I finally found a spare hour this morning to sit down and read the Human Rights Watch report on abuse of prisoners by the 82nd Airborne Division at Camp Mercury, near Fallujah. Over the weekend both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times carried articles on Captain Ian Fishback, one of three members of the 82nd Airborne who reported the abuse to HRW, as well as to aides to John Warner and John McCain (and, according to the LAT, Carl Levin). Today’s Washington Post follows up by printing the letter Fishback wrote to McCain, and, in a related editorial, notes that the confusion about what soldiers considered permissible at Camp Mercury is directly attributable to this administration’s “evasive legalisms in response to simple questions about uncivilized conduct.”

Basically, this administration has said to American soldiers: We’re not going to tell you what the policy on treatment of prisoners is. You can guess. If you guess wrong…well…you lose.

If, on the other hand, you are significantly smarter and more honorable than Lynndie England…ha!…you still lose. (Damn! It’s good to be king!) Captain Fishback went to Iraq believing that the Geneva Conventions did not apply there, because that was the impression his training left him with. It was only when he heard Donald Rumsfeld testify at the Abu Ghraib hearings that the letter of the Geneva Conventions were supposed to apply in Iraq, that he realized something was wrong, and began to act, assuming there should be some relationship between stated policy and what was happening on the ground. That’s a reasonable and decent assumption. If anyone above Captain Fishbback’s pay grade had believed Rumsfeld was telling the truth about the Geneva Conventions applying in Iraq,  there would have been a whole lot of people realizing they were in trouble if they didn’t get things cleaned up fast. Didn’t happen. Captain Fishback wandered through a military maze for 17 months, trying to find someone to take his concerns seriously, before turning to senators and Human Rights Watch. And he wasn’t just ignored, he was threatened, and denied a pass to leave his base in order to speak to senators.

Seems no one was terribly concerned about someone from the Department of Defense showing up and screaming, “We told you the Geneva Conventions count here!”

And the threats haven’t stopped. Today’s NYT reports that Fishback is being pressured to give up the names of the two sergeants who also spoke to Human Rights Watch, but who have decided (probably wisely, all things considered) to remain anonymous. Investigators, he says, have shown far more interest in the names of the whistleblowers than in those who allegedly beat and starved prisoners. In that context, Donald Rumsfeld’s comment on the case  — “To the extent somebody’s done something that they shouldn’t have done, they’ll be punished for it.” — sounds quite ominous.

They have created a world in which it is not safe to go along, but neither is it safe to report a crime. The only people who can survive such a system are those who are ruthless enough to commit crimes, and smart enough to cover them up. Bush and Company have created a military that can’t make room for decency.

The astonishing thing is that the good people still keep raising their voices, even if it costs them a career.

There’s a lot to the report. Much of the press’s emphasis fell on the elite reputation of the 82nd Airborne:

If substantiated, the allegations would represent one of the most
serious episodes in the mistreatment of detainees by American military
personnel since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. This is
the first time that soldiers in the regular Army have been implicated
in widespread abuse. Previous abuse cases have involved misconduct by
relatively untrained National Guard and Reserve troops.

The 82nd Airborne is one of the most storied units in the U.S.
military. The division has a record of distinguished service stretching
for nearly a century, and its members are considered highly trained
professionals. Formed during World War I, the division was reactivated
during World War II, when its handpicked paratroopers landed behind
German lines to prepare for the D-day invasion of Europe.

Based at Ft. Bragg, N.C., it is the largest paratroop force in the
world. Its members served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and various
brigades have served several tours in Iraq.

In such a unit, evidence of a significant breakdown in discipline
would call into question the Army’s contention that previously
disclosed abuses did not reflect systemic problems. The misconduct
reported by Fishback and the two noncommissioned officers was said to
have begun in September 2003 and continued through the following April.
The abuses at Abu Ghraib occurred within that period, mainly the fall
of 2003, and were publicly revealed in April 2004.

A Capitol Hill aide familiar with the new allegations said they were considered “very credible.”

I don’t know about all that. Regular army military intelligence units were certainly “implicated” at Abu Ghraib. Taking the fall is another story. There have, in fact, been some pretty serious cases of abuse involving Special Forces soldiers and Navy Seals. The elite. This is not all about Lynndie England and a bunch of semi-educated animals, and that’s nothing new.

There are other things in the report I found more interesting than what the press focused on. A lot of it is depressingly familiar: Ghost prisoners. Medical personnel witholding treatment and falsifying records. But a couple of things, while not exactly new, give insight into how this abuse has evolved:

1. From the first revelations out of Abu Ghraib, distinctions have been drawn between over-zealous intelligence gathering and “animal house on the night shift” — as if abuse had to result from one or the other, and if it was clear that there was some of the latter, it ruled out the former. The military police at Abu Ghraib insisted that military intelligence people ordered them to soften up prisoners. The abuse itself was classic C.I.A stuff. But it was impossible to deny that the guards seemed, in photographs, to be having one hell of a good time. If they enjoyed it, how could it have anything to do with gathering intelligence?

That was always a ridiculous question, but the relationship between torturing for “truth” (or whatever poor imitation of it you can get from torture) and out-of-control soldiers is laid out fairly clearly in the three accounts published by HRW. Soldiers were ordered to mistreat prisoners:

Someone from [Military Intelligence] told us these guys  don’t get no sleep.  They were directed to get intel [intelligence] from them  so we had to set the conditions by banging on their cages, crashing them into  the cages, kicking them, kicking dirt, yelling.  All that shit.  We never  stripped them down because this is an all-guy base and that is fucked up shit.   We poured cold water on them all the time to where they were soaking wet and we  would cover them in dirt and sand.  We did the jugs of water where they held  them out to collapse all the time.

The account is a little mangled, of course. What was ordered is not entirely clear. MIs told them not to let the prisoners sleep, but were the methods of keeping them awake MI inspired? Maybe. Or maybe it was improvised. Or maybe they had other instructors:

In Afghanistan we were attached to Special Forces and saw OGA.   We never interacted with them but they would stress guys.  We learned how to do  it.  We saw it when we would guard an interrogation.

OGA — Other Government Agency — probably refers to the CIA. Captain Fishback makes exactly the same point — that soldiers witnessed and copied CIA techniques.

In essence, they were ordered to mess up the prisoners, and indirectly taught how to do it. But once authorized abuse begins, revenge and pure sadism kick in: The soldiers report that prisoners were abused on order, for amusement, and as revenge for friends who were killed. It’s difficult to tell where one motive leaves off and the other begins. Most likely, more than one motive was operating at any given time.

2. Confusion about the policy on how to treat prisoners seems to have been not just widespread but almost universal:

• When Captain Fishback saw the Abu Ghraib pictures, he wasn’t shocked by the abuse, but by the reaction. He’d seen similar abuse at Camp Mercury and up to that time had been under the impression that such actions were in accordance with U.S. policy.

• I’ve developed a deep respect for the JAG corp lately, but Captain Fishback has some counterpoint: A JAG lawyer, for example, told him that chaining a naked prisoner to the ground was within the Geneva Conventions.

Was Lynndie England supposed to have a better grasp of the law than JAG? If a West Point educated captain didn’t know what was permitted, how could anybody expect Lynndie England to know?

And even if you give everyone in this administration far more benefit of the doubt than they have earned, far more than I’m able to give them, isn’t it obvious that this level of dysfunction requires an investigation at the very least?