it's not "left wing drivel" mlsoft... i don't know where on the list we rank, but there's definitely a problem... but just like Bush, Cheney, Rummy, etc there is just never any admitting to wrong-doing... must keep to the party-line rhetoric
Torture: The Case Against, and Prescription for..... Posted by: Jon Henke on Sunday, May 29, 2005
Recently, it was suggested that I lay out the actual case for widespread torture, and present a solution to it. That's a good idea, though I find that Dale Franks largely beat me to it. Still, I want to be a bit more explicit, so I'll start by repeating what Dale wrote because it's damned well worth repeating. Then I'll give some specifics:
As expected, posting the cartoon yesterday provoked arguments from the usual suspects who, for whatever reason, seem entirely uninterested in the fact that our troops are killing prisoners in their custody. For those who are counting, the death toll currently looks like this. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/03/16/national/w113007S95.DTL
The Army has concluded that 27 of the detainees who died in U.S. custody in Iraq or Afghanistan since 2002 were the victims of homicide or suspected homicide, military officials said in a report released Friday.
The number is higher than Pentagon officials have acknowledged, and it indicates that criminal acts caused a significant portion of the dozens of prisoner deaths that occurred in U.S. custody...
Another Army investigation found systematic abuse and possible torture of Iraqi prisoners at a base near Mosul just as top military officials became aware of abuse allegations at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, documents released Friday show.
Records previously released by the Army have detailed abuses at Abu Ghraib and other sites in Iraq as well as at sites in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The documents released Friday were the first to reveal abuses at the jail in Mosul and are among the few to allege torture directly.
An officer found that detainees "were being systematically and intentionally mistreated" at the holding facility near Mosul in December 2003. The 311th Military Intelligence Battalion of the Army's 101st Airborne Division ran the lockup.
"There is evidence that suggests the 311th MI personnel and/or translators engaged in physical torture of the detainees," a memo from the investigator said. The January 2004 report said the prisoners' rights under the Geneva Conventions were violated.
And, of course, that’s what we know as of now. In some cases, it appears that investigations have gotten...uh...bogged down. But, in any event, as far as we can tell, out of 108 prisoner death in US Military custody, at least 27 of them, or 25% appear to be murders committed mainly by US Military personnel, although in one case, the Justice Department is investigating since the suspects are CIA employees. Compare that, to say, 2001, when, in the US corrections system—both state and federal—homicides accounted for 57 of the 3,311 deaths that year, or 1.7%. And that, by the way, includes homicides of inmates by other inmates. The number killed by prison guards, while not broken out, is no doubt substantially smaller still.
25% v.1.7%
I’d say that’s a bit of a discrepancy, wouldn’t you? No, strike that last phrase. Some of you won’t feel it’s a discrepancy at all. Or, if you do, don’t particularly care.
It doesn’t matter that our terrorist enemies are evil. It doesn’t matter what they do to their prisoners, in terms of beheading, or what have you. We don’t judge our behavior by the standards of barbarians. We judge it by our own standards, and, so far, it looks like we haven’t been doing as good a job as we should of living up to those standards. Pointing that out somehow makes me Andrew Sullivan. Well, that’s fine. I’d rather be Andrew Sullivan than a moral cripple. Some of you appear content to be the latter.
Now, you can bitch and moan that some lefty cartoonist makes the military look bad. But, if you’re honest, you have to acknowledge that if the military wasn’t, in fact, torturing and murdering any prisoners, the snide little cartoonist wouldn’t be able to draw his little cartoon. And, when our guys are torturing prisoners to death, then the cartoon, no matter how distasteful you find it, has some relevance, and, indeed, some truth. [...]
It is to our credit that CID is looking into this stuff, and pressing criminal charges. But something is causing entire units to mistreat prisoners, torture them, and kill them. And let’s not hide behind any of this “Well, if it’s needed to stop another 9/11...” crap. Clearly, in the cases cited so far, it wasn’t necessary. It was being done at places like Bagram because the interrogators made it regular practice. Why? How did it become regular practice? I guarantee it wasn’t because some Staff Sergeant exceeded his authority. And, while we’re on the subject, why was the CID’s initial work at Bagram so shoddy that CID headquarters had the investigation reassigned from local CID agents and given to a team in Virginia? Apparently, some of our guys feel perfectly comfortable engaging in barbarism. Since there are no bad troops, only bad leadership, I have to wonder how complicit the chain of command is, at least at the local level, at turning a blind eye to this stuff.
Murdering prisoners is wrong. Period. Torturing prisoners is wrong. Period. Those are, in fact, supposed to be the types of principles that separate us from the terrorists. But as far as I can tell, there seems to be some problem getting this message down through the whole chain of command. It doesn’t matter whether that’s by negligence, or by design, it has to stop. Even if you don’t care about the prisoners themselves, you have to at least acknowledge that torturing and killing prisoners creates a propaganda and moral defeat for our side. It’s unwise on purely utilitarian grounds, let alone moral ones.
Finally, it’s too bad if it offends you to read criticism of our soldiers here. But, after putting in 10 years on active duty as a trigger-puller myself, I’ve pretty much earned the right to make any criticisms I think are appropriate.
In case my own rundown of the evidence was insufficient, please see this excellent and authoritative piece http://slate.msn.com/id/2119122/ (by, among others, Phil Carter) at Slate. In great detail, they describe....
- How and where torture and abuse has been authorized up and down the chain of command.
- The legal memos suggesting, authorizing and/or setting the environment for torture and abuse.
- Descriptions of the tortures and abuses that have been committed, along with the sources of their authorization when such exists, the location of usage, and the legality according to US, International and Military Law.
- Findings of the various military investigations.
Quotes of Interest:
Secrecy:
Another striking aspect of the torture memos is the secrecy that surrounded them. We would not know about most of these documents were it not for leaks, Freedom of Information Act requests, and subsequent investigations. Questionable Investigations: The Pentagon would say that the inquiries and the reports they produced reflect the DOD's considered judgment about who should bear responsibility for Abu Ghraib and the other detention facilities, based on the evidence that was collected. Yet the findings in the Fay-Jones Report and the recent recommendations of Army Inspector General Stanley Green don't match up. And it's hard to ignore the conflict of interest that the military has in investigating its own misconduct, especially when the trail may lead to top commanders.
POW Status:
In response to Abu Ghraib, the military has made some efforts to learn from the disaster and install controls of its own. In a draft field manual posted to a public Pentagon sever-and then withdrawn after the press reported it-the Pentagon ... reaffirms the longstanding U.S. policy of granting Geneva Convention protections to detainees, even where doubt exists as to their status, until a "competent tribunal" can judge them to be enemy combatants rather than protected prisoners of war.
Conclusion:
These policies were deliberately designed to carve out exceptions to international rules regarding prisoners of war that the United States had once championed and led the world to embrace. The rules would remain in place for everyone except the detainees in Guantanamo and Afghanistan purported to possess valuable information that they would not otherwise divulge. "These are the worst of a very bad lot," Vice President Dick Cheney said of the Guantanamo prisoners, according to Rose. "They are very dangerous. They are devoted to killing millions of Americans, innocent Americans, if they can." It is difficult to challenge such a consequentialist argument, for few Americans would rather follow the rules than prevent another terror attack. The exceptions to the standard military doctrine of interrogation, however, did not remain exceptions. They swallowed the rules, as exceptions are prone to do.
The real legacy of American interrogation practices, post-9/11, is that practices and justifications that should have been reserved for the worst of the worst (assuming we could know who they are) began to be used indiscriminately. In the eyes of the government, they began to seem almost normal. The effect has been to turn America from the world's leader on many issues of international human-rights law into the world's tyrant. [...] It is not true, as many in the Arab world believe, that the United States has embarked on a reckless campaign of torture and abuse of its Arab prisoners of war. But what has happened-a slow slide from coherent, consistent standards for interrogation and treatment of prisoners to a sometimes ad-hoc, occasionally brutal search for information at all costs-should warrant public outcry. That it has not suggests either that this shift doesn't interest us because it affects outsiders, or that we no longer consider torture or near-torture to be beyond the bounds of civil conduct. Indeed.
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