British troops accused of thousands of torture cases

[Thanas]

Deutsche Welle
(for those who ask about the source, DW is basically Germany's BBC)

Call for ICC probe into British 'war crimes' in Iraq

Two NGOs say they have asked the International Criminal Court to investigate allegations of abuse of prisoners in Iraq from 2003 to 2008. They say hundreds of former prisoners have complained.

A German human rights group and a British law firm say they have asked the prosecutor's office at the International Criminal Court in The Hague to look into allegations that British soldiers carried out systematic abuse and torture of prisoners in Iraq between 2003 and 2008.

The Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional Rights and the law firm Public Interest Lawyers (PIL), based in Birmingham, said in a statement on Saturday that they had jointly filed a complaint with the ICC. The 250-page complaint called for the "opening of an investigation" into the actions of senior British officials, "in particular the former Minister of Defense Geoff Hoon and secretary of state, Adam Ingram."

The two organizations said more than 400 former Iraqi prisoners had contacted PIL in the past two years alleging "serious abuse and humiliation" at the hands of British soldiers. They said the complaint document contained more than 2,000 accusations of abuse documented over five years, with allegations ranging from sexual and religious humiliation to physical violence.

The joint statement said a similar complaint to the ICC failed in 2006 on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence, but insisted that "a thorough investigation was and remains necessary."

Responding to queries from the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung and regional public broadcaster NDR, the British Defense Ministry on Friday confirmed that there had been cases of abuse by British soldiers in Iraq, but that these were "isolated." A spokesman rejected the accusation of systematic torture on the part of British military personnel, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

As I said back in July, torture was well known to be a british way of war in colonial wars or interventions. Thus, this is not at all surprising. It also provides some sort of twisted vindication for the US citizens who claimed that the British were doing nothing special in Iraq in their occupation - and they are right, they did the same things the US did.

And just like in the US, nothing probably will ever be done to put those responsible between bars for serious periods of time. Instead, in a few years we will hear "those poor guys giving their lives in Iraq" all over on remembrance sunday and stories like this will most likely be relegated to being known to historians only. Just like the little known fact that before giving countries their independence, British archivists went through their archives to destroy all the records of crappy things done to people in the name of freedom.

[K. A. Pital]

That is unsurprising. An earlier thread just recently mentioned how torture remains pervasive, especially given the ubiqutous adoption of cleaner torture techniques.

[Napoleon the Clown]

I'd honestly be more surprised at a military, modern or otherwise, that doesn't get up to shit like this. People are right proper assholes against "The Enemy."

[K. A. Pital]

But people are surprised: they expect civilian control of the military to curb such excesses. In reality it just led to greater cunning on part of the military perpetrators.

[Simon_Jester]

Plus, fat lot of good it does to have civilian control of the military if the civilians are just as enthusiastic as anyone in the army about torturing 'terror suspects' or whatever.

[Replicant]

Not to defend this in any way, because I am not.

But a war like this can and will bring out the worst in people. In both Iraq and Afghanistan you have the troops working day in and day out alongside normal everyday civilians in both countries. They often grow close to them, feel familiar around them, and then the "enemy" being little better than terrorists are quite willing to show up the day you turn your back to attack you or worse to blow up markets, set children on fire, etc.

Considering the level barbarism displayed by the insurgent/terrorists/mercenaries/Al Qaeda members it (I would assume) become very difficult to keep your rage in check.

I mean just imagine spending a few days in some fairly remote village in Afghanistan, you leave and the next day an Al-Qaeda force shows up, rounds up the village members and does all the worst things out of your least favorite torture porn movie to the villagers for daring to associate with the decadent Westerners. If your squad shows back up a day or two later and captures one of the insurgents is your first inclination really to check the Geneva Convention rules, let your squad medic give them a once over, and then properly feed and care for them until they can be turned over to whomever they go to?

[Thanas]

I mean just imagine spending a few days in some fairly remote village in Afghanistan, you leave and the next day an Al-Qaeda force shows up, rounds up the village members and does all the worst things out of your least favorite torture porn movie to the villagers for daring to associate with the decadent Westerners. If your squad shows back up a day or two later and captures one of the insurgents is your first inclination really to check the Geneva Convention rules, let your squad medic give them a once over, and then properly feed and care for them until they can be turned over to whomever they go to?

That is why you get paid ridiculously well for doing a comparatively unskilled job. Besides, that excuse did not work for armies in the past, nor should it have.

Also, considering this supposedly happens a lot in military prisons your excuse does not hold up.

[Channel72]

I don't know why, but for some reason my first reaction to stories like this is to sort of downplay it in my head. I start thinking things like... "thousands of 'torture' cases? Yeah, I bet at least 70% of them were of the "psychological" variety, i.e. basically just British soldiers using profanity or calling Mohammed a pedophile or something..."

But then I think... so what? Even if there's only one torture case, it's not something that should be tolerated.

What bothers me, however, is that my first inclination is always to sort of downplay the atrocities, giving the soldiers the benefit of the doubt. I suspect most ordinary civilians have the same initial reaction, which is probably a major part of the reason that the military is able to continuously get away with this sort of thing, despite the fact that they keep getting caught.

[Napoleon the Clown]

From comments I've made seen by those who have served in the military, there's a big push (official or otherwise) to dehumanize the people you're fighting against. When the guy you just took captive isn't a "real person" in how you think about him it suddenly becomes a lot easier to do really nasty shit. I mean, how many people would just up and torture a random person while still consciously and subconsciously thinking of them as a person? It's hard to inflict significant harm on other people, but if you stop thinking of someone as a person, even subconsciously, it becomes a lot easier to justify doing horrible shit.

Doesn't make it any semblance of right. But I can understand how an otherwise normal person could end up doing shit like this.

[Block]

I mean just imagine spending a few days in some fairly remote village in Afghanistan, you leave and the next day an Al-Qaeda force shows up, rounds up the village members and does all the worst things out of your least favorite torture porn movie to the villagers for daring to associate with the decadent Westerners. If your squad shows back up a day or two later and captures one of the insurgents is your first inclination really to check the Geneva Convention rules, let your squad medic give them a once over, and then properly feed and care for them until they can be turned over to whomever they go to?

That is why you get paid ridiculously well for doing a comparatively unskilled job. Besides, that excuse did not work for armies in the past, nor should it have.

Also, considering this supposedly happens a lot in military prisons your excuse does not hold up.

In what world are soldiers paid ridiculously well, or unskilled labor? You can make the argument that infantry is relatively unskilled, although it's significantly more complex than you'd realize, but my position required learning Arabic, becoming an expert in everything from construction and basic agriculture to grant writing and developing payroll systems. Soldiers are hardly the barely trained conscripts of 50 years ago.

[Thanas]

In what world are soldiers paid ridiculously well, or unskilled labor?

The pay scale looks mighty generous to me, considering it also does not take things like the GI bill or the various bonuses and allowances.

You can make the argument that infantry is relatively unskilled, although it's significantly more complex than you'd realize, but my position required learning Arabic, becoming an expert in everything from construction and basic agriculture to grant writing and developing payroll systems. Soldiers are hardly the barely trained conscripts of 50 years ago.

My apologies, I should have defined soldiers purely as infantry or military prison operators.

[Mr Bean]

Thanas your not thinking.
Most of the military is E6 or below but lets say your an E6 earning 3000 dollars a month with six years in the service.

Well working 40 hours a week four weeks in the month that's 160 hours divided that by the 3000 dollars a month not counting benefits and yes you get a nice 18$ dollar an hour pay rate. Are you willing to work 40 hours a week for 18$ an hour?

Most people would say yes to that, to bad we can assume that 160 hours a week is the base line for a 8-5 office job. In my military service I worked an average of 48 hours a week minimum with 60 being the high average. I know those who spend six months in a stretch working 70 hours a week day in day out without breaks for entire deployments. Lets take the low ball figure of 48 hours a week I worked, that's 192 hours a week or 15$ an hour. But that's for an E6 with six years. During my time I was making 2300 a month which works out to an 11 dollar an hour job. And that's with benefits without I calculated some weeks I was earning the equivalent of just above minimum wage. In 2003 I worked 250 hours in one month at my then pay rate of 2,122 per month meant I worked that month for 8.40$ an hour.

I'm not atypical and lots of jobs mean you are on the clock 24/7. You can't exactly take the week off aboard and a aircraft carrier or submarine.
Remember Thanas pay rates are monthly, and did we mention people will be trying to kill you? And if they don't kill you, well good thing your job will destroy the shit out of your body.

[Zixinus]

From comments I've made seen by those who have served in the military, there's a big push (official or otherwise) to dehumanize the people you're fighting against. When the guy you just took captive isn't a "real person" in how you think about him it suddenly becomes a lot easier to do really nasty shit. I mean, how many people would just up and torture a random person while still consciously and subconsciously thinking of them as a person? It's hard to inflict significant harm on other people, but if you stop thinking of someone as a person, even subconsciously, it becomes a lot easier to justify doing horrible shit.

And this is one of the reasons why any military keeps doing this sort of things, even if they don't really want to or set it up as a goal.

In any modern nation you have to condition and convince everyone that you must never kill a person, nor even to attack someone. You must not use violence, you are not allowed to use violence and you are punished by law when you use violence. You have religions teaching this, you have parents teaching this to their children, you have schools.
You have to have this setup because this is essential for allowing a large society to function. You have to live in a world where you don't have to fear for you life when you meet a new person.

So it should come as no surprise that then you have a problem when you recruit from people raised to these values. You have soldiers that have a problem doing their primary jobs: killing enemy soldiers.

The way to overcome this conditioning is by instilling otherness. The human you are shooting at isn't a person, but the enemy and the target. You don't shoot at people, you shoot at enemy targets.

The training then keeps on going pass the battlefield. The soldiers will not see their prisoners suddenly as people and human beings, but the enemy. The enemy that will lie to overcome you, trick you to gain an advantage and stab you in the back the first chance they get. With this in mind, an innocent person now will say and act in a similar way as the enemy.
So, soldiers who were taught to do a horrible thing to the enemy (kill them) will easily make the step of doing a horrible thing to the enemy that he merely wasn't trained for (or was, if the torture and humiliation was part of an interrogation).

Of course, this does not mean that the soldiers doing this shouldn't be punished and prevented whenever possible. And doesn't mention why torture is still intentionally used.

[Thanas]

Thanas your not thinking.
Most of the military is E6 or below but lets say your an E6 earning 3000 dollars a month with six years in the service.

Well working 40 hours a week four weeks in the month that's 160 hours divided that by the 3000 dollars a month not counting benefits and yes you get a nice 18$ dollar an hour pay rate. Are you willing to work 40 hours a week for 18$ an hour?

Most people would say yes to that, to bad we can assume that 160 hours a week is the base line for a 8-5 office job. In my military service I worked an average of 48 hours a week minimum with 60 being the high average. I know those who spend six months in a stretch working 70 hours a week day in day out without breaks for entire deployments. Lets take the low ball figure of 48 hours a week I worked, that's 192 hours a week or 15$ an hour. But that's for an E6 with six years. During my time I was making 2300 a month which works out to an 11 dollar an hour job. And that's with benefits without I calculated some weeks I was earning the equivalent of just above minimum wage. In 2003 I worked 250 hours in one month at my then pay rate of 2,122 per month meant I worked that month for 8.40$ an hour.

I'm not atypical and lots of jobs mean you are on the clock 24/7. You can't exactly take the week off aboard and a aircraft carrier or submarine.
Remember Thanas pay rates are monthly, and did we mention people will be trying to kill you? And if they don't kill you, well good thing your job will destroy the shit out of your body.

K, I'll concede that line of argument.

Still, that should in no way excuse people for being torturers, nor absolve people from losing their composure (if even that excuse applies here, since most torture seems to be done after combat is over).

[PainRack]

I would think most torture appears to be the corruption of utter power, along with the insidious need to get more things done with less staff. Abu Grahib in particular appears to have been a melting pot where the CIA and other higher agencies wanted to get more intelligence out of the detainees while they rotated in unskilled MPs to perform detainee control.......

[loomer]

This is an appropriate time again to recommend Darius Rejali's Torture and Democracy - and the rest of his body of work, for that matter. Anyone who wants to know more about British involvement in torture globally over the last century would do well to read it, even if it lacks a big section on their involvement in this particular batch due to its age.

[energiewende]

"allegations ranging from sexual and religious humiliation to physical violence"

This seems to indicate that many of the allegations do not involve physical violence, though all are described as torture, which is a word used for the immoral and usually illegal infliction of sufferring. This raises an interesting question: what is the maximum level of coercion that may be applied in war time to irregular combatants, especially those who may have knowledge of others or of future attacks? At one time they had no rights and could be shot out of hand, but have we now (either in aspiration or in law) moved to a position that they should, at worst, be treated as civilian criminals in the same situation?

[K. A. Pital]

At one time they had no rights and could be shot out of hand, but have we now (either in aspiration or in law) moved to a position that they should, at worst, be treated as civilian criminals in the same situation?

Indeed - before the expansion of the Geneva convention they had no rights. Among other signs of these wonderful past times: women rarely had suffrage, negroes were put in cages to be shown alongside animals in zoos and corporal punishment in territories with "irregular combatants" who were really anti-colonial partisans was widespread, with notable cases of torture, too.

Now "they" have some rights, because at some point it hit people that "they" are actually people too, and if you dehumanize them to a point where "they" have nothing to lose, they start fighting so ferociously that most wars of such nature end in quagmires. Or maybe humanity got smarter, but I'm not really convinced.

Referring to the past as normality, which seems to be the case here, is wrong.

[energiewende]

I'm not sure most of those things are actually true of 1948, the year before the Geneva Convention expanded coverage to irregular forces in general that operated roughly according to the methods of state armies' commandoes. Perhaps suffrage, but only in so far as most men didn't have it either.

Now, you clearly like irregular combatants - seemingly because you think they agree with your political ideology, although I'd point out that if you don't like racism one of the first modern irregular forces was the KKK - but my question is more subtle than whether they should exist at all. It is whether they should have the same legal rights as non-combatant civilians and, if not, to what extent should their rights differ.

[Thanas]

I'm not sure most of those things are actually true of 1948, the year before the Geneva Convention expanded coverage to irregular forces in general that operated roughly according to the methods of state armies' commandoes. Perhaps suffrage, but only in so far as most men didn't have it either.

Now, you clearly like irregular combatants - seemingly because you think they agree with your political ideology, although I'd point out that if you don't like racism one of the first modern irregular forces was the KKK

Nope. First, the KKK is not an irregular force. Second, irregular forces as in the modern sense of guerilla warfare exist since the 1600s.

- but my question is more subtle than whether they should exist at all. It is whether they should have the same legal rights as non-combatant civilians and, if not, to what extent should their rights differ.

How about they have a right not to be tortured. Do you disagree with that?

[energiewende]

I'm not sure most of those things are actually true of 1948, the year before the Geneva Convention expanded coverage to irregular forces in general that operated roughly according to the methods of state armies' commandoes. Perhaps suffrage, but only in so far as most men didn't have it either.

Now, you clearly like irregular combatants - seemingly because you think they agree with your political ideology, although I'd point out that if you don't like racism one of the first modern irregular forces was the KKK

Nope. First, the KKK is not an irregular force. Second, irregular forces as in the modern sense of guerilla warfare exist since the 1600s.

The current KKK isn't, but the first KKK was.

- but my question is more subtle than whether they should exist at all. It is whether they should have the same legal rights as non-combatant civilians and, if not, to what extent should their rights differ.

How about they have a right not to be tortured. Do you disagree with that?

I don't know. Can you define torture?

Also, how would you answer the question I asked?

[Thanas]

The current KKK isn't, but the first KKK was.

In what war were they fighting?

How about they have a right not to be tortured. Do you disagree with that?

I don't know. Can you define torture?[/quote]

Intentional causing of mental or physical pain to a person in your power.

Also, how would you answer the question I asked?

Depends on the specific situation, as protection is always flexible. For example, a soldier who fake surrenders can legally be shot.

[energiewende]

The current KKK isn't, but the first KKK was.

In what war were they fighting?

...in what war were the Iraq insurgents fighting? Or do you assign to Iraq insurgents the power to declare extralegal wars but not to the KKK? (why?). Regardless, it is not a requirement of the convention that there be a declared war for these rights to apply.

How about they have a right not to be tortured. Do you disagree with that?

I don't know. Can you define torture?

Intentional causing of mental or physical pain to a person in your power.

Ok. Can you clarify, does imprisoning someone count as torture? I have never been imprisoned but I intuit that it would cause me mental pain.

Also, how would you answer the question I asked?

Depends on the specific situation, as protection is always flexible. For example, a soldier who fake surrenders can legally be shot.

Only while presenting an imminent danger, or after the fact as a punishment? A non-combatant civilian could legally be shot if he somehow presents an imminent mortal danger to a soldier, so that exception would not distinguish the two classes of person.

[Thanas]

...in what war were the Iraq insurgents fighting? Or do you assign to Iraq insurgents the power to declare extralegal wars but not to the KKK? (why?). Regardless, it is not a requirement of the convention that there be a declared war for these rights to apply.

They were fighting a war against occupation, all the more legal because the sovereign nation of Iraq never surrendered in the war.

Ok. Can you clarify, does imprisoning someone count as torture? I have never been imprisoned but I intuit that it would cause me mental pain.

Then you are a weakling crybaby.

Only while presenting an imminent danger, or after the fact as a punishment?

After the fact he has the right to a trial.

Which, coincidentally, is something most of those detained never got.

[energiewende]

...in what war were the Iraq insurgents fighting? Or do you assign to Iraq insurgents the power to declare extralegal wars but not to the KKK? (why?). Regardless, it is not a requirement of the convention that there be a declared war for these rights to apply.

They were fighting a war against occupation, all the more legal because the sovereign nation of Iraq never surrendered in the war.

The CSA was fighting a war against occupation blah blah blah. The Geneva Convention rights are not based on a subjective assessment of the justice of the cause for which irregulars are fighting, nor should they be.

Ok. Can you clarify, does imprisoning someone count as torture? I have never been imprisoned but I intuit that it would cause me mental pain.

Then you are a weakling crybaby.

Ah - so what objective standard do you use to exclude imprisonment but not "non-violent religious abuse"? Do you believe that the suicide rate is higher among those subjected to "non-violent religious abuse" than among prisoners, for instance?

Only while presenting an imminent danger, or after the fact as a punishment?

After the fact he has the right to a trial.

Which, coincidentally, is something most of those detained never got.

So would a civilian, so this is no distinction. Please stop evading and answer the question: do you believe that irregular combatants should receive any different treatment to civilian criminals, and if so, what?