By command structure, I meant the pentagon. I haven't once said that Bush was to blame for this other than he's the one that got us into the war. I haven't blamed Bush once. But when you read rim's article about the pentagon not having any oversight, when you find out that Meyers, and Rumsfeld supposedly hadn't read the report, that someone like Miller who's had problems in the past with prisons is sent again to take over now that there are problems with the prisons, and things of this nature, then there is a command structure problem. I'm not drawing the line at any one place, and I don't have all the answers. But I can look at the reports and facts about a lack of oversight, seeing little to nothing being done about past reports of the problem, and think that folks high up in the pentagon are at least guilty by neglegence, if not by knowingly allowing an environment where this could take place.
We can't stop it from happening overseas. But we can stop it from happening here. And set a god-damn good example, too.
So because terrorists and dictators torture POWs, we torture POWs? If it's wrong for them, why is it not wrong for us? I thought we wanted to be *better* than Saddam Hussein.
Fall 2003: Bremer repeatedly raises issue of prison conditions with Rumsfeld and the President's inner circle according to LA Times: "Bremer repeatedly raised the issue of prison conditions as early as last fall -- both in one-on-one meetings with Rumsfeld and other administration leaders, and in group meetings with the president's inner circle on national security. Officials described Bremer as 'kicking and screaming' about the need to release thousands of uncharged prisoners and improve conditions for those who remained." (Washington Post, Graham, 5/7/04) ----- November 5, 2003: Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder files report concluding that there were potential human rights, training, and manpower issues -- system wide -- that needed immediate attention. Discussed serious concerns about tension between missions of the military police assigned to guard prisoners and intelligence teams who interrogate them. (New Yorker Magazine, Hersh, 5/5/04 ---- January 2004: Rumsfeld learns of photographs showing prisoner abuse according to the Washington Post: "...Rumsfeld has known of the photographs since January, when they came to the attention of U.S. commanders in Iraq, he had not seen them, and he was not aware that CBS was about to air them until just hours before they were broadcast last week." (Washington Post, Graham, 5/7/04) ---- Mid-January, 2004: Bush told about the photo of abuse according to the Washington Post: "Marine Gen. Peter Pace...said Wednesday on CBS's "Early Show" that beginning in mid-January, everyone "up the chain of command . . . was kept apprised orally of the ongoing investigation." Asked if Bush "was well aware of the situation," Pace replied: "Yes."" (Washington Post, Allen, 5/7/04) ---- David Kay, the man who led the U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, says he repeatedly told people about problems with the interrogation of prisoners, but the military ignored him. "I was there and I kept saying the interrogation process is broken. The prison process is broken. And no one wanted to deal with it," Kay said. "It was too, too distasteful. This is a known problem, and the military refuses to deal with it."(Charlottesville Daily Progress, May 6, 2004) ---- We can contribute a second hand anecdote to newspaper stories on rising concern, last year, from Secretary of State Powell and Deputy Secretary Armitage about Administration attitudes and the risks they might entail: according to eye witnesses to debate at the highest levels of the Administration...the highest levels...whenever Powell or Armitage sought to question prisoner treatment issues, they were forced to endure what our source characterizes as "around the table, coarse, vulgar, frat-boy bully remarks about what these tough guys would do if THEY ever got their hands on prisoners...." -- let's be clear: our source is not alleging "orders" from the White House. Our source is pointing out that, as we said in the Summary, a fish rots from its head. The atmosphere created by Rumsfeld's controversial decisions was apparently aided and abetted by his colleagues in their callous disregard for the implications of the then-developing situation, and by their ridicule of the only combat veterans at the top of this Administration. (The Nelson Report, May 6, 2004)
What, so those American soldiers can rape POWs because they're not technically on American soil? Since when was American character dependent on a technicality?
Some of you are acting like there's a clause in the Geneva Convention that states the U.S. is exempt. The excuse that we're doing this because it's war is ridiculous, as the Geneva Convention was set up for fair treatment DURING A WAR.
Red Cross Was Told Iraq Abuse '<b>Part of the Process'</b> LONDON (Reuters) - The Red Cross saw U.S. troops keeping Iraqi prisoners naked for days in darkness at the Abu Ghraib jail last October and was told by an intelligence officer in charge it was "part of the process," a report leaked on Monday said. The 24-page report added to the pressure on U.S. officials by revealing that commanders were alerted to apparent abuses at Abu Ghraib months before they opened a criminal investigation. The Red Cross, which has special access to war zone prisons under international treaties, said mistreatment of prisoners "went beyond exceptional cases and might be considered as a practice tolerated by the CF (Coalition Forces)." Abuse was "in some cases tantamount to torture." Although most of the Red Cross's observations concerned U.S. forces, it also piled pressure on Washington's closest ally, describing British troops forcing Iraqi detainees to kneel and stomping on their necks in an incident in which one died. The International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva confirmed that the confidential February 4 report, initially leaked on the Web site of The Wall Street Journal, was genuine. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&e=3&u=/nm/20040510/ts_nm/iraq_abuse_dc_39
What do you stand for? Do you believe in the ideals embodied in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution? Do you even know what they are? This country was founded on the idea that the poweful cannot arbitrarily deny people of their "inalienable" rights. We don't always live up to these ideals, but they serve as a measuring stick by which we constantly measure our society. It is this continual reevaluation of our practices as a nation against the ideals layed down by our founding fathers that led to the abolition of slavery, the women's right to vote, and the Civil Rights movement. You seem to value your status as a US citizen, what do you think makes this country special?
There was exactly ZERO evidence that this kind of thing happened to the KBR employee who escaped last week. When Jessica Lynch was freed, there were no reports that she had been raped or tortured. You are trying to justify these actions based on fictitious abuses being performed on OUR POWs even though the only evidence of abuse WHATSOEVER is that of our soldiers abusing Iraqis. You need to swallow a big dose of reality.
Interesting article in the BBC. Unfortunately, this article is wishful thinking annd unrealistic experimentatoin. No psychological study has yet been able to prove that humans CAN 100% resist evil in a group once given power and a goal higher than humane treatment (such as intelligence-gathering or rehabilitation, particularly against the will of the powerless). I frankly doubt they'll EVER be able to do it. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3700209.stm ===================================== Why everyone's not a torturer By Stephen Reicher and Alex Haslam Psychologists So groups of people in positions of unaccountable power naturally resort to violence, do they? Not according to research conducted in a BBC experiment. The photographs from Abu Ghraib prison showing Americans abusing Iraqi prisoners make us recoil and lead us to distance ourselves from their horror and brutality. Surely those who commit such acts are not like us? Surely the perpetrators must be twisted or disturbed in some way? They must be monsters. We ourselves would never condone or contribute to such events. Sadly, 50 years of social psychological research indicates that such comforting thoughts are deluded. A series of major studies have shown that even well-adjusted people, when divided into groups and placed in competition against each other, can become abusive and violent. Most notoriously, the 1971 Stanford prison experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo and colleagues, seemingly showed that young students who were assigned to the role of guard quickly became sadistically abusive to the students assigned to the role of prisoners. Combined with lessons from history, the disturbing implication of such research is that evil is not the preserve of a small minority of exceptional individuals. We all have the capacity to behave in evil ways. This idea was famously developed by Hannah Arendt whose observations of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, led her to remark that what was most frightening was just how mild and ordinary he looked. His evil was disarmingly banal. In order to explain events in Iraq, one might go further and conclude that the torturers were victims of circumstances, that they lost their moral compass in the group and did things they would normally abhor. Indeed, using Zimbardo's findings as evidence, this is precisely what some people do conclude. But this is bad psychology and it is bad ethics. It is bad psychology because it suggests we can explain human behaviour without needing to scrutinize the wider culture in which it is located. It is bad ethics because it absolves everyone from any responsibility for events - the perpetrators, ourselves as constituents of the wider society, and the leaders of that society. In the situation of Abu Ghraib, some reports have indicated that the guards were following orders from intelligence officers and interrogators in order to soften up the prisoners for interrogation. If that is true, then clearly the culture in which these soldiers were immersed was one in which they were encouraged to see and treat Iraqis as subhuman. Other army units almost certainly had a very different culture and this provides a second explanation of why some people in some units may have tortured, but others did not. Grotesque fun Perhaps the best evidence that such factors were at play is the fact that the pictures were taken at all. Reminiscent of the postcards that lynch mobs circulated to advertise their activities, the torture was done proudly and with a grotesque sense of fun. Those in the photos wanted others to know what they had done, presumably believing that the audience would approve. This sense of approval is very important, since there is ample evidence that people are more likely to act on any inclinations to behave in obnoxious ways when they sense - correctly or incorrectly - that they have broader support. So where did the soldiers in Iraq get that sense from? This takes us to a critical influence on group behaviour: leadership. In the studies, leadership - the way in which experimenters either overtly or tacitly endorsed particular forms of action - was crucial to the way participants behaved. Thus one reason why the guards in our own research for the BBC did not behave as brutally as those in the Stanford study, was that we did not instruct them to behave in this way. Zimbardo, in contrast, told his participants: "You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me - and they'll have no privacy.... In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness". Officers' messages In light of this point it is interesting to ask what messages were being provided by fellow and, more critically, senior officers in the units where torture took place? Did those who didn't approve fail to speak out for fear of being seen as weak or disloyal? Did senior officers who knew what was going on turn a blind eye or else simply file away reports of misbehaviour? All these things happened after the My Lai massacre, and in many ways the responses to an atrocity tell us most about how it can happen in the first place. They tell us how murderers and torturers can begin to believe that they will not be held to account for what they do, or even that their actions are something praiseworthy. The more they perceive that torture has the thumbs up, the more they will give it a thumbs up themselves. So how do we prevent these kinds of episodes? One answer is to ensure that people are always made aware of their other moral commitments and their accountability to others. Whatever the pressures within their military group, their ties to others must never be broken. Total and secret institutions, where people are isolated from contact with all others are breeding grounds for atrocity. Similarly, there are great dangers in contracting out security functions to private contractors which lack fully developed structures of public accountability. Power vacuum Another answer is to look at the culture of our institutions and the role of leaders in framing that culture. Bad leadership can permit torture in two ways. Sometimes leaders can actively promote oppressive values. This is akin to what happened in Zimbardo's study and may be the case in certain military intelligence units. But sometimes leaders can simply fail to promote anything and hence create a vacuum of power. Our own findings indicated that where such a vacuum exists, people are more likely to accept any clear line of action which is vigorously proposed. Often, then, tyranny follows from powerlessness rather than power. In either case, the failure of leaders to champion clear humane and democratic values is part of the problem. But it is not enough to consider leadership in the military. One must look more widely at the messages and the values provided in the community at large. That means that we must address the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment in our society. A culture where we have got used to pictures of Iraqi prisoners semi-naked, chained and humiliated can create a climate in which torturers see themselves as heroes rather than villains. Again, for such a culture to thrive it is not necessary for everyone to embrace such sentiments, it is sufficient simply for those who would oppose them to feel muted and out-of-step with societal norms. Leaders' language And we must also look at political leadership. When administration officials talk about cleaning out "rats' nests" of Iraqi dissidents, it likens Iraqis to vermin. Note, for example, that just before the Rwandan genocide, Hutu extremists started referring to Tutsi's as "cockroaches". Such use of language again creates a climate in which perpetrators of atrocity can maintain the illusion that they are nobly doing what others know must be done. The torturers in Iraq may or may not have been following direct orders from their leaders, but they were almost certainly allowed to feel that they were behaving as good followers. So if we want to understand why torture occurs, it is important to consider the psychology of individuals, of groups, and of society. Groups do indeed affect the behaviour of individuals and can lead them to do things they never anticipated. But how any given group affects our behaviour depends upon the norms and values of that specific group. Evil can become banal, but so can humanism. The choice is not denied to us by human nature but rests in our own hands. Hence, we need a psychological analysis that addresses the values and beliefs that we, our institutions, and our leaders promote. These create the conditions in which would-be torturers feel either emboldened or unable to act. We need an analysis that makes us accept rather than avoid our responsibilities. Above all, we need a psychology which does not distance us from torture but which requires us to look closely at the ways in which we and those who lead us are implicated in a society which makes barbarity possible. Alex Haslam is a professor of psychology at University of Exeter and editor of the European Journal of Social Psychology. Stephen Reicher is a professor of psychology at University of St Andrews, past editor of the British Journal of Social Psychology and a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Interesting link to the Gitmo case in a WaPo letter to the editor... ________________ By requesting that CBS delay its report on prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib by two weeks [news story, May 4], Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deprived the country of a full and forthright oral argument before the Supreme Court on the rights of U.S. citizens whom the government has detained as "enemy combatants." Oral argument in those cases, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Padilla v. Rumsfeld, ended about noon April 28. CBS aired the report eight hours later. Had the report aired the previous week, the government's responses to certain questions at oral argument would certainly have been different. Specifically, it would have been clear what abuses could be perpetrated under the government's theory that "enemy combatants" have no rights. As it happened, the justices asked Principal Deputy Solicitor General Paul D. Clement what in the law would check the executive branch from torturing prisoners. He responded that the government would honor its obligations under the "convention to prohibit torture and that sort of thing." He also explained that as a practical matter torture is not the best means of extracting information from prisoners, because one "would wonder about the reliability of the information you are getting"; the "way you get the best information from individuals is that you interrogate them, you try to develop a relationship of trust. . . ." Mr. Clement said that it is "the judgment of those involved in these processes, that the last thing you want to do is torture somebody." He concluded in response to a question about checks on the executive branch's authority to engage in torture: "You have to recognize that . . . where the government is on a war footing, you have to trust the executive. . . ." As the abuses at Abu Ghraib show, one cannot simply trust the executive branch to protect human rights under U.S. criminal law, the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. For the sake of our security and for the protection of human rights everywhere, we believe the court should agree. JAMES F. FITZPATRICK Washington The writer, a partner at the law firm Arnold & Porter, filed friend-of-the-court briefs with the Supreme Court in the Hamdi and Padilla cases on behalf of Global Rights, a Washington-based international human rights group that he chairs.
Pictures of tortured Iraqi prisoners in desecrated British cemetery GAZA CITY (AFP) - Pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused by US troops and vengeful inscriptions were found on desecrated graves of British soldiers of World War I in Gaza City, the cemetery curator said. "Eight to ten men smashed 32 tombstones Sunday night," said Issam Jaradah, who is in charge of the northern Gaza City cemetery's maintenance. Some of the infamous pictures depicting scenes of mistreatment inside the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were found stuck on the tombs, some of which also bore the Nazi swastika and the inscription in English "Revenge", Jaradah told AFP. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040510/wl_uk_afp/mideast_gaza_us_britain_040510134747
More from the Red Cross Report... Red Cross Report Describes Systemic Abuse in Iraq Compiled From Wire Reports Monday, May 10, 2004; 8:56 AM GENEVA – <b>Abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers was broad and "not individual acts" as President Bush has argued, according to a Red Cross report disclosed today.</b> Bush has said the abuses were the result of the "wrongdoing of a few." However, the report says "the use of ill-treatment against (Iraqi) persons deprived of their liberty went beyond exceptional cases and might be considered a practice tolerated by" coalition forces. A senior Red Cross official added:<b> "We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system."</b> "ICRC (Red Cross) delegates directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to secure the cooperation of the persons deprived of their liberty with their interrogators," according to the confidential report. The 24-page document was confirmed as authentic by the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) after it was published today by the Wall Street Journal. The Red Cross report says its delegates saw how detainees at Abu Ghraib were kept "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness." It said it found evidence supporting prisoners' allegations of other forms of abuse during arrest, initial detention and interrogation. Among the evidence were burns, bruises and other injuries consistent with the abuse that prisoners alleged, it said. The report cites abuses – some "tantamount to torture" – including brutality, hooding, humiliation and threats of "imminent execution." "These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information and other forms of cooperation from persons who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an 'intelligence value."' The agency said arrests allegedly tended to follow a pattern. "Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property," the report said. "Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people," it said. "Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles." Pierre Kraehenbuehl, ICRC director of operations, said the report had been given to U.S. officials in February, but it only summarized what the agency had been telling U.S. officials in detail between March and November 2003 "either in direct face-to-face conversations or in written interventions." <b>Kraehenbuehl said the abuse of prisoners represents more than isolated acts, and that the problems were not limited to Abu Ghraib. "We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system," he said, declining to give further details.</b>
