I blogged about Gall’s article, inter alia:

TORTURED CONSTRUCTIONS

Three articles below suggest that the United States government might be torturing people – torturing them to death in some cases…

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TORTURED CONSTRUCTIONS #2

The World Socialist Web Site has many articles on torture and related subjects. Below is the first WSWS article related to the deaths at Baghram.

Detainee dies during US interrogation in Afghanistan
By Peter Symonds
11 December 2002
[...]
Neither the New York Times nor other media outlets have raised any questions about the death or criticised the treatment being meted out to alleged terrorist suspects, in breach of their most basic democratic rights. A man can be detained indefinitely without charge and die in unexplained circumstances—and the media, including the so-called liberal New York Times, passes over the matter in silence.

There are only a limited number of possibilities. In normal circumstances, young men do not suddenly die. The detainee may have been sick, injured or wounded—either before or during his capture—in which case he should have been taken to hospital, not an interrogation centre. Or he may have fallen ill, and, likewise, been given proper medical treatment. The only other possibility is that the interrogation itself contributed directly to his death. Whichever is the case, serious questions of gross negligence and/or mistreatment are raised.
[...]
It appears, however, that the interrogation regime at Bagram Air Base is even more aggressive [than Guantanamo]. According to an October 29 article in the Washington Post, “Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is losing its usefulness as a place for gathering valuable intelligence information, while interrogations at the US military base at Bagram, and elsewhere abroad, have proven more fruitful…

“Because Guantanamo is so close to the United States and is continually being visited by US and foreign officials, informed sources said, the camp operates in more of an atmosphere of ‘political correctness’ than does the Bagram facility—a sense among interrogators that they must not allow detainees an opening to complain of mistreatment.”

At Bagram, which operates in “more of a frontier atmosphere”, interrogators feel no such constraint. The military insists it operates within rules that ban the use of physical and mental torture, drugs and the exposure to inhumane treatment. But no one is permitted inside the facility. Other than an occasional visit by the international Red Cross, there is no check on the treatment of prisoners…Similar methods are being used in Kabul, just 60 km from Bagram.

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TORTURED CONSTRUCTIONS ##3

HOW WE SURVIVED JAIL HELL
THE OBSERVER (UK)
David Rose March 14, 2004

For two years the Tipton Three have been silent prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Now, in this remarkable interview with David Rose, they describe for the first time the extraordinary story of their journey from the West Midlands to Camp Delta

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just not possible to say “bad apples” OR “bad Executive Branch.” Both are true, really, though manifest themselves only in very complicated circumstances & individual cases

imagining that he or anybody else doesn’t see this too. It was IIRC his point.

Secondly, your reply to Otto – that the US officers corps are, in your opinion, fine, upstanding people – completely misses the point. The argument is that within any institution the people on the inside are usually less ready to make critical judgments of the institution and of its other members than outsiders are. They don’t have to be “assholes” to think this way, although if a lot of them were it might make the effect more pronounced. In the case of the army, it’s easy to think of reasons why this effect will be especially strong. Therefore it sounds quite bizarre when you say that even the army has problems facing up to what has happened: of course it has and we would expect the army to be among the worst offenders in this regard. But it’s supposed to be the job of the media to force them to face up to it.

So perhaps you ought to have another go at your #14, this time trying to reply to what people have actually said.

Abb1—Yeah, there’s a certain kind of cynicism I can grok… certainly the publishers & broadcasters have advertisers & audiences to maintain: but I wonder if it’s healthy to go there wholesale? We did have, after all, the Pentagon Papers-or even more recently, the great Toledo Blade piece on the “Tiger Force.” Or even: pretty wide-spread coverage of the “Generals’ Revolt” this spring, & more recently, the Army prosecutors’ decision to seek the death penalty in (just one of) the big Iraqi war crimes investigations, no?

Otto—Surely you’re not suggesting that the U.S. commanders know/feel less about the nuances of war crimes than the journalists at the Times, Post, etcetera? I’ll grant you there are a few assholes in the officer corps, but as someone who used to resist them (I was busted three times as a Marine) & now talks to them w/some degree of frequency (and much more authority), I can say they’re among the most articulate, impassioned group of people you’ll ever come across. That’s not to say their ‘day job’ isn’t a nightmare and that many of them would do better to quit it—because it is and they would—but it’s to say: a lot more than you’d think are well aware of the bullshit, the compromises, etcetera, and if they didn’t think we needed the best, most thoughtful military in the world, they’d leave tomorrow. A good example of a guy who upholds this ideal (and did decide to quit) is Nathanial Fick. His memoir (as well as Evan Wright’s account of his Marine Recon Platoon’s service in Iraq) is definitely worth checking out (though it should be said his isn’t the only one worth reading: Quang Pham’s Gulf War memoir as Vietnamese-American Marine aviator is superb, as is Andrew Exum’s “This Man’s Army”—and those only the officer corps memoirs worth reading).

Sven—the big problem, as I see it, with the “bad apples” theory is it gets things half wrong, from both sides. The fact is, there are trailer park de Sades—petty sadists you used to see playing Jai-Alai with garden rakes and toads at Camp LeJeune—as well as more-or-less straight-up guys who get pressured into bullshit from a top-down authority that discounts the laws of land warfare & even of human life. There are also a lot of commanders who don’t want to see even one life lost during their mission, Iraqi or American. Even if we had Eisenhower and Bradley running things in Iraq, you’d still have atrocities, as even in the Pacific in WWII we had Marines collecting Japanese ears, skulls, etcetera & there were a number of high-profile prosecutions of war crimes in both Europe and, shockingly, within the continental U.S. during WWII. That we had Gonzales, Rumsfeld, et. al., pushing the boundaries of human rights past all acceptable limits only makes the matter worse, without question—but in the end: if you look deep into the nature of squad/platoon/company/battalion dynamics, I’m sure you’ll find a pretty fascinating dynamic of resistance/response from both sides of this moral & that it’s just not possible to say “bad apples” OR “bad Executive Branch.” Both are true, really, though manifest themselves only in very complicated circumstances & individual cases.

Turnipseed is right about the naivete of the US press, however. When the four contractors’ corpses were mutilated and displayed at Fallujah, I was shocked at how shocked the media was. What do they think happens during wars?

As Umansky’s story notes, the press’ failure to connect the dots left the troops – the “bad apples” – holding the bag when administration policy was the root of the problem.

It is exactly because the people in the military dont want to know about this that we need so slam Raines and co. for being weak-kneed in making outright charges of murder against troops in Iraq.

Second, the Supreme Court’s recent decision has impaired our ability to prosecute terrorists through military commissions, and has put in question the future of the CIA program. In its ruling on military commissions, the Court determined that a provision of the Geneva Conventions known as “Common Article Three” applies to our war with al Qaeda. This article includes provisions that prohibit “outrages upon personal dignity” and “humiliating and degrading treatment.” The problem is that these and other provisions of Common Article Three are vague and undefined, and each could be interpreted in different ways by American or foreign judges. And some believe our military and intelligence personnel involved in capturing and questioning terrorists could now be at risk of prosecution under the War Crimes Act—simply for doing their jobs in a thorough and professional way.