Abu Ghaib: Moral Disaster

Before I comment on Abu Ghaib I want to provide my sources in case anyone is interested in looking into it further:

Amnesty International

Slate's roundup of the story.

Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article.

Phil Carter.

You may also be interested in Sgt Stryker's response. Or you may also be interested in what Lt. Smash has to say.

Abu Ghraib represents a number of disturbing things, all of which must be dealt with.

First, it is either a horrible breakdown of military discipline or a truly foolish tactic employed by some fool(s) in the military. I strongly suspect it is the former, because if you read the articles above you will see that the investigations of and the beginnings of court martials for these abuses were already underway before the news broke. I will not offer any excuses for these soldiers. The stress they are under in Iraq does not excuse them. Anger at seeing their friends killed in Iraq does not excuse them. The fact that such torture and worse is common in Arab countries does not excuse them. This kind of treatment is not what Americans are supposed to be doing. It is morally wrong and the military needs to crack down hard on those who think that it is ok.

I think it is very important for those on the right to strongly criticize any attempt to whitewash this or downplay its significance. These actions are illegal, immoral and very counterproductive in the War on Terror. If we are going to ask people to commit to a decades-long fight, we need to be very clear that this kind of thing is not helpful to the fight.

Which brings me to my second point. Just as I have argued that Zapatero's public diplomatic statements are damaging the war on terror by giving the terrorists a propaganda victory which allows them to credibly claim to have gotten a Western government to change its foreign policy to fall in line with what the terrorists desire, so to these Abu Ghaib war crimes severely damage our efforts in the War on Terrorism. They do so in multiple ways.

First, it allows them to say that our humanitarian rhetoric is merely a game. Just because I do not believe that our humanitarian rhetoric is actually a game does not mean that Abu Ghaib cannot easily be used by them to give more force to such an argument. This is awful because it is very important to our long-term prospects in the Middle East that the humanitarian benefits of living in a free society be apparent to citizens of Mid-East countries. One of those benefits is living in a society where getting arrested is not roughly equivalent to being exposed to torture. I'm not naive, I realize that some level of mistreatment of prisoners goes on even in all Western countries. But part of having civil society is trying to minimize the number and severity of those abuses, and punishing those who commit them. We must make it clear that such abuses are not US policy, and that they will not be tolerated.

Second, it is quite obvious that many in Arab countries are willing to allow for huge abuses by their own that they will not tolerate from foreigners. To be frank, far worse occurs every day in Egyptian or Saudi or Iranian prisons with hardly a peep from the Arab street. But that is all 'inside the family' so to speak. Arab cultures are already hyper-sensitive to the idea of outsiders meddling with their ways. That is why our existence is such a threat to people like Osama bin Laden--Janet Jackson's costume reveal wasn't aimed at the Islamic market, but the culture that can argue it might not be so bad is a threat to his sense of morality. Even though it isn't aimed at him, it is still is seen by him as Western meddling/tempting of his moral culture. So much so as to require a violent response. This type of reaction is already very common. So far as we can avoid it while we are in Iraq we need to not stimulate the response. And Abu Ghaib and related acts definitely stimulate that response.

The problems caused by these Abu Ghaib crimes cannot be recalled. We must instead try to minimize their damage. That will involve punishing those who committed the crimes AND those who knew about them yet did nothing to stop them. We must be crystal clear that this type of behaviour cannot continue. It may involve destroying the prison so that the symbol of the crimes does not endure. It almost certainly will involve a very public review of those held in the prison to justify the presence of those held there. Anything less would make the disaster even worse.

Comments

[Jesurgislac]

you will see that the investigations of and the beginnings of court martials for these abuses were already underway before the news broke

I suspect the former, because the civilian contractors condemned in the report are still at work in detention centers in Iraq.

Actually, I don't see why both couldn't be true.

[Factory]

jes:
I think you mean the latter.

SH:
That piece went into the PR problems with this issue, the other is how systemic this practice is. If it is systemic and is not fixed by these arrests, it will prolly produce the result of the practice getting more secretive, then the next time this issue comes out in the open it will be far worse.

IMHO it looks like the book will be thrown at the soldiers, and those higher up will be told strongly not to do it again.

[Jesurgislac]

Ignore my first comment. (Thanks, Factory.)

it is either a horrible breakdown of military discipline or a truly foolish tactic employed by some fool(s) in the military.

I think it's both. "Some fools in the military" extend upward at least to Brigade level, and from Amnesty International reports, Abu Ghreib prison is not an exceptional case.

Using torture on Iraqi prisoners - many of whom were then released since they were not suspected of anything - was a damn fool thing to do, when the US army was occupying Iraq and attempting to look substantially different from Saddam Hussein.

But look at Bagram Airbase. There are areas there where the Red Cross isn't allowed to go. When one of the British prisoners (released from Guantanamo Bay recently) talked of sexual abuse while he was imprisoned, most people (me included) didn't take it seriously. I take it a lot more seriously now in the light of what's come out about conditions at Abu Ghreib.

There has been a horrendous breakdown in military discipline, and there are some damn fools who are responsible for it.

[K.W. Mays]

To any interested: I spent 33-years as a correctional officer in california. The following is an excerpt from a book i recently finished titled; "Chaos in Corrections,the dynamic's of inmate control."
Chapter-3: Values, Ethics & Treatment

VALUES:
I have already mentioned several times that ‘you can not control others unless your first control yourself’. This theme will be repeated over and over through out this work. It is the essence of being a correctional officer. In the last section you saw all the elements of risk that exist in a correctional facility except for possibly one. The loss of your soul.
I have come to believe, and my past experience and observations support, that nothing will test the content of your character like working in a correctional facility. It not just the stress of the environment, it’s the allure and temptation of evil that can gnaw at your very soul. Once a person is given power over another the tendency to be consumed by that power is difficult to resist. This can happen in even the best of ’corporate’ settings. Never mind an environment that can foster the perspective that the inmates are substantially ’sub-human’. Such submission to the ’dark side’ doesn’t happen overnight. Although it can occur very quickly given the right circumstance and the right person. Your ‘conversion’ begins with nothing more then the application of the dehumanizing terms used to describe the inmates themselves. When the newer officer hears the older officers refer to the inmates as ‘assholes’, shit-heads’, ‘fish’, ‘cock roaches’, or any one of a dozen other terms and epitaphs, the listeners mind begins to declassify the inmates into a sub-standard specie.
When this demonizing effect is then supported by the despicable acts some of the inmates can and will do, the image is only amplified even further. Add to this the power of ‘peer support’ from other officers who will reward you with their acceptance when you emulate them and shun or reject you when you don’t; and you will find all the forces of psychology and the power of ‘group think’ being focused upon you.
It is no surprise to me that the soldiers in the prisons of Iraq are doing or have done what they did. Their charges, the inmates, were viewed as terrorist who deserved no mercy. After all, five minutes before their capture ‘you’ were willing to kill them and they were trying to kill you. As soldiers, watching their brothers and sisters die at the hands of these very individuals, it is only natural for them to want revenge and even expected as a part of the soldiers military ‘up bringing’. Taking those soldiers and their combat mentality and then placing them into a prison environment is equivalent to pouring gasoline on a fire. It was the wrong mindset put in the wrong mission to begin with.
A study in 1972 at Stanford University took two dozen psychology students and randomly divided them into ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’. They were placed in a 24/7 simulated prison environment. Within six days the professors and controllers had to step in and halt the experiment. In just that short of time the ‘guards’ behavior had degenerated to the point of depriving the inmates of food and water, beating them, stripping them down and having them simulate homosexuals acts.
Often times the correctional officer can not even look outside the prison for moral support from family and friends. Their ‘protective custody’ actions or attitude is, more often then not, viewed by others as ‘coddling’ the criminal, or being too soft or some other nonsense. You even see this from politicians and ’talk show hosts’ who rant about our prisons being to lenient on inmates and other such crap. Yet, when the realities of Iraq suddenly came out, they all talked about how shocked and horrified they were. For those of you that really want to know how such can happen, even to the ’best’ of us just read Dave Grossman’s book ‘On Killing’. Then none of that will be a surprise. Then you will understand that as a correctional officer you are not just guarding the inmates you are also having to accomplish a much more difficult task; guarding yourself.

Sgt. Kenneth W. Mays, (retired)

[widlest]

That's very cruel, who have no morality!
Do you human being or animal.