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[TheLorax]

"What amazes me was the one soldier who said he had never read the Geneva Convention until he was charged. Of course, he did not have to read it to know that stacking guys in naked human pyramids was probably wrong."

I thought that too. What is going on in your head that you think that could possibly be appropriate? One of these guys is a prison guard back home, great.

Let's see we've had incidents of women soldiers being raped by their fellow servicemen and now this. We're doing a great job of showing the rest of the world how an evolved society works.

[smoothmoniker]

Originally posted by TheLorax
Let's see we've had incidents of women soldiers being raped by their fellow servicemen and now this. We're doing a great job of showing the rest of the world how an evolved society works.

An evolved society decries and punishes these acts. Isn't that what's happening?

-sm

[warch]

When/if we hear about them, and certainly not under international law. It is suspect. The press is the only sort of "independent" or less dependent check in place.
Good cop bad cop. Good war crime bad war crime. Now there is another unfortunate Vietnam association.

[mrnoodle]

The thing about war is, those who are participating have to turn in their humanity card for a brief period. Otherwise they go nuts. Their job is to kill the enemy, which means dehumanizing the enemy - otherwise they can't kill. It's gone on in every war since war began. The difference today is that the press is on the front line and can more effectively document the reality of war.

It's a sad fact that if armies try to be polite to their enemy, they get killed. The quickest way to win this war would be to follow the doctrine of WWII: Get the press out so they can't see what happens, then carpet bomb the place and send in the infantry to kill whatever is still twitching. Quick, but not pretty.

[warch]

Thing is, this wasnt on the romantic battlefield, this was after the "battle" (this was like a year ago and if we listen to Bush it was probably even after the "war".
This was when we were incharge and meant to be just and humane. That being said, I dont know how all the soldiers arent nutty.

This also brings up a bit, the contracting out off the policing and security duties to private companies. Does anyone check for humanity cards? Are these guys held up to military law? International law? Do they need to worry about the Geneva convention?

[glatt]

Originally posted by warch
That being said, I dont know how all the soldiers arent nutty.

Maybe not all of them, but some of them are. Washington Post every couple of weeks runs pictures of the soldiers who have died, and a brief description of how they died. Too many of the war dead are suicides. I am confident that not one of those suicides would have occurred if these guys weren't living through hell. It can't help that their tours keep getting extended. How many times can you hear that you aren't going home after all, before you lose all hope?

By the way, the Washington Post doesn't list them as suicides, but how else can a soldier die of a gunshot wound to the head while in a chapel on a secure base?

[richlevy]

Originally posted by warch
This also brings up a bit, the contracting out off the policing and security duties to private companies. Does anyone check for humanity cards? Are these guys held up to military law? International law? Do they need to worry about the Geneva convention?

In a word - no.

[Torrere]

There was a scandal a while back because a group of the private security guys started notching their knives by enforcing apartheid in South Africa while it was falling apart.

[richlevy]

Stanley Milgrams experiment in Obedience

If you want to understand some human behavior, you can look at Stanly Milgram's Experiment in Obedience

In the 1960's, Milgram told subjects that they would be 'teaching' volunteers by administering electical jolts when the volunteers made a mistake.

When the "teacher" asked whether increased shocks should be given he/she was verbally encouraged to continue. Sixty percent of the "teachers" obeyed orders to punish the learner to the very end of the 450-volt scale! No subject stopped before reaching 300 volts!

Milgram's experiment was controversial in it's effect on the subjects. Even after being told that there was no real physical damage to the 'volunteer', many of the test subjects suffered attacks of conscience.

In effect, Milgram was conducting a 'morality test' of average Americans (the test was later peformed in other countries). He advanced the theory that while some Nazi leaders were sociopaths, the capacity to commit acts of atrocity exists in 'normal' citizens, requiring only the encouragement of authority.

Project Phoenix in Vietnam

This is the best summary I could find of
The Phoenix Program: in Vietnam. I placed a quote below I should add that the last statement has never been completely proved. The part that ties in with our current discussion about military prisons is the rules for detention of individuals who were 'suspected' of Viet Cong (VC) sympathies or activities.

Picture an Enron environment in which artificial quotas replace any qualitative measure of success. Now picture middle managers under pressure to meet quotas. Except instead of a board room or assembly line, the quotas cover the interrogation, torture, and executions of individuals.

"Central to Phoenix is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers. As a result, its detractors charge that Phoenix violated that part of the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing protection to civilians in time of war. "By analogy," said Ogden Reid, a member of a congressional committee investigating Phoenix in 1971, "if the Union had had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon, Georgia."

"Under Phoenix, or Phung Hoang as it was called by the Vietnamese, due process was totally non-existent. South Vietnamese civilians whose names appeared on blacklists could be kidnapped, tortured, detained for two years without trial, or even murdered simply on the word of an anonymous informer. At its height, Phoenix managers imposed a quota of eighteen hundred neutralizations per month on the people running the program in the field, opening up the program to abuses by corrupt security officers, policemen, politicians, and racketeers, all of whom extorted innocent civilians as well as VCI. Legendary CIA officer Lucien Conein described Phoenix as, "A very good blackmail scheme for the central government: 'If you don't do what I want, you're VC.'"

"Because Phoenix "neutralizations" were often conducted at midnight while its victims were home, sleeping in bed, Phoenix proponents describe the program as a "scalpel" designed to replace the "bludgeon" of search and destroy operations, air strikes, and artillery barrages that indiscriminately wiped out entire villages and did little to "win the hearts and minds" of the Vietnamese population. Yet the scalpel cut deeper than the U.S. government admits. Indeed, Phoenix was, among other things, an instrument of counter-terror - the psychological warfare tactic in which members of the VCI were brutally murdered along with their families or neighbors as a means of terrorizing the entire population into a state of submission. Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, often made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy.

[elSicomoro]

Milgram was a fucking pimp...too bad his experiments are considered unethical now...

[wolf]

That experiment changed the way experimental ethics are handled (made getting human research projects approved a colossal pain in the ass).

I always liked Peter Gabriel's song about the experiment ...

[tw]

Apparently torture and abuse of prisoners was ongoing many times previously. At least two earlier cases of outright abuse have been reported. But then this only demonstrates a fundamental principle - 85% of all problems are directly traceable to top mangement. When Americans last were in a war due to top management lies, then abuse and torture was routine. VietNam. One need only look at Guantanamo to see this administration gives lip service to civil rights, rule of law, and the truth.

Why is prisioner abuse probably widespread in Iraq? And why does this administration refuse to admit the problem until the press finally tells Congress? Problematic is a righteous loyalty to George Jr - god's choosen president. Civil rights, the law, and ethical responsibility is always secondary to that (god's) agenda. Lets not forget what George Jr told his staff. He is choosen by god to be president. Does god also condone torture? Of course. "NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!"

85% of all problems are directly traceable to top management. The White House set the tone for how all non-Christian prisoners are to be treated. Camp Delta. Why should anyone do anything different? After all, those prisioners in Cuba are obviously being treated as god has ordered through his disciple - George Jr.

Maybe god hates us. He has given us the president we deserve. Just another reason for the world to so suddenly go from admiring Americans to disliking Americans. (don't tell right wing extremist Americans who never understood why the world hates them). Clearly god is punishing us. He gave us George Jr. Those American prison guards were only doing what the president advocated - Camp Delta.

[richlevy]

Originally posted by tw

Maybe god hates us. He has given us the president we deserve. Just another reason for the world to so suddenly go from admiring Americans to disliking Americans. (don't tell right wing extremist Americans who never understood why the world hates them). Clearly god is punishing us. He gave us George Jr. Those American prison guards were only doing what the president advocated - Camp Delta.

I'm not quite ready to build a conspiracy theory around this. Basically we under-supported the prison in order to supply manpower to a badly overstretched occupation force. Conspiracy theories imply competence. This was just another cluster fuck caused by bad planning and lack of support, not to mention politicizing the war in not allowing the generals fighting it to ask for the forces they really need and getting rid of the ones who actually do give reasonable estimates.

It will be interesting if this news will affect the Supreme Courts hearing of the two cases before it about Camp Delta. I am especially interested in how the US intends to justify taking a US citizen in custody inside the US and specifically shipping him outside the US to deny him his legal rights, then pretending that a US military base is not US soil. If a suspect fled the country he would be charged with Interstate flight to avoid prosecution. So is the governments action 'International flight to avoid defense?".

With these pictures coming out, any country with citizens in Camp Delta will be under pressure to demand oversight.

BTW, Joe Scarborough's spin on this is so bizarre that he must be doing it for ratings. He really can't possibly believe what he is saying, can he?

[Undertoad]

What would an Iraqi say?

Of course the behavior at Abu Ghraib is terrible and I think everybody agrees; and most certainly the few who perpetrated these actions do not represent anybody but themselves. They have betrayed the Coalition soldiers and all the friends of democracy, before anybody else. However, the Media, and especially the famous Al Jazeera, Al Arabia & Co. are having great time with this affair. It’s like Christmas over there. Saturation coverage, trying all the time to sound objective and merely reporting what the western media are saying.

Well I am an Iraqi, and hate what I saw, but I would like to say in all honesty that compared to the practices of the old Baathists, this is a drop in an ocean. The terrors of Saddam torture houses make this isolated condemned practice by a small group of perverted individuals seem nothing, awful as it is. And more important, the outrages of the Saddam regime were sanctioned and perfectly well known and approved from the highest levels of the state and there was no question of any criminal investigations of the practices, the victims simply buried in any convenient ditch near by. But we never heard any righteous and noisy protests from Any Jazeera or Arabiya, nor did we witness much “Arab” anger during many years when torture, rape and murder were going on a regular basis and massive scale. Perhaps those hundreds of thousands of victims were not “Arabs” and did not deserve the righteous pity of the brotherly Arab masses.

Salaam

Alaa, The Mesopotamian

[richlevy]

Originally posted by Undertoad
What would an Iraqi say?

Alaa, The Mesopotamian

Unfortunately, everyone knew Saddam was a bad man. It wasn't news. The US, as crusaders, are the 'good guys'. It's just like the fact that child molesters exist is not news, the fact that some priests were child molesters and that some individuals in the heirarchy knew about it and took little or no action raises the issue to a new level.

We went in there on a crusade, and like the last Crusade (actually there were 8 to 12 over hundreds of years), this one has been fraying around the edges as a significant minority sink to the lowest level.

Now, we can say that because no blood was shed and no permanent injury was done, that this is not as bad as Saddam's regime. In fact, the concept of 'bloodless torture' was what was proposed by Pope Innocent IV at the start of the Inquisition around the time of one of the Crusades.

In 1252 Pope Innocent IV authorized,

"torture which will not imperil life or injure just as thieves and robbers are forced to accuse their accomplices, and to confess their crimes; for these heretics are true thieves, murderers of souls, and robbers of the sacraments of God."

The problem with all war, especially murky ones, is that in addition to the dead and physically wounded, the spiritually wounded come back home. These are the ones who have to worry about going near an amusement park because the children's happy screams might trigger a flashback.

I am actually as concerned for the US soldiers who acted as torturers as I am for their victims. These men and women, unless they have gone completely cold inside, must have some attacks of conscience. One of the reasons that Milgram got into so much trouble was that his subjects, after the experiment was over and they were told that they had caused no actual damage, were still devastated.

The men and women who participated, the ones who didn't but kept quiet, all of them will have that guilt follow them for the rest of their lives. Unlike combat, there can be no 'fog of war' excuse. They did this premeditated and in cold blood.

People accuse Kerry of flip-flopping on the war and being indecisive. I think that he and every other 'blooded' veteran in Congress understand what war really means and were trying to be cautious. One need only look at the problems of Vietnam-era veterans to understand the mental toll war takes on men and women.

These dozen men and women only represent a fraction of the mess we are going to have to deal with when all of these troops come home. The cost, emotional as well as monetary, will continue long after every soldier is home.

God save us all.