Bad Apples Also Grow in Afghanistan

“aren’t nearly as bad as the stuff Saddam Hussein was doing.”

This debate infuriates me every time I hear it. We aren’t in a competition with Saddam over who is the better person.

Why don’t you just come out and say that as long as we do not torture more than Saddam did, then everything is fine.

Of course, I taking your point a little far. My point, however, is that we cannot tolerate torture or abuse. If we give the military any slack on how they treat the Iraqis or Afghans, everyone in the military will take that slack willingly, as opposed to just a few.

Worse and worse:

“The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda that have produced growing concerns inside the agency about abuses, according to current and former counterterrorism officials.

At least one agency employee has been disciplined for threatening a detainee with a gun during questioning, they said.

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as “water boarding,” in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/politics/13DETA.html?ei=5062&en=f4df7ec51a3252e0&ex=1085025600&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=

I love the “cultural concern” factor.

Because we all know there are some places where the local culture has no problem at all with that kind of thing. Right?

I suppose laws and conventions are a matter of culture too, unless they can be brought up to reassure no abuses were ever considered acceptable investigating practices.

What the hell is happening to my country?

Belle, it’s important to remember that all forms of interrogation and incarceration are– by definition–involuntary, intimidating and “abusive.”

Nothing is “happening” to your country.

On the contrary, all that is “happening” is that we’ve all become much more uncomfortably aware of detainee abuse because of the (at least according to General Taguba) extreme and unsanctioned degree and sexual perversity of the detainee abuse documented at Abu Ghraib. Some degree of abuse (including, but not limited to, stripping, humiliating, rectally examining, pushing, shoving, threatening, intimidating, etc.) is normal operating procedure in even the most “enlightened” prison environments.

And always has been.

Just ask someone who’s been in prison.

Abuse is the nature of the detention and interrogation beast. (Civil liberty protections, remember, merely prevent admission of any testimony acquired using the more hair-raising methods. Except in the most outrageous incidences, abuses of prisoners and those under interrogation are routinely dismissed. And always have been.)

The degree of detainee abuse (whether inflicted while in civilian or military custody)that a civilized country chooses to tolerate in the interests of security is certainly always open for debate.

But please don’t mistake what you’re hearing now for something horrfyingly novel, or comfort yourself with the thought that prisoner abuses of any kind are limited to wartime exigencies–or to the aberrant excesses by the Bush administration.

All that’s “happening” is that we’re actually talking about it for a change.

whoops. and sorry for hitting refresh.

Nothing is happening to your country…

Notice in fact how things work pretty well in your country when it comes to issues like these.

The timeline went something like: Abuses –> whistle blower –> immediate investigation –> conclusions –> court martials

But then something extraordinary happened. Pictures of evidence were released that dramatically affected the public. Outrage upon outrage was escalated, the gov’t took additional steps, and people were reprimanded.

I agree with a previous poster… you can’t compare this to Saddam’s torture… because nothing like that ever happened under Saddam.

So, the system worked pretty well after all.

Oh, and then there was Nick Berg, who became one of the “sheep” that the Al-Queda Zarquawi said would come.

That was no beheading, it was a slaughter… as Nick screams in the background, the killers call on the name of Allah and then show his severed head. Two lessons from this:

1) Berg’s murder is a reminder why we are fighting the war on terror (did I mention they were Al Queda and in Iraq)

2) Berg’s murder has no “self-correcting” mechanism. There is only one thing these people know… and that is death. And that is hopefully what they will get.

I’ve just posted a piece on the “climate of permissiveness”, supported by conservative senators and commentators, that enabled these abuses to occur. Please take a look at:

http://worldonfire.typepad.com/world_on_fire/2004/05/ends_and_means_.html

“The timeline went something like: Abuses —> whistle blower —> immediate investigation —> conclusions —> court martials”

Actually, it was:

Sanction of abuses by the highest authority (Bush, Rumsfield sh*tting on the Geneva conventions, and claiming sole authority) ->
abuses ->
whistleblower ->
investigation where the investigator exceeded the scope of his orders, and discussed the MI and contractors ->
attempted coverup and punishment of the lowest ranking enlisted men ->
one of the scapegoats released photo’s to the public ->
public outrage->
Bush, Rumsfield, Chairmand of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Myers still didn’t read the report ->
MI and contractors still on the job ->
Guantanamoid General Miller put in charge of Iraq (the one who recommended ‘prepping’ the
prisoners) ->
right-wing spin machine sinking to new depths (‘outraged at the outrage, etc.)->
Bush criticizing Rumsfield->
Cheney backing Rumsfield ->
Bush backing Rumsfield ->
Rumsfield accepting ‘full responsibility’, where ‘full’ means ‘none’.

Some degree of abuse (including, but not limited to, stripping, humiliating, rectally examining, pushing, shoving, threatening, intimidating, etc.) is normal operating procedure in even the most “enlightened” prison environments.

And always has been.

If that’s the case, it certainly doesn’t seem to be so in other countries. You’d be amazed at how different the whole framework for debate about prisoner rights can be elsewhere…

It’s not that all forms of incarceration are by nature abusive. It’s a certain kind of mentality that can spread in any given society, that can be reflected in abuse in prisons, and in the tolerance of it as normal.

I assume the full-body nude ID photos are actually scans, to make realistic high-polygon “enemy” skins for the next terrorism-themed video game.

It will be rated M for Mature.

I think we should do a careful survey of all of the tortures and abuses committed under Saddam Hussein. Count up the number of prisoners tortured, raped, and killed, per capita, per year. Get it all out on the table.

Then as we occupy Iraq, we should just do 20% less. That way, we can still say that we’re a significant improvement.

phew, jason, good thing you added that note. I’d just finished reading this and my parody-detector had been severely scrambled…

Of course there is someone here (lance) that says the Arabs view the Berg decapitation was US / Israeli produced theater, and agrees. (Mossad bad, Jews bad, intellectuals keep pointing this out but ignorant Americans don’t seem to understand.)

I take it you all don’t read the Iraqi blogs like Iraq The Model or Alaa or Zeyad or Salam. It might be instructive to take a look from their point of view. (I didn’t see that they blamed Israel for Berg, for instance.)

I’m assuming that the full body nude photos are to be able to identify their corpses later.

It’s not like there are full bodies available when the suicide bomb a girl’s school.

The Arab world seems to view the Berg atrocity as Us/Israeli produced theater

Where are you getting this from? Even the woeful CNN has reported that the “Arab world”, its media and TV viewerships etc., is appalled.

Belle Waring:

Calm down and try to make some intelligent distinctions.

Torture of the innocent is horrific and should be punished severely. The Abu Ghraib atrocities must not happen again.

But torture of a mass murdering Al Qaeda gruppenfuehrer such as Khalid Muhammed, if done in order to extract specific operating details of future attacks that would kill thousands, is justified and necessary.

Khalid Muhammed was likely the thug who wielded the knife used to slaughter Danny Pearl. Khalid Muhammed, as AQ’s chief tactical and operations officer, was almost certainly the one who devised the 9/11 mass murders, and he has already revealed details of AQ plots that he developed to hijack and blow up airliners over the Pacific. (Note that the original 9/11 plan was to crash TWELVE planes, which would have brought the number of innocents slaughtered into the tens of thousands.)

My sister flies across the Pacific on business every month. .

Now, Belle, here’s a not-so-hypothetical for you.

Khalid Muhammed, having already confessed to devising plots to hijack and blow out of the sky a number of passenger airplanes, one of which may be carrying my sister, balks at interrogation requests to reveal details concerning this mass-murder operation.

Fail to get the information, and there’s a good chance that thousands of innocent civilians will be inicinerated.

Do you torture Khalid Muhammed or not?

If you consider yourself a humane and morally serious person, then please give a serious and well-considered answer.

Rgds,
Tombo

Pepi:

Because Norway’s entire prison population amounts to a mere 2,900 inmates, that country’s “Club Med” prison practices are largely irrelevant to the penal problems faced by the rest of the world: understaffing, overcrowding, maltreatment, addiction, underfunding, and so on.

Norway notwithstanding, and contrary to the singularly anti-American tone of much of the current conversation about the issue, prisoner abuse is much more than an American problem.

Just as in the U.S., where there are merely more humane prison environments and less humane prison environments, Europe is all over the map.

Here are some alarming references to the prison conditions within a few random European countries:

FRANCE: “Packed into old, vermin-ridden cells, often suffering from disease or mental problems, inmates craft makeshift daggers from canteen forks and resort to self-mutilation to pass the time. One man decapitates his cellmate with a pocket knife. Another dies when his cellmates set fire to a mattress. Rapes are commonplace, and guards too few to prevent them… ‘We had reason to fear a deterioration of the situation denounced in 2000 by two parliamentary assemblies, but we did not imagine having to describe a descent towards hell,’ wrote Thierry Levy of the French-based International Prisons Observatory (OIP) in the report… Around half of those held have not been convicted but are awaiting trial…As newspapers seized on the report, Justice Minister Dominique Perben denounced it as ‘excessive and grotesque’… In January 2000, Veronique Vasseur caused an uproar with a book recounting her experiences as chief doctor at La Sante – a notoriously grim maximum security detention centre in Paris. She wrote of inmates so depressed they swallowed rat poison, drain cleaner and even forks. Beds were ridden with lice, vermin were rampant, and skin diseases rife. ‘Out of 30 emergency measures recommended three years ago by parliamentarians, practically nothing has been done. Everything I did was in vain,’ Vasseur told the daily Le Parisien.” (http://www.lexpress.mu/display_article.php?news_id=8472)

GERMANY: “The news first surfaced after a regional television station, RBB, aired a film about attacks on inmates at the Brandenburg/Havel prison between 2001 and 2004. The report was based on statements by two former victims and one current inmate of the prison, who said that masked prison officers would often come into the cells in groups of three or four and rough up the prisoners with their fists and batons. They said that some prisoners suffered broken bones and other serious injuries. ‘They hit me with rubber truncheons.’ Even seriously ill inmates weren’t spared by the officers, according to the prisoners interviewed…Brandenburg’s justice minister Barbara Richstein of the opposition conservative Christian Democratic Party has come under fire for permitting prison officers to wear masks in certain situations. (http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,1432_A_1199266_1_A,00.html)

BELGIUM: “Belgium’s prison system suffers from overcrowding and violence. In 1997, Belgium confined some 8,200 inmates in prisons whose total capacity was 6,900 places…It also found that the living conditions of A and C wings of Mons prison were “absolutely miserable,” constituting inhuman and degrading treatment of the inmates confined in them.” (http://www.hrw.org/advocacy/prisons/europe.htm)

FINLAND “[N]umerous allegations were heard of frequent and severe acts of violence between inmates in Helsinki Central Prison. Such attacks seemed most often to take the form of beatings, with occasional incidents of slashing the face or body of a victim with a knife… The delegation were told that inter-prisoner attacks sometimes went undetected by staff and that, when they were discovered, little effective action was taken. The high number of prisoners in the establishment who were in solitary confinement at their own request was further evidence of the extent of the above-mentioned problem. According to the staff, there were on average forty to fifty prisoners (i.e. approximately 15% of the population) seeking such protection at any one time.” (http://www.hrw.org/advocacy/prisons/europe.htm)

GREECE: Amnesty International, “Greece: Inhuman prison conditions in Drapetsona, Athens,” August 14, 1998 (http://www.hrw.org/advocacy/prisons/europe.htm)

ITALY: “Amnesty International (AI), the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC), the United Nations (U.N.) Committee Against Torture, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, and the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) reported instances in which police abused detainees, commonly at the time of arrest or during the first 24 hours in custody, before detainees saw an attorney or a judicial authority. Examples of mistreatment include insults, particularly those aimed at aliens or Roma, kicking, punching, beatings with batons, or deprivation of food. Allegations continued of the abuse of prisoners by guards. In 1994 the Naples judiciary committed to trial 71 prison officials of the Secondigliano prison, including the chief warden, on charges of mistreating some 300 inmates…” (http://stockholm.usembassy.gov/human/human97/italy.html)

Even Norway’s prison system, faced with comparatively negligible numbers of inmates, isn’t entirely immune: “…prison administrators complain of unbearable conditions and that they are short of funds. The Ministry of Justice must give an account of this state of affairs to the Office of the Auditor General by Friday.” (http://www.norwaves.com/norwaves/Volume4_1996/v4nw22.html)

A.D.M.-
“…what is in the news right now is strictly being done to humiliate and demoralize people on a broad basis with no particular purpose…”

Unless the purpose is exactly that. To humiliate and demoralize.
The pictures themselves are doing exactly that.
Maybe the mission really was accomplished – not the stated mission, which is all just P.R. anyway – but the real reason this all is going down. To de-stabilize and cripple Iraq. With oil being a serious by-product and motivator for the moronic greedheads whose co-operation was necessary to make it happen.
Remember the sacking of the Baghdad Museum of Antiquities? There was this loud outcry from academics and nice people everywhere. How could this happen? It was so irresponsible. Yeah, unless it was done on purpose.
Now why would someone do that?
I’m suggesting that viewing all these seemingly incompetent bungles and ineptitudes as intentional acts of cunning and manipulation makes a lot more sense.
Everyone on the planet is looking at images of Iraqi(Arab) men degraded and humiliated by a woman.
Smells like victory to me. Creepy honorless victory.
So far.

More reassuring, but still avoiding the not-so-hypothetical instance.

Let me be a bit more clear. This is not a hypothetical tossed about in an academic seminar lounge. At this moment we have in our custody Khalid Muhammed, the Chief Operating Officer, as it were, of Al Qaeda. Khalid Muhammed is believed to be the one who devised the 9/11 mass murders and the masked terrorist who sawed off Danny Pearl’s head. He has confessed to plotting to repeat the 9/11 mass murders, spefically by hijacking and blowing out of the sky numerous airliners over the Pacific Ocean.

Here’s the only hypothetical part: say that a) we know that this week, as per Khalid M’s plans, his fascist operatives are planning an atrocity on a scale even larger than 9/11 and that b) my (or let’s say, your) sister has urgent business that will require her to board an airliner crossing the Pacific this week. Khalid M refuses to release any details other than that the atrocity will take place this week.

Do you torture Khalid M for this information that can save many thousands of innocent lives?

Tee hee– cute link! You funny, Matt

Other than lame sarcasm that sails wide of the mark and embarrassing cliches like “this is a problem that can[not] be solved by military force alone,” I’m not sure what, if anything, Matt wishes to get across here. He seems to think that I condone the idiotic and appaling atrocities at Abu Ghraib, which neither made us safe nor showed our troops stationed at Abu G. as worthy of anything other than contempt and disgust. Thus he responds to a deeply serious issue with venom and childishness.

But since he seems to have my sister’s safety in mind I’ll respond, and begin by noting that I don’t view this as a partisan issue in the slightest. I voted twice for Clinton and supported his war on Iraq. I support this war and anyone who’s determined to win it, be it Hillary, McCain, Lieberman, or if necessary, Bush.

Matt seems to have forgotten that:

— Bush’s war continued Clinton’s war;

— Clinton and his top security officials, including Dick Clarke (who notes this in his book) identified Saddam’s agents as behind the spread of chemical weapons to east Africa in the late 1990s;

— Clinton, arguing that “Saddam is determined to get WMD and if he gets them, I guarantee you he will use them”, unilaterally and pre-emptively attacked Saddam’s regime in 1999;

— Clinton, with the overwhelming support of leading Democrats, legislated “regime change in Iraq” as “the official policy of the US”;

— Bush broke with the failed, cynical pseudo-realism of his father’s circle and embraced Clinton’s regime change policy

–Bush made good on Clinton’s committment.

All of which was just and necessary because the sanctions were an abject, cruel failure that
Saddam and his French and Russian pimps manipulated so as to cause the deaths by starvation and illness of thousands of Iraqis EVERY MONTH.

Given Matt’s expressed humanitarian concern, we know that he would have opposed such a vile regime as the Franco-Russian-Annan Oil-for-Food program. And he appears to loathe the US invasion.

Which leaves the only remaining option for dealing with Saddam, the oil execs’ favorite: ending sanctions and doing business with Saddam.
This option would of course have avoided the need to deal with difficult issues of war and intelligence-gathering, and would have left people like Matt the freedom to utter cliches about “hearts and minds” and so forth.

If you care to be serious OTOH, I’m happy to discuss this.

Regards,
Tombo

Tombo — let’s take your hypothetical. So we have KM in the interrogation room and we want to get from him the details of the hijacking that we know is planned for next week. But he won’t talk. So we tie him to a board and duck his head under water repeatedly til he has a little taste of what it would feel like to drown. Still won’t talk. So we start tearing his fingernails off with pliers. Ah, that’s better — now he’s talking. But what is he telling us? How can we use the information? Is information extracted under these circumstances more liable to be true than otherwise?

Jeremy,

Clearly, neither one of us is expert in– nor do I have any serious interest in– specific interrogation or torture methods. The presumption behind your response is that any coerced statement cannot contain valid information or that such valid information as was revealed would be indistinguishable from false information. I seriously doubt that is always the case.

Obviously, whatever information KM divulges would have to be analyzed, checked against other sources, and perhaps field-tested, so to speak, through some kind cat-and-mouse, feedback loop involving indirect signaling to KM’s people in the field.

I don’t have complete information or solid expertise in this area; neither do you or any of those I’ve seen blogging or posting here. My paramount interest is in saving thousands of innocent lives, which leads me to conclude that some forms of torture are warranted in some instances in order to save those lives. Obviously, we need extremely stringent internal oversight and training processes within our military to prevent stupid and self-defeating Abu Ghraib abuses AND to yield effective information-gathering from known terrorist senior operatives such as Khalid M, Zarqawi, and Zawahiri.

To me, arguing for both of the above is the consistent liberal and humane position. Which is why I say, again, we must investigate, punish and make necessary corrections to prevent future Abu Ghraibs AND we must win this war. I hope you share these goals; I fail to see how any realistic and liberal person would not.

Best regards,

Tombo

Interesting that Matt, who likes to accuse others of changing the subject, persists in pretending that this discussion of torture was all about the Bush admin’s effectiveness at counterterrorism rather than the morality of torture.

Perhaps you wish to change the subject because you can’t contribute a serious and intelligent response to the Khalid M situation being discussed? Please, Matt, tell us why war is dangerous to humans and other living things. But don’t bother to strain yourself and address the Khalid M issue.

Rick Freedman wrote:

“I’ve just posted a piece on the “climate of permissiveness”, supported by conservative senators and commentators, that enabled these abuses to occur. Please take a look…”

I read the essay (and many of the previous ones as well).

It was excellent and you’re right.

So is Barr, on this issue.

bryan asked:

“Is something happening to my country?”

Yes.

Something bad.

Some argue that the US has been bad seems like forever, and they have a point. But I’d still say we’ve gone from bad to worse.