Almost two years ago, a British tabloid published photos of soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. The pictures turned out to be fakes. Anything is possible, but looking at the recent News of the World video of British soldiers kicking and beating four very young Iraqi captives, it’s difficult to imagine how something like this could have been doctored. Not only do the Iraqis seem to take it for true, but the Royal Military Police have already arrested one man in connection with the beatings.
A British colonel thinks he knows how this happened:
Colonel Tim Collins, a veteran of the conflict, told the programme
that Iraqis were right to feel disappointed when the British army
failed to keep the very high standards expected of it. He said he
strongly believed a more senior officer had been complicit in the
beatings by leaving the soldiers unsupervised.
"Someone chose not
to step in and deal with that situation who would have seen it and they
are clearly not fit to hold that rank," he said. "An officer or senior
NCO [non-commissioned officer] more likely, who’s either been in this
or has failed in his duty because he has failed to deal with it."
He
said such incidents were isolated and that British forces were unique
in the region by dealing with "petrol bombers and grenade throwers"
using plastic shields and batons rather than "lethal force".
At least he sees the outlines of a rotten tree and not just the bad apples, but look again at the video, and see if his claim that such "incidents" are isolated — Tony Blair piped a similar tune — makes any sense. The second time I saw the video, I noticed something odd: The off-screen voice begins his commentary – "Oh, yes! Oh, yes! You’re gonna get it. Yes!" — before anything happens. The boys are being pulled into a courtyard, but the first blow isn’t struck until after the first "Oh, yes!" Obviously the speaker knew what was coming. Either this was planned ahead of time, and the person filming was waiting for it to happen, or such beatings are so routine that as soon as the boys were pulled aside, the speaker knew from experience what was coming.
It isn’t just the men beating the teenagers, or the soldier filming the crime who are culpable. According to the Washington Post, the film was shown on a military base in Europe before a whistleblower came forward. There is a pattern to this. Many people witness a crime and take it for entertainment. One person sees it for what it is and acts. Brutality isn’t rare; decency is — at least in circumstances where brutality is encouraged, and decency punished.
The CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired this week, by the way, for the crime of being anti-torture, and perhaps for not being sufficiently diligent about shutting people up.
Maha Barbara catches the right whining once again about the nerve of the occasional politician telling the truth about torture.
If you work in this system at any level — from a National Guardsman working in one of the detention facilities, to a White House lawyer writing memos about policy on detainees, to a top CIA official — it must be very clear to you by now that justifying torture, practicing torture, filming torture, or at least turning away while others torture will not only not get you punished, it’s a good career move. Only the people who get in the way will be punished.
The soldiers who murdered an innocent Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar will certainly not be punished. Tim Golden, who has been doing holy work on this story for a long time, has a must-read piece in today’s Times about the Army’s muddled prosecution of those responsible for the deaths of Dilawar and another prisoner, Mullah Habibullah, at the Bagram detention center. The worst punishment anyone has gotten for these two murders is five months in prison. Golden’s delineation of the reasons for this failure to hold anyone accountable are fascinating — and tragic.
One reason is simply bizarre: So many soldiers participated in the beatings of the two prisoners, that to assign guilt to any one would be difficult. Two things you have to remember about the law if you’re going to survive in George Bush’s America:
If the president does it, it’s legal.
If everyone does it, it’s okay.
Second, the courts simply have more sympathy for American soldiers than Afghan civilians:
In the modest Fort Bliss courtrooms where the trials have been held,
the two Afghan victims have rarely been evoked, except in autopsy
photographs. But much testimony focused on hardships faced by the
soldiers themselves: the poor training they received, the tough
conditions in which they operated, the vague rules with which they had
to contend. As in other recent abuse cases, Army judges and jurors also
seemed to consider the soldiers’ guilt or innocence with an acute sense
of the sacrifices they had made in serving overseas.
Lt. Col.
Joseph A. Simonelli Jr., who sat on the jury for a former Bagram guard
who admitted to repeatedly striking one of the detainees who died, was
asked after the trial how he had viewed the defendant. The soldier,
convicted of maiming, assault and other crimes, was sentenced to only a
demotion in rank, and honorably discharged.
"This individual was
an American citizen who had been called up," Colonel Simonelli, a Fort
Bliss battalion commander, said in an interview. "He had volunteered,
and when they called upon him to perform his duties in a time of war,
he did it without question."
Noble and hard-pressed American soldier vs. two dead foreign bodies.
This is what the court should have seen:
Dilawar.
Dilawar’s father and brother.
Dilawar’s 3-year-old daughter.
The court failed to see the misery they are inflicting on human beings in the same way a soldier did when he drew this illustration of Dilawar’s treatment.
Looking at the diagram, I recall playing Hangman as a kid. The person who drew it felt as much for Dilawar as I did for the head added to the rope when I guessed the wrong letter. We can talk about the laws of war, and exactly where on the chain of command responsibility lies — and we should, and in a moment I will — but these crimes, and the inability to fully prosecute them, will continue as long as people pick and choose who they see as human beings, and who they see as sketches and bodies.
Now, responsibility. One of the things that resonated with judges and jurors was the fact the soldiers did not make the policy they were carrying out, the policy that killed Dilawar and Mullah Habibullah. The prisoner’s died not only from the beatings, but from being left hanging from the ceiling by shackled wrists for hours. But shackling prisoners to the ceiling was an approved method of punishing prisoners at Bagram, and keeping them awake. If the soldiers who strung up the prisoners are guilty, the policy itself is criminal.
This is the vicious circle. The soldiers aren’t entirely culpable because they were doing what they were trained to do. Senior officers are not responsible because….well, actually serious consideration was given to charging higher ranking officials, but, mysteriously, nothing ever came of it.
Well, maybe not so mysteriously:
Army investigators had recommended charges of assault, maltreatmentand dereliction of duty against the former noncommissioned officer in
charge of the Bagram interrogators, Staff Sgt. Steven W. Loring. But
Mr. Loring, who left the Army at the end of 2003, was rarely mentioned
in court and never charged.
A military official familiar with the Loring case said the Army referred it to the Justice Department, which
declined to prosecute.
All of this makes it easy to see both why British soldiers wouldn’t have much concern about videotaping themselves beating Iraqi teenagers, and passing the video around, and why the Justice Department might be disinclined to see this go further up the chain of command.
In case they need a reminder of the potential for danger, the Los Angeles Times leads today with a story on the draft of a UN report on conditions at Guantanamo, which concludes that prisoners are being tortured, and conditions there violate international law. And apparently they aren’t buy the bad apples defense:
The report said some of the treatment of detainees met the definition of torture under the U.N. Convention Against Torture: The acts were committed by government officials, with a clear purpose, inflicting severe pain or suffering against victims in a position of powerlessness.
The Bush administration initially chose Guantanamo as the place to interrogate prisoners because they assumed it was beyond the reach of U.S. courts. No one should be surprised that people who start out looking for ways to skirt the law turn out to be — lo and behold! — criminals.
