“It is well and good to murder, rape, sexually abuse, and urinate on prisoners, as long as you don’t get caught.”
Seriously? How much progress have we made since the middle ages?
You SERIOUSLY think it is perfectly fine to shove a M-16 against a prisoners head and force him to blow another prisoner while some asshat sprinkles him with urine and punches him in the kidneys until he pisses blood?
And you probably have the audacity to call other people subhuman?
Shocking. See, THIS is why I don’t believe anyone when they say, “we’re doing it for freedom” - because the same people turn around and try to justify things like this kind of torture.
For the record, before you come spluttering back with “oh they were doing it to save combat lives,” BS. They were doing it half for the fun of it, and half to ask them where Bush’s beloved WMDs are. Don’t you read the rags? Or are you bitter about how everyone is a pussy leftist and denounces anally raping prisoners in the name of national security?
You’re right on a one assumption: I don’t believe we’ve made a lot of progress, socially, since the Middel Ages or since the banana days, for that matter. Humans are capable of vile behavior.
You’re wrong on another: because of the above statement, I can’t call anyone subhuman because I don’t think we have all that far down to go before we’re just animals again.
You are fogiven for not researching my posts & opinins, so I’ll say it again: I KNOW that we’re not there to make the Iraqis feel good and safe from that Bad Man. I’ve never believed it, and I’ve never said it.
And no, I don’t read the rags, thus my question, “Who were these people? Were they common criminals or were they actually POWs?” Since 9/11 I’ve been so paranoid and cynical of my own governments actions that I can’t believe any news story is not spun around the administrations conspiracy–but I try not to talk about it 'cuz people think I’m nuts if I do. Liberal media my ASS. GWB and Associates owns it as far as I’m concerned, so I might as well read MAD Magazine for the info for as much as I’ll believe it.
So, spluttering back, yes. In the name of interrogation for relevant combat information, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” I for one would have no qualms about so troubling a prisoner if I knew they could give me information that would mitigate the losses to civilian or military targets. But if these were common inmates–bread thieves, thugs, etc, then no, the abuses were uncalled for.
Are you telling me that you’d let someone grin at you like you’re a soft-minded Geneva Convention Thumping Boy Scout while he conceals the names of folks involved in strapping a body bomb onto an 8 year old destined for the local police station? You’re an idiot if you think that gentle, civilized techniques are effective with these types of people. Again, if that’s not who these prisoners are, and we clearly knew that, then we need to present them, bodily, to the local populace as an offering of contrition.
Well, you obviously have some level of “we are of a better level than them” thinking. I don’t think I was that off the mark with you.
Well, in that case, you should be informed that these are mostly people picked up on the street for being suspected of “anti-coalition efforts.” One story circulating is that one of the aforementioned abused was just a common thief who robbed a convenience store. Many are women and children. Not many have been officially charged or given a trial, and some don’t even enter the processing system - they are just held arbitrarily based on suspicions. A good number have been released after it was determined they had done nothing wrong. This is where most of the reports are coming from.
Actually, I guess am.
No, but neither would I get the urge to urinate on his face. For one, you have absolutely no way of knowing that he knows the names of folks involved in strapping a bomb onto an 8 year old destined for the local police station, so abusing a prisoner on those grounds is entirely theoretical.
Secondly, there is no way to prove that their intelligence is accurate anyway.
Guess I’m also an idiot, then. Sorry, but this is a war of images with an entire culture. The last thing we need is gung-ho morons fueling their fire. Not torturing them may not win brownie points, but torturing them will lose you a helluva lot.
In any case, I thought the entire point of this stupid ass war was that we were bringing freedom and democracy to a nation ruled by a harsh dictator who tortured and killed his own people. How do we do that? By installing a dictator, torturing people, and carpet bombing cities. Fucking brilliant strategy there.
Face it, the only way we can win this conflict is by playing nice, not pissing them off more.
I have an idea! How about we start having fucking trials before we detain and rape civilians?
Ignoring the rather horrific implications of this statement, for the hard-nosed, results-based analysis of “methods of interrogation”, let’s just consider what makes for effective intelligence gathering. I can’t find the cite at the moment, but I’ve read a couple times over the past few days the words of an intelligence specialist who claims too much torture is actually a bad thing, because it tends to produce false testimony. If an interrogator hammers on anyone hard enough, he will eventually be told whatever he wants to hear. Even without a specific cite from an expert in the field, this just makes sense, because we all know about forced confessions here in the States. There have been documented cases of people confessing falsely to murder under duress, for the simple purpose of ending their interrogation, even in cases involving capitol punishment. Given the severity of the torture the prisoners were allegedly subjected to (which should not be underestimated, given the cultural and religious attitudes in the Middle East regarding nudity, homosexuality, etc., besides the physically harmful abuse), it’s not hard to imagine they might falsely claim to have useful information about the whereabouts of WMDs or important Iraqi figures wanted by coalition forces.
It has been alleged that these soldiers were given license by intelligence officials to abuse POWs for the purpose of intelligence gathering; if not from these particular prisoners, perhaps from future detainees who could be shown the photographic evidence and thus might cave with relatively little effort. If the prisoner found the prospects of such torture sufficiently horrifying, it’s not hard to imagine they might confess to something. But, again, would that confession be worth anything? If you’ve got a high-level official or terrorist organizer, maybe, but who are these prisoners? Sadam’s bodyguard, or common riff-raff? If the latter, it seems they were casting a rather large net for intelligence. Also, if that net is in any way likely to be filled with a significant amount of useless information, you’re wasting time and resources following up on false leads.
Thus far, many ex-prisoners claiming abuses weren’t even combattants; they could have been looters or just unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If folks like this make up the preponderance of the general prison population, than even a few cases of rank abuse could be counterproductive. The threat of torture, when widely applied in this case, would tend to create a flood of bad intelligence. It’s stupid all around, even more so now that these incidents have been leaked to the public. How are any prisoners captured likely to behave now?
More disturbingly, what are our POWs likely to experience now?
I can’t think of a single good argument for these acts, even in purely practical terms. You could dismiss these criminals for incompetance alone.
OK. That makes sense. The whole post. Provided we have all the correct info and correctly understand the motivation for the maltreatment. Even in the case for “This could be you” photographs, however, you make a good point.
So what you are hinting at is that you think this was explicit policy?
Are you aware of the findings of many experts on interrogation that torture is often counter-productive as a technique, because you get people willing to confess to whatever you want them to, rather than any clear picture of what hte truth is?
This current controversy is one of the prices we pay for the amazing level of secrecy and disdain for the opinions of the public, the media, and the world that this operation has had. They hid prisoners from the Red Cross. That tells people they had something to hide, and no matter what it might be, it’s always worse in the imagination than the plain facts would have been. Because the government has refused to be open about what it has been doing and why, refused any oversight or criticism, nobody trusts what it has to say. And that goes ten times over for people in the Middle East.
I doubt very much that anyone in this administration would have condoned torture. But they demanded results without looking very closely at how they were acheived, or even if the results were reliable. They created a culture of impunity and protection from scrutiny in which people felt perfectly free and happy to do things like this.
Interesting statistic from today’s (completely unscientific) CNN web poll:
The kicker in this poll is the word “ever,” which is in there very subtlely. I don’t think I could say that torture can NEVER be justified. It can still be unwise, but there are some extreme cases where it may be justified.
Like I said above, if you’ve got a major player under the lamp, and you’re in extremis (say you’ve got intelligence on a pending terrorist act, but not enough to pinpoint the perps and stop them), I could understand breaking from the Geneva Conventions, maybe. But if you’re brutalizing any old prisoner as a matter of course, that’s horrible policy all around. Stupid from a PR perspective, stupid from an intelligence perspective, stupid from a strategy perspective, and stupid because it’s patently inhumane.
Really, if the common grunt is little more than an animal (as alluded to above), then command damn well better be in control of their troops. The heads that should be rolling here aren’t just in the lower ranks…probably shouldn’t be, primarily. Who was in charge of these people? The excuses of their CO, that she was excluded by the cloak-and-dagger set, are disturbing for any number of reasons, but I wouldn’t take “the spies told me to butt out” as an encouraging explanation from a general, of all people. Don’t those stars count for anything? Maybe if Army brass gets it into their heads their responsible for what some idiot hothead beneath them may be doing while they’re not looking, a “butt out” from the spooks won’t seem so compelling.
Of course, nail the spies too, for doing a really, really sloppy job. Some covert opps. these guys have going. CBS outed them, for chrissakes, and now any child can download the evidence from the internet. The bastards all oughtta be sitting in the brig, if you ask me. Pro-war, or anti-war, these photos are hugely problematic. If you’re pro-, your effort to “win hearts and minds” may have been dealt fatal damage in an already difficult struggle; if you’re against, one more glaring reason to believe this has all been a horrible mistake.
There is no doubt that actions all the way up the line should be taken in this case. Between the Brigadier General in charge and that Sergeant were Company, Battalion and Regimental Commanders all of whom bear responsibilty.
However, in castigating the BG for not taking a harder line with the ‘cloak-and-dagger’ group you are forgetting that we don’t know what her orders were. Generals aren’t God and do have bosses you know. It is not inconceivable that she was told that her job was to see that the intelligence people had the resources available to do their job and they were in full charge of how it was done.
I do agree though that she should have known how that job was being done and reported violations to her boss who might have been in a position to do something even if she wasn’t. She is certainly open to criticism for lax performance in not knowing if she didn’t or for not reporting on it to her superiors if she did.
This is a disaster of the worst kind for a country that claims to be there to bring democracy to Iraq. According to Seymour Hirsh on The News Hour With Jim Lehrer tonight (3 May) these prisoners were ordinary Iraqis caught up in various “sweeps” over a period of time.
The ironic thing, which I’m sure Iraqis will notice is that this was a prison in which the lackeys of Saddam did the same sorts of things. As an Arab newsman said on The News Hour what should have been done first thing is to raze that prison and erect a memorial to Saddam’s victims at the side, and put our detention facility elsewhere.
To give her some credit, she was apparently stretched incredibly thin in her time and resources compared to what she was responsible for overseeing: which is more the fault of the “generals will get anything they ask for (yeah right)” leadership.
This is just a little off the topic of the prisoner abuse in Iraq. But …
This case to me is an illustration of the extreme danger that lies in the lack of an effective checks and balance system. The military policing and justice system has little in the way of an effective outside corrective agency keeping an eye on it. The Congress and the Courts are reluctant to interfere in the military command’s disciplinary methods and the normal checks and balances such as right to counsel, appeals routes and all the rest are really just a part of the same chain of command that brought the charges in the first place.
And that brings up the dangers inherent in things like the USA Patriot Act and the whole business of ‘enemy combatants.’ A question was asked in another thread whether or not the feared abuses of the Patriot Act had occurred. Maybe not yet, but if the power exists it will be abused. You can bet on it. And I’m confident that when conditions in Guantanamo Bay are finally brought to light much of the same kind of abuse will be found to have occurred there at least to some degree.
Well, this goes right back to when we were discussing the mercenaries. They have no overview, they are not subject to American, Iraqi, or international law, so how is their behavior regulated? The answer is that it isn’t. Right now, our military is holding tens of thousands of people prisoners without trials in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba, and they have slipped through the legal cracks. There is no one to defend them, and there is no oversight for how they are treated.
During the 1999 WTO riots, the cops beat the shit out of everything that moved in downtown Seattle. They called in all the help they could from the surrounding area, including MP’s from Fort Lewis. The next week I was at a laundrymat with some MP’s who were laughing and joking about all the fun they’d had with their “dummybegood” sticks.
Reading the papers near a large military installation, I get the impression that the life of an MP is a depressing routine of prying the hands of enraged soldiers’ from the throats of their wives at 2:00 AM, so an opportunity for fun & games is always welcome.
At the moment, the two civilian contractor employees whom the Army report (which came out months ago now) recommended by fired, stripped of security clearances, and sent the heck out of Iraq, are still in the country, still working (on interrogations, no less).
But then, I guess since none of the necessary people in the administration (Myers, Bush, or Rumsfeld) have even read the Army’s report yet, several says after the story broke and two months after the report came out, you can’t fault them for not taking any action: they still don’t seem to know as much about the situation as most people on this board do. We’re assured that they’ll get around to it, just as soon as they finish up on crafting resolved and concerned soundbites.
Cite for the bolded stuff? I lived in a non-Greek environment, there was nothing LIKE frat or sorority hazing going on … I really think you’re spewing BS here.