Was the usage of torture foreseeable?

[Axis Kast]

Cross-posted from M1A2 Sniper on 'History and Politics'.

Abuse less shocking in light of history

Thu May 13, 7:00 AM ET Add Top Stories - USATODAY.com to My Yahoo!


By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY

One of the most surprising things about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers is that so many Americans are surprised.

Decades of research and eons of history point to one conclusion: Under certain circumstances, most normal people will treat their fellow man with abnormal cruelty. The schoolboys' descent into barbarism in William Golding's classic The Lord of the Flies is fiction that contains a deeper truth.


And from Andersonville to the "Hanoi Hilton," no combination of circumstances turns us against our better nature faster than the combination of war and prison, whether we are acting on orders or on our own.


Charles Figley, a Florida State University psychologist who studied the experiences of 1,000 U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War, describes himself as "shocked about people being shocked" by the reports from Iraq (news - web sites).


"About 25% of the vets I've talked to either participated in, witnessed, or were aware of violations of the Geneva Conventions" in Vietnam, he says.


Geneva is a long way from Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where U.S. military police photographed each other tormenting hooded, naked Iraqis in their custody. Three face courts-martial, and four others could soon learn whether they will be tried, too.


President Bush (news - web sites) has called the alleged offenders a relative few whose actions "do not reflect the nature of the men and women who serve our country." Still, many Americans wonder how people described as kind and decent by the folks back home could lapse into such extraordinary behavior.


Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford University psychologist who presided over the single most famous experiment in the field, blames the system, not the soldiers, who "were put in a situation where the outcome was totally predictable."


"It's not a few bad apples," he says. "It's the barrel that's bad. The barrel is war. That's what can corrupt, whether it's in My Lai or in Baghdad." (Related photos: Abuse at Abu Ghraib)


That might explain the actions of soldiers such as Lynndie England, so gentle back home in West Virginia that she wouldn't even shoot a deer on family hunting trips, or Sabrina Harman, whose mother says that when she found a bug in the house she'd release it outside.


It also raises the question: Were the American guards following orders or defying them?


The evidence is conflicting. Many families and other experts say they doubt the relatively unsophisticated reservists would come up with tactics that seemed specifically designed to humiliate Muslim men, such as stripping them naked and forcing them into homosexual poses.


England said Tuesday that she was ordered to pose for photos showing her holding a leash around the neck of an Iraqi prisoner. In an interview with KCNC-TV in Denver, she said her superiors praised the techniques she and other military police were using on prisoners. They "just told us, 'Hey, you're doing great, keep it up,' " England said.


Whether the American guards were following orders or not, the prison seems to have been a virtual petri dish for the sorts of abuses that experts have long warned against and that threaten to undermine the U.S. war effort in Iraq.


School for scandal


Soldiers are not lab rats. But experts say that in retrospect, conditions at Abu Ghraib virtually assured a scandal. They point to the presence of some conditions - and the absence of others. The following appear to have been insufficient or deficient:


•Training. The guards were reservists, most of whom had not been trained to work in a prison or internment camp, much less interrogate terrorists or prisoners of war. The 372nd Military Police Battalion was practiced mostly in traffic enforcement.





•Staffing. By most accounts, there were too many prisoners and too few guards. Experts say this tends to encourage brutality as a crude means of inmate control.

•Direction. The soldiers' basic charge was to guard prisoners, but that became muddied when military intelligence officers came forward with vague requests to "soften up" prisoners and "set conditions" for interrogation.

•Supervision. The unit's commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, rarely visited the prison within a prison (the so-called hard site) where prisoners were abused. Her authority may have been usurped by military intelligence officers, but even at a congressional hearing Tuesday, a Pentagon (news - web sites) official and a major general couldn't agree on who was in charge. That prompted Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., to ask, "How do you expect the MPs to get it straight if we have a difference between the two of you?"

•Accountability. In the absence of a clear line of command, the guards were on their own - operating at night, behind prison walls, in a foreign country far from home, without lawyers, journalists or relatives to observe them.

In addition to what was lacking, Abu Ghraib also had ingredients to encourage abuse:

•Stress. The young and inexperienced soldiers were in a war zone that had witnessed many deadly sneak attacks on soldiers and civilians. The prison itself was the target of almost daily mortar attacks. One such incident Sept. 20 killed two Army intelligence soldiers.

•9/11. The government has argued that the war on terrorism sometimes requires suspensions of civil liberties. Critics ask whether this message trickled down to guards, who concluded that in this war, anything goes.

•Revenge. Soldiers may have been influenced by a range of events, from the 9/11 attacks to an escalating series of incidents in Iraq.

•Instability. Prisons are stabilized by long-standing, informal understandings between guards and inmates. But at Abu Ghraib, everyone - guards and prisoners alike - was new and had neither a common language nor culture.

These factors combined to produce a classic case of abuse. But Zimbardo, the Stanford psychologist, sees something else in the jeering faces of the guards in the prison photos - a sort of timeless euphoria.

"The trophy photos make no sense," he says. "At some level, even as you're doing this stuff, you should realize this isn't something you're going to want documented in the future. I think these people got lost in what I call 'expanded present time.' The past seemed distant. The future was vague. All they knew was they were in charge of these animals. It was their circus."

He sounds surprised. And, after what he went through in 1971, it takes a lot to surprise Zimbardo.

Studying abusive behavior

The two most famous experiments that bear directly on Abu Ghraib were separately designed and executed by two members of the class of 1950 at James Monroe High School in the Bronx - Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram.

In the early 1960s, Milgram was teaching at Yale and studying the impact of authority on human behavior. He wanted to see whether ordinary people would follow orders to keep administering what they thought were ever more painful and powerful electric shocks to test subjects.

He hired local residents to participate in what he told them was an experiment in "teaching through punishment." They were the "teachers," and they would, on instructions, apply electrical shocks to the "learners." The director would take responsibility for any harm to the "learners."

What Milgram found surprised him: based purely on the instructions of a researcher in a white lab coat, two-thirds of the subjects kept raising the voltage levels, despite the howls (and eventually the ominous silence) of the learners in the next room. The teachers didn't know the electricity wasn't on, and that the learners were actors pretending to be hurt.

Milgram later identified some key conditions for suspending human morality, many relevant to Abu Ghraib: an acceptable justification for the behavior; an important role for participants; use of euphemisms such as "learners" (instead of victims); and a gradual escalation of violence.

A decade later, Milgram's old honors program classmate undertook an experiment of his own in a basement of the psychology building at Stanford.

In 1971, Zimbardo recruited 24 college students from around the San Francisco Bay Area to pose as guards or inmates in a mock prison for two weeks.

But, in contrast to Milgram, he gave them few further orders and supervised them only loosely.

Quickly, the guards became more and more abusive, the inmates more and more cowed. At night, when Zimbardo was gone, guards put bags over inmates' heads, stripped them of clothing and told them to simulate sex acts. Finally, after several inmates suffered emotional breakdowns, a shaken Zimbardo stopped the experiment after six days.

He concluded later that he himself had gotten swept up in the situation and didn't see what was happening until it was too late. "You could never even try that today," he says. "You'd be sued."

While Milgram's study stands for the proposition that most good people will sometimes follow bad orders, Zimbardo's suggests that sometimes good people don't even need bad orders - none or vague ones will do.

Milgram had strictly supervised his subjects, and they did the wrong thing - he called it "surrendering your agency," your self-control. Zimbardo had mostly left his subjects on their own, and they did the wrong thing. He called it "the power of the situation."

Over the years, the experiments have become famous. They are taught in psychology classes and have formed the basis for novels and movies.

At the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., the experiments are often mentioned in courses in the Department of Behavior Sciences and Leadership.

Not everyone fails the test. The cadets at West Point periodically get a visit from someone who did not surrender his agency - Hugh Thompson, the Vietnam War Army helicopter pilot who put his craft between marauding GIs and Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre in 1968.

Who among us?

To some, the fallout from the Abu Ghraib scandal is a sign of progress.

David Finkelhor, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire and director of the school's Crimes Against Children Research Center, says the government's willingness to deal immediately with the problem contrasts with World War II and Vietnam.

"In other wars, these things stayed under wraps - it was not talked about," he says. "Now I think that there are a lot (of people) around who are not willing to tolerate this, colleagues and their superiors who are truly committed to keeping this from happening, even if it allows some compromise of our mission."

Frank Farley of Temple University, past president of the American Psychological Association, says the photos offer an education, albeit a painful one. "We have learned a little bit," he says. "We may become a little bit more enlightened, also, about ourselves. It is going to be hard for those dark concerns to be hidden."

What's really different about Abu Ghraib are the photos, which have granted the public a rare view of what can go on behind prison walls - even when Americans are the jailers.

In his psychology classes at Stanford, Zimbardo used to talk about Milgram's experiment. Who among you, he'd ask, would have been in the minority that refused to keep applying the shocks? Without fail, he says, each hand in the room shot toward the ceiling. The fact is that few people in situations like this actually do resist.

Time and again, studies of torturers also have returned the same verdict: "terrifyingly normal," in the words of Hannah Arendt, chronicler of the trial of Nazi Holocaust functionary Adolf Eichmann.

This has been true in Northern Ireland, Greece and Brazil, in Josef Stalin's Russia and Pol Pot's Cambodia. It was true in ancient Mexico; blocks from the Iraqi prison hearings in Washington, the National Gallery of Art displays a mural of Mayans parading tortured captives before their victorious leader.

Who could do such a thing? The answer could be as far away as the nearest mirror.

[Patrick Degan]

Yes, that definitely sounds like the Tiger Defence you're whipping out. Nicely ignores failure at command level, policy defects, and the initial mindset that was created setting the stage for these abuses to begin with.

So... to sum up, your position would be "People get stressed, shit happens, what's the big deal?"

[Stuart Mackey]

In a controlled environment it is either deliberate or negligent. You writing it off as inevatable is morally reprehnsible, which is what this is about.

Read the fucking question.

"Was the usage of torture foreseeable?" considering that the United States established prisons to house detainees.

The answer is "yes". That torture occured at all should come as no surprise.

And inevitability has nothing to do with morality. If I tell you I'm positive that there will be future wars, that doesn't make me responsible for them, you blithering idiot.

And by the way, just because there are authorities present to provide oversight and enforce orders doesn't mean they will always do so. Having the right people in the right places doesn't always translate to success. The question was whether we expected something like this. My answer was, "Yes." Frankly, that you're trying to spin it into some kind of reflection of savagery on my part is merely indicative that you yourself foam at the mouth to attack and defame other people.

Look tiger boy..when an entire unit of the US army fucks up like this, as documented by the Red Cross, it tell you that it was either deliberate or or there was something seriously wrong. either way it should not have happned, you are saying it is was inevitablethe simple fact that this is not an evry day occurance in the US army puts the lie to your position. If you say 'its going to happen any way' and shrug your shouldrs then such a stance indicates an acceptance o something that is illegal..why do you not get this, Baghdad boy?

[Axis Kast]

Nice strawmen, boys.

I said that I thought torture and abuse would always be a part of war, not that we should shrug our shoulders when it does happen, and throw our hands up in defeat. That argument is a fabrication on your part in some rabid attempt to defame me.

[Predator]

If you say 'its going to happen any way' and shrug your shouldrs then such a stance indicates an acceptance o something that is illegal..why do you not get this, Baghdad boy?

Firstly, let me say, I've been reading these forums for some time. I'm well acquainted with Axis Kast, and most of his contributions deserve the responses they get, however I think in this particular instance he's being misrepresented. I dont get the impression that he's "shrugging his shoulders", or that he's saying "People get stressed, shit happens, what's the big deal?", merely that he's presenting what is in my mind a very valid observation: There are enough unethical, morally corrupt arseholes in this world - including within the armed forces - that we should expect that there will be at least a few instances of torture.

Making that observation doesnt condone it any more than saying "There will always be crime in society" is condoning crime. A lack of torture in war and when dealing with prisoners of war is a goal we should always strive for - it is not to relinquish that goal in stating the fact that we'll never actually be completely free of it.

Expecting that there would be no soldiers or prison guards who would abuse or mistreat their captives is similar to being so naive as to think that there are no Police who beat their suspects, plant evidence, or who are on the take.

The only things that surprise me about this whole affair is that firstly, the soldiers were stupid enough to allow themselves to be caught on film, secondly that those images ever reached the public, and thirdly that so many of the public seemed shocked that US soldiers would ever do such things.

Perhaps there needs to be a refinement to the question, because I think Axis is referring to torture or abuse of captives at any levels - in which case individual soldiers deciding to rough up a prisoner would count. So perhaps, "Was the systematic usage of torture foreseeable?", where by systematic we mean a large number of individuals acting on orders originating somewhere higher up, would ensure we're all on the same page.

If this is the question, then we cant be so confident that such systematic torture would be universal, that it would occur during any war. In the case of the US and its war on terrorism - yes, it was absolutely forseeable given the mangling of the law the US employed to create the human rights no-mans-land of Guantanimo Bay inmates - the only concievable purpose of finding (or rather, creating out of thin air) such a legal loophole would be to torture them. The US government/military clearly considers torture a useful and acceptable tool in certain circumstances.

[Axis Kast]

Precisely.

[Patrick Degan]

Nice strawmen, boys.

I said that I thought torture and abuse would always be a part of war, not that we should shrug our shoulders when it does happen, and throw our hands up in defeat. That argument is a fabrication on your part in some rabid attempt to defame me.

Um, ahem:

Second, I expect the U.S. military to use torture. There are people who are paid to pull out other men's fingernails in every country. Frankly, we sometimes need them.

Your words, I believe. A whole pile of your Red Herrings are not enough to bury them.

[JME2]

The torture of prisoners is a foregone conclusion. In every war.

The abuse of prisoners is a foregone conclusion. In every war.

Truer words were never spoken.

[Patrick Degan]

Oh, Axi:

Linky

excerpt:
THE GRAY ZONE
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”

The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as “kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.” In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command.

Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America’s most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps, including the Navy’s submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force’s stealth bomber. All the so-called “black” programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.

And:

Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were “completely read into the program,” the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. “We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,” he said. “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.’”

One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. “Remember Henry II—‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. “Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.”

Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld’s disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.’s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone’s military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.

And:

Inside the Pentagon, there was a growing realization that the war was going badly. The increasingly beleaguered and baffled Army leadership was telling reporters that the insurgents consisted of five thousand Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein. “When you understand that they’re organized in a cellular structure,” General John Abizaid, the head of the Central Command, declared, “that . . . they have access to a lot of money and a lot of ammunition, you’ll understand how dangerous they are.”

And:

By the fall, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon’s political and military misjudgments was clear. Donald Rumsfeld’s “dead-enders” now included not only Baathists but many marginal figures as well—thugs and criminals who were among the tens of thousands of prisoners freed the previous fall by Saddam as part of a prewar general amnesty. Their desperation was not driving the insurgency; it simply made them easy recruits for those who were. The analyst said, “We’d killed and captured guys who had been given two or three hundred dollars to ‘pray and spray’”—that is, shoot randomly and hope for the best. “They weren’t really insurgents but down-and-outers who were paid by wealthy individuals sympathetic to the insurgency.” In many cases, the paymasters were Sunnis who had been members of the Baath Party. The analyst said that the insurgents “spent three or four months figuring out how we operated and developing their own countermeasures. If that meant putting up a hapless guy to go and attack a convoy and see how the American troops responded, they’d do it.” Then, the analyst said, “the clever ones began to get in on the action.”

And:

The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures. The internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by Major General Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that Miller urged that the commanders in Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in charge of the prison. The report quoted Miller as recommending that “detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation.”

Miller’s concept, as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, was to “Gitmoize” the prison system in Iraq—to make it more focussed on interrogation. He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in Cuba—methods that could, with special approval, include sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in “stress positions” for agonizing lengths of time. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally declared Al Qaeda and other captured members of international terrorist networks to be illegal combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva Conventions.)

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the sap, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.

And:

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap’s rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap’sauspices. “So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply,” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. “And, as far as they’re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be kept within Defense Department channels.”

The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included “recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.” He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. “How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib—whether military police or military intelligence—was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others—military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special-access program—wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer ostensibly in charge. “I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn’t know,” Karpinski told me. “I called them the disappearing ghosts. I’d seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I’d see them months later. They were nice—they’d always call out to me and say, ‘Hey, remember me? How are you doing?’” The mysterious civilians, she said, were “always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out.” Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. (General Taguba found that Karpinski’s leadership failures contributed to the abuses.)

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan—pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets—and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’”—the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.

And:

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.” The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”

The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything—including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.

“This shit has been brewing for months,” the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with saps told me. “You don’t keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick.” The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. “We don’t raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that’s one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don’t know the rules, that’s another.”

In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General’s (jag) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights. “They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,” Horton told me. “They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it’s going to occur.” The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. “They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.” They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.

And:

If, indeed, General Miller was sent from Guantánamo to Iraq for the purpose of acquiring more actionable intelligence from detainees, then it is fair to conclude that the actions that are at point here in your report [on abuses at Abu Ghraib] are in some way connected to General Miller’s arrival and his specific orders, however they were interpreted, by those MPs and the military intelligence that were involved.. . .Therefore, I for one don’t believe I yet have adequate information from Mr. Cambone and the Defense Department as to exactly what General Miller’s orders were . . . how he carried out those orders, and the connection between his arrival in the fall of ’03 and the intensity of the abuses that occurred afterward.

Sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, the former intelligence official told me, Miller was “read in”—that is, briefed—on the special-access operation. In April, Miller returned to Baghdad to assume control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its glaring headlines, General Sanchez presented him to the American and international media as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison system and instill respect for the Geneva Conventions. “His job is to save what he can,” the former official said. “He’s there to protect the program while limiting any loss of core capability.” As for Antonio Taguba, the former intelligence official added, “He goes into it not knowing shit. And then: ‘Holy cow! What’s going on?’”

If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify, he, like Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have been able to mention the special-access program. “If you give away the fact that a special-access program exists,”the former intelligence official told me, “you blow the whole quick-reaction program.”

One puzzling aspect of Rumsfeld’s account of his initial reaction to news of the Abu Ghraib investigation was his lack of alarm and lack of curiosity. One factor may have been recent history: there had been many previous complaints of prisoner abuse from organization like Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered them with ease. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had not been provided with details of alleged abuses until late March, when he read the specific charges. “You read it, as I say, it’s one thing. You see these photographs and it’s just unbelievable. . . . It wasn’t three-dimensional. It wasn’t video. It wasn’t color. It was quite a different thing.” The former intelligence official said that, in his view, Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials had not studied the photographs because “they thought what was in there was permitted under the rules of engagement,” as applied to the sap. “The photos,” he added, “turned out to be the result of the program run amok.”

The former intelligence official made it clear that he was not alleging that Rumsfeld or General Myers knew that atrocities were committed. But, he said, “it was their permission granted to do the sap, generically, and there was enough ambiguity, which permitted the abuses.”

And:

Last week, the government consultant, who has close ties to many conservatives, defended the Administration’s continued secrecy about the special-access program in Abu Ghraib. “Why keep it black?” the consultant asked. “Because the process is unpleasant. It’s like making sausage—you like the result but you don’t want to know how it was made. Also, you don’t want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know. Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The last thing you want to do is let the Arab world know how you treat Arab males in prison.”

The former intelligence official told me he feared that one of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on terror, which had already suffered from the draining of resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as “a tumor” on the war on terror. He said, “As long as it’s benign and contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose it—it becomes a malignant tumor.”

The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone and his superiors, the consultant said, “created the conditions that allowed transgressions to take place. And now we’re going to end up with another Church Commission”—the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the previous two decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the Pentagon leadership was unable to handle its discretionary power. “When the shit hits the fan, as it did on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?” the consultant asked. “You do it selectively and with intelligence.”

“Congress is going to get to the bottom of this,” the Pentagon consultant said. “You have to demonstrate that there are checks and balances in the system.” He added, “When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have very clear red lines.”

Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, “If this is true, it certainly increases the dimension of this issue and deserves significant scrutiny. I will do all possible to get to the bottom of this, and all other allegations.”

“In an odd way,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, “the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized.” Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees. “Some jags hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war,” Roth told me. “We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.”


Copyright © CondéNet 2004. All rights reserved.

So much for the Tiger Defence.

[Predator]

Second, I expect the U.S. military to use torture. There are people who are paid to pull out other men's fingernails in every country. Frankly, we sometimes need them.

To comment on the issue surrounding this quote: While there's no doubt that torture is being used where it shouldnt, and all likelyhood it's being employed by the US on people who are entirely innocent, is there really anyone who believes there are absolutely no circumstances in which torture is justified?

Lets say that Osama is caught. And that he begins rambling about how we'll never find the nuclear device he stole from the Pakistani military and that he has brought into New York in time to stop it from going off- and there's vague intelligence reports that indicate he might be telling the truth. Should he be tortured so as to extract the necessary information to foil the plot? Or merely kindly asked where the bomb is?

There's probably not more than a handful of countries around the world that dont have someone with some training in torture. And there are theoretical instances where the stakes could be high enough to warrant it. That said, the vast majority of the time it's employed would probably not come near the required urgency to be justified in my mind. Unless the stakes are incredibly high, and the guilt of the subject beyond all doubt, the Geneva Convention must be abided by.

[Aaron]

To comment on the issue surrounding this quote: While there's no doubt that torture is being used where it shouldnt, and all likelyhood it's being employed by the US on people who are entirely innocent, is there really anyone who believes there are absolutely no circumstances in which torture is justified?

Lets say that Osama is caught. And that he begins rambling about how we'll never find the nuclear device he stole from the Pakistani military and that he has brought into New York in time to stop it from going off- and there's vague intelligence reports that indicate he might be telling the truth. Should he be tortured so as to extract the necessary information to foil the plot? Or merely kindly asked where the bomb is?

I don't believe that there is any instance where torture is acceptable. It's been proven that people being tortured will say anything to make the torture stop. This leads to false intelligence being gathered. While I'm not familar with the alternatives, as I'm not in the military intelligence field, I'm sure that there are better alternatives. Lets not forget that there's a moral side to this as well, namely if the US employs torture against it's POW's then it's no better than the regime that it just toppled and should vacate Iraq immediatly. As well the enemies of the US may torture any captives that they obtain in retaliation for the torture of their people. We have seen this happen already with the killing of Berg in Iraq.

As for your scenario, who's to say that torture will even be effective? He may say anything to stop the treatment, including lying about the location. The point is that torture is an unreliable means of gathering information.

[Predator]

It's been proven that people being tortured will say anything to make the torture stop.

Not being an expert on torture, I cant dispute that - if there are better alernatives, great.

Lets not forget that there's a moral side to this as well, namely if the US employs torture against it's POW's then it's no better than the regime that it just toppled and should vacate Iraq immediatly.

firstly, let me state that I believe this war is immoral, and that I have grave fears for the future or Iraq - the country may well end up worse than it was under Saddam. The justifications presented were fabricated for public consumption, and this war just continues a long line of immoral interventions by the US worldwide.

That said, I dont quite agree with the above statement. The torture that's happened is terrible, absolutely unacceptable, however to say that the US is no better than Saddam's regime *on that basis* (I believe that is established in other ways) ignores, probably the severity (depending on whether some of the alleged methods employed by Saddam are accurate, and depending on what Us torture is yet to surface), and almost certainly the scale. I do believe the US is no better in what its done and is doing in Iraq, but if this torture were their only wrongdoing, that alone wouldnt make the US "no better" than the previous regime.

Secondly, if the US were to pull out now, the country would be even worse off. While a downward spiral may be inevitable (we'll have to wait and see), the nation would fall into complete anarchy if the Us pulled out now... the joke of a government they've set up wouldnt have the ability to establish its authority, you'd have civil war, it'd be chaos... At the very least, while the US is still there, it might take a while to get *that* bad...

Pulling out now would be morally reprehensible - the US has a responsibility to do all that it can to ensure a.. tolerable future for the people of Iraq. The US got Iraq into this mess, it has to go the distance and try to get them out of it.

As for your scenario, who's to say that torture will even be effective? He may say anything to stop the treatment, including lying about the location. The point is that torture is an unreliable means of gathering information.

Then, again as a non-expert on the effectiveness of torture, I'll rephrase my statement:

If there is no superior method, and torture is at least somewhat effective or has some chance of yielding the information necessary, then in the circumstances I described, it would be justified.

[Joe]

I don't believe that there is any instance where torture is acceptable.

In the mid-90s Filipino police managed to foil a Islamic terrorist plot, possibly saving thousands of lives in the process. Do you know how they did it? They were lucky enough to capture one of the SOBs, and they tortured the living fuck out of the bastard and he spilled the beans on everything afterwards. Would not torturing him seriously have been the better alternative, morally?

[The Kernel]

I don't believe that there is any instance where torture is acceptable.

In the mid-90s Filipino police managed to foil a Islamic terrorist plot, possibly saving thousands of lives in the process. Do you know how they did it? They were lucky enough to capture one of the SOBs, and they tortured the living fuck out of the bastard and he spilled the beans on everything afterwards. Would not torturing him seriously have been the better alternative, morally?

Depends on if your moral code is based on whether the ends justify the means. But let me ask you this, what if the man in question knew nothing? Would the torture still have been justified?

[Aaron]

I don't believe that there is any instance where torture is acceptable.

In the mid-90s Filipino police managed to foil a Islamic terrorist plot, possibly saving thousands of lives in the process. Do you know how they did it? They were lucky enough to capture one of the SOBs, and they tortured the living fuck out of the bastard and he spilled the beans on everything afterwards. Would not torturing him seriously have been the better alternative, morally?

I know that their are other alternatives to torture, so they could have used them. However it may not have gotten them the result so quickly. I just think that in order for the US to be any better than those they fight against that they must not use torture. Otherwise whats to distinguish them from their enemies, once you justify one atrocity it is easy to justify others, then where does it stop.

[Joe]

I don't believe that there is any instance where torture is acceptable.

In the mid-90s Filipino police managed to foil a Islamic terrorist plot, possibly saving thousands of lives in the process. Do you know how they did it? They were lucky enough to capture one of the SOBs, and they tortured the living fuck out of the bastard and he spilled the beans on everything afterwards. Would not torturing him seriously have been the better alternative, morally?

Depends on if your moral code is based on whether the ends justify the means. But let me ask you this, what if the man in question knew nothing? Would the torture still have been justified?

Of course not, but this guy obviously knew all kinds of shit - they caught him running away from a house he set on fire while trying to make a bomb, for God's sake. There is simply no way his right to not be tortured could have possibly been more important than the right to live of the thousands of people who were saved by his being tortured.

[The Kernel]

Of course not, but this guy obviously knew all kinds of shit - they caught him running away from a house he set on fire while trying to make a bomb, for God's sake. There is simply no way his right to not be tortured could have possibly been more important than the right to live of the thousands of people who were saved by his being tortured.

Alright, well let's consider this from a practical sense. When arguing morality, one must avoid using the slippery slope fallacy, but when trying to come up with laws that govern the rules associated with law enforcement, one must consider all the possibilities.

Now, if you were trying to come up with a legal system that included torture, what would be the criteria for resorting to it? Remember that in our justice system, a person is innocent until proven guilty, so unless you wanted to go through a jury trial to prove that the person is a terrorist, you are going to have to leave the determination of how and when to use torture up to someone in the law enforcement hirearchy. Who would make this decision then and what would be the criteria for its use?

You see the problem with what you are suggesting? If you give the police power to torture individuals to gain information, they are going to use it. And quite honestly, I would rather live in a society where the government cannot use torture as a means of interrogation and give up the information that might be gained from it. Sure, a situation might arise where thousands could be saved with the information, but the overall devestation caused by using toture to interogate suspects is FAR more frightening prospect.

[Predator]

I just think that in order for the US to be any better than those they fight against that they must not use torture.

So all other moral considerations are irrelevant, the sole criteria for moral judgement is the use of torture? When we're judging who is able to deliver what kind of society to the Iraqi people, no other factors such as provision of basic services, healthcare, and so on, make any difference if on that one issue, the treatment of POWs, the US and Saddam's regime are equivalent?

Let us pretend that the US provisional government is somehow able to deliver a wonderful modern society with good living standards, that everything about the lies of Iraqis is better in every realm, except for prisoner treatment. Are you seriously suggesting that in this situation, the US would be no better than Saddam's regime, because of that one particular failing?

Obviously the US isnt delivering a wonderful society to the Iraqis. There are many reasons why the US government is just as bad as Saddam's regime in this whole affair - in terms of setting a precedent for preventive war, in terms of manipulating its own population, in terms of creating instability in Iraq through terribly poor post-war planning, and obviously through unnecessarily taking tens of thousands of lives, both Iraqi soldiers and civilians, of further weakening the UN and destroying international goodwill, of creating the circumstances in which terrorism will grow. The torture adds to that... but it's just rancid icing on a particularly rotten cake.

Otherwise whats to distinguish them from their enemies, once you justify one atrocity it is easy to justify others, then where does it stop.

That's a bit of a slippery slope. I'm firmly in the the-ends-justify-the-means camp, that's the criteria by which we should judge our actions, not merely precedent in kinds of activities. What's right is right if the outcome is, on the whole, better (and I would add, best).

[Joe]

You're assuming that I'm arguing for torture on a legal basis; I'm not, I'm arguing for it on a moral basis. There is probably too much legal baggage related to torture for a Western democracy to adopt it. To make an analogy, I think capital punishment is absolutely justified morally, but I realize that it would probably be best for the U.S. to place a moratorium on it for the time being, due to the fact that the risk of putting innocents to death has been shown to be greater than previously known to be in recent years. Basically, I think it's a good idea in principle, but not so much in practice. Same with torture.

[Predator]

Remember that in our justice system, a person is innocent until proven guilty, so unless you wanted to go through a jury trial to prove that the person is a terrorist, you are going to have to leave the determination of how and when to use torture up to someone in the law enforcement hirearchy. Who would make this decision then and what would be the criteria for its use?

If you look at the example I gave, of Osama bin Laden, guilt isnt really in question. I agree that the law cannot in all instances match the utilitarian ideal, and I agree that torture (assuming it is effective and there arent superior alternatives) must be limited to very extreme cases. In situaitons where a terrorist is known to be guilty of previous offenses -and especially of they've confessed to it via video and audio tape - that would satisfy the criteria in my mind, and the law could be designed in such a way.

[The Kernel]

So all other moral considerations are irrelevant, the sole criteria for moral judgement is the use of torture? When we're judging who is able to deliver what kind of society to the Iraqi people, no other factors such as provision of basic services, healthcare, and so on, make any difference if on that one issue, the treatment of POWs, the US and Saddam's regime are equivalent?

Security brought about through torture and fear doesn't last unless you are willing to slaughter people on a regular basis. Didn't they teach you that in history class?

Let us pretend that the US provisional government is somehow able to deliver a wonderful modern society with good living standards, that everything about the lies of Iraqis is better in every realm, except for prisoner treatment. Are you seriously suggesting that in this situation, the US would be no better than Saddam's regime, because of that one particular failing?

The chances of the US being able to rebuild the Iraqi society while atrocities are still being knowingly commited in the prisons is zero. Saddam could barely get away with it, and he had to rule with an iron fist in order to do it. What the hell makes you think that a bunch of foreigners are going to be able to placate the Iraqis without using the same brutal tactics?

Obviously the US isnt delivering a wonderful society to the Iraqis. There are many reasons why the US government is just as bad as Saddam's regime in this whole affair - in terms of setting a precedent for preventive war, in terms of manipulating its own population, in terms of creating instability in Iraq through terribly poor post-war planning, and obviously through unnecessarily taking tens of thousands of lives, both Iraqi soldiers and civilians, of further weakening the UN and destroying international goodwill, of creating the circumstances in which terrorism will grow. The torture adds to that... but it's just rancid icing on a particularly rotten cake.

Indeed. However, that is politics for you. Sometimes it takes a particularly heinous incident such as this for the general population to see the obvious.

That's a bit of a slippery slope. I'm firmly in the the-ends-justify-the-means camp, that's the criteria by which we should judge our actions, not merely precedent in kinds of activities. What's right is right if the outcome is, on the whole, better (and I would add, best).

The ends justifying the means is bullshit argument since we don't know what the end is ahead of time. Besides, if you really think that we can salvage Iraq without killing a lot of people in the process you are an optimistic fool.

[The Kernel]

You're assuming that I'm arguing for torture on a legal basis; I'm not, I'm arguing for it on a moral basis. There is probably too much legal baggage related to torture for a Western democracy to adopt it. To make an analogy, I think capital punishment is absolutely justified morally, but I realize that it would probably be best for the U.S. to place a moratorium on it for the time being, due to the fact that the risk of putting innocents to death has been shown to be greater than previously known to be in recent years. Basically, I think it's a good idea in principle, but not so much in practice. Same with torture.

And I agree with you for the most part from a strictly moral standpoint. Trouble is, we live in the real world and in the real world, torture is not only legally unfeasible, it is practically unfeasible as well.

Morals are great when you can adapt them into real world solutions, but when you can't, you have to go with what will do the least amount of harm and benefit the greatest number of people. As you say, torture might help in the extreme case, but for all the thousands of others that would get tortured needlessly (not to mention the sociological fallout) the best course of action becomes clear.

[The Kernel]

If you look at the example I gave, of Osama bin Laden, guilt isnt really in question. I agree that the law cannot in all instances match the utilitarian ideal, and I agree that torture (assuming it is effective and there arent superior alternatives) must be limited to very extreme cases. In situaitons where a terrorist is known to be guilty of previous offenses -and especially of they've confessed to it via video and audio tape - that would satisfy the criteria in my mind, and the law could be designed in such a way.

I can gurrantee you that if Osama bin Laden was captured tomorrow, he would NOT be tortured (at least not officially), and he would go straight to a very lengthy trial.

In any case, you are using the exception to try to dictate the rule. Let me make this clear to you: you cannot design a legal system based around the exceptions. Laws have to be written to benefit the greatest number of people, and I'd like to see how you would design a law to allow torture that would work in our society.

[Predator]

Security brought about through torture and fear doesn't last unless you are willing to slaughter people on a regular basis. Didn't they teach you that in history class?

Where do you see me claiming that fear and torture delivers security at all? I referred to the use of torture, not the scale, effectiveness, or purpose of it. You're assuming that I'm that torture would be the method of ensuring security - I'm not. Security might be maintained through civil methods, with a few limited instances of torture incidental to that.

That already happens in our societies. When the police beat a confession out of a suspect, that's torture. And it still happens. Yet regularly slaughtering people isnt necessary to maintain social order.

The chances of the US being able to rebuild the Iraqi society while atrocities are still being knowingly commited in the prisons is zero. Saddam could barely get away with it, and he had to rule with an iron fist in order to do it. What the hell makes you think that a bunch of foreigners are going to be able to placate the Iraqis without using the same brutal tactics?

What the hell makes you think that I'm proposing they will? I created my example, which is pure fantasy, to illustrate the point: It's foolish to judge two leaderships/societies as equivalent based solely on the fact that torture is carried out by both.

The ends justifying the means is bullshit argument since we don't know what the end is ahead of time.

We have very little certainties about the future, but we can make predictions, sometimes with high probabilities of accuracy. If you're out in a remote location and given the choice between performing an apendectomy on someone without anaesthesia, because you're quite certain they have appendicitis and will die if you dont, you'd be foolish not to on the basis that the damage and pain your scalpel will cause might not necessarily be justified, on the small chance the person doesnt actually have appendicitis. We make these kinds of judgements all the time.

Besides, if you really think that we can salvage Iraq without killing a lot of people in the process you are an optimistic fool.

And you're an illiterate fool if that's what you really think I'm saying.

[Predator]

I can gurrantee you that if Osama bin Laden was captured tomorrow, he would NOT be tortured (at least not officially), and he would go straight to a very lengthy trial.

Did you even read the hypothetical example I proposed above? Of course if he's merely captured, and there's no evidence of a new plot that urgently needs to be foiled, he wont be tortured. Where did you get the idea that I was saying he'd be tortured "just because"?

In any case, you are using the exception to try to dictate the rule. Let me make this clear to you: you cannot design a legal system based around the exceptions.

As long as the law is designed only to deal with exceptions of that nature, yes you can. Is it really that much of a concern that the law wont get used particularly often?

Laws have to be written to benefit the greatest number of people, and I'd like to see how you would design a law to allow torture that would work in our society

Is it really that hard to imagine how such a law would function? It'd be reliant on all sorts of particularly extreme conditions, it would be designed around and exclusively for an exceptional situation, but there's no reason this cant or shouldnt be so.