Saturday, August 28, 2004
UK's Guardian on Abu Ghraib:
It was only last month that the US army formally asserted that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison consisted of "aberrations" that could not be put down to systemic problems. This week, however, two official reports... one for the Pentagon chaired by the former defence secretary James Schlesinger, and the other for the US army by Generals George Fay and Anthony Jones, describe a situation in which the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners was more extensive than previously acknowledged and in which military leadership was found seriously wanting.
Forced nudity was common... from the importation to Abu Ghraib of techniques used in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay. "They simply carried forward the use of nudity into the Iraqi theatre of operations," General Fay observes. Prisoners were frequently stripped and hooded, then left in extreme heat or cold for hours. One detainee was handcuffed naked and forced to crawl on his stomach as US soldiers urinated and spat on him; later he was sodomised...
These were acts of "brutality and purposeless sadism"... continued for several months. They were not, the report stresses, "just the failure of some individuals to follow known standards."
It is an utmost failure of leadership that senior military commanders:
(1) allowed this to happen in the first place, and to continue for months,
(2) during the long time since, continued resisting comprehensive investigation (let alone justice), whitewashing known abuses while concealing the rest: such a strictly a cover-your-own-ass operation instills zero confidence in the capability and moral integrity of the same leaders,
(3) are willing to put enlisted reservists up for punishment meanwhile. Culpable individuals? Yes. Plausibly the only ones responsible? Clearly not.
Do they want it both ways? The latitude to torture unknown foreigners and the power to pin it on subordinates? With these reports out, nobody can contend there were no systematic failures. What then? "We have found the system failed. People are being punished for it. This is proof the system works." That's exactly the sentiment Rumsfeld has declared (the last sentence verbatim). Pathetic.
The Guardian does a good job of contextualizing also, that the fault does go further than Rumsfeld. The Pew Center poll last week found a great number of Americans think torture of suspected terrorists can "often or sometimes" be justified:
43% of all Americans;
48% of American men;
54% of American men aged under 50; and
58% of people intending to vote for Mr Bush in November.
If de Tocqueville was right, America should now cease to be great.
It was only last month that the US army formally asserted that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison consisted of "aberrations" that could not be put down to systemic problems. This week, however, two official reports... one for the Pentagon chaired by the former defence secretary James Schlesinger, and the other for the US army by Generals George Fay and Anthony Jones, describe a situation in which the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners was more extensive than previously acknowledged and in which military leadership was found seriously wanting.
Forced nudity was common... from the importation to Abu Ghraib of techniques used in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay. "They simply carried forward the use of nudity into the Iraqi theatre of operations," General Fay observes. Prisoners were frequently stripped and hooded, then left in extreme heat or cold for hours. One detainee was handcuffed naked and forced to crawl on his stomach as US soldiers urinated and spat on him; later he was sodomised...
These were acts of "brutality and purposeless sadism"... continued for several months. They were not, the report stresses, "just the failure of some individuals to follow known standards."
It is an utmost failure of leadership that senior military commanders:
(1) allowed this to happen in the first place, and to continue for months,
(2) during the long time since, continued resisting comprehensive investigation (let alone justice), whitewashing known abuses while concealing the rest: such a strictly a cover-your-own-ass operation instills zero confidence in the capability and moral integrity of the same leaders,
(3) are willing to put enlisted reservists up for punishment meanwhile. Culpable individuals? Yes. Plausibly the only ones responsible? Clearly not.
Do they want it both ways? The latitude to torture unknown foreigners and the power to pin it on subordinates? With these reports out, nobody can contend there were no systematic failures. What then? "We have found the system failed. People are being punished for it. This is proof the system works." That's exactly the sentiment Rumsfeld has declared (the last sentence verbatim). Pathetic.
The Guardian does a good job of contextualizing also, that the fault does go further than Rumsfeld. The Pew Center poll last week found a great number of Americans think torture of suspected terrorists can "often or sometimes" be justified:
43% of all Americans;
48% of American men;
54% of American men aged under 50; and
58% of people intending to vote for Mr Bush in November.
If de Tocqueville was right, America should now cease to be great.
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