The hearings

An honest question:
Would it be fair to say, based on his performance today, that Rumsfeld thought the worst thing about Abu Ghraib was that there were pictures; and seemed angriest when talking about those pictures being leaked to the press?

Or do I only say that out of partisanship, bitterness, and knowledge of how things like this play out when there are no pictures?

It could well be the latter. I do realize that it doesn't seem real until you see it first hand. Rumsfeld sounded a lot more contrite, and hell, a lot more human, at the beginning of today's hearings than he had before. That may be because he knows his job depends on it, but it also may be that he didn't see all of the pictures until last night.

But, God. We need to learn to prevent these things before they happen, and certainly before pictures of them are broadcast on 60 Minutes and Al-Jazeera. And I'm not even a little confident that it will happen.

(I hope I don't need to say this but what the hell, it might save some very tiresome arguments:

I realize that this is not in any way representative of U.S. soldiers of Iraq and I'm not trying to imply that it is. Most of them seem to be doing an amazing job in an impossible situation. I do think it goes beyond six "bad apples," though. There has been an official, high level decision that the end justifies the means when it comes to interrogating potential enemies of ours. There have been a lot of situations where prisoners' treatment depends entirely on the good will of their captors. Combine that with a screwed up chain of command, understaffing and inadequate training, and what a history professor of mine called "the human cussedness factor", and....I wouldn't say prisoner abuse is inevitable. But it is definitely foreseeable.

Or as Rivka says, speaking of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment:

I don't think it absolves the low-level MPs from moral responsibility, but it should steer us away from explanations which depend on their moral exceptionality. The Stanford experiment tells us that there needn't have been anything psychologically or morally deficient about these MPs at the outset of the war, just as the "guards" in Zimbardo's experiment were psychologically indistinguishable from "prisoners" when the study began.

If anything, the Stanford study damns the leadership of the 800th MP Brigade even further than they've already been damned. We know that, in the absence of continuous training, supervision, and strict controls, people given absolute power over others will tend to become vicious. No one in that chain of command has any business acting surprised that their failures of leadership led to exactly what anyone who's taken Psych 101 at any time since the mid-1970s could have predicted.)

Comments

[asdf]

hmm

[Katherine]

Thanks. In case anyone doesn't want to click through the Salon day pass, here are some key paragraphs from that story, by Joe Conason. Horton is a New York attorney who spoke to some JAG officers about how prisoners were being treated.

"Indeed, Horton says that the JAG officers specifically warned him that Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith,one of the most powerful political appointees in the Pentagon, had significantly weakened the military's rules and regulations governing prisoners of war. The officers told Horton that Feith and the Defense Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes II, were creating "an atmosphere of legal ambiguity" that would allow mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Haynes, who was recently nominated to a federal appeals court seat by President Bush, is responsible for legal issues concerning prisoners and detainees. But the general counsel takes his marching orders from Feith, an attorney whose scorn for international human rights law was summed up by his assessment of Protocol One, the 1977 Geneva accord protecting civilians, as "law in the service of terrorism."

How did the "permissive environment" that encouraged rampant criminality and cruelty arise at Abu Ghraib? According to the JAG senior officers who spoke with Horton, Pentagon civilian officials removed safeguards that were designed to prevent such abuses. At a detention facility like Abu Ghraib, those safeguards would include the routine observation of interrogations from behind a two-way mirror by a JAG officer, who would be empowered to stop any misconduct.

The JAG officers told Horton that those protective policies were discontinued in Iraq and Afghanistan. They said that interrogations were routinely conducted without JAG oversight -- and, worse, that private contractors were being allowed unprecedented participation in the interrogation process. Moreover, the contractors who participated in the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners were operating in a legal twilight zone, says Horton."

[Anarch]

I thought exactly the same thing, Katherine: what really angered Rumsfeld wasn't the torture, it was the leaking of the pictures of the torture. I'm hoping that that's just a result of his oft-congested speaking style, but it sure didn't seem that way to me.

[Gromit]

I was only half-listening to the testimony, but I did get the impression that he was fixated on the photos as well.

[bob mcmanus]

US Slavers in Iraq

Didn't know what a question mark would due to the link

Max Sawicky has 2 additional cites

[asdf]

I was only half-listening to the testimony, but I did get the impression that he was fixated on the photos as well.

I think this is about where the country is, too. Without those photos, this might not have gone anywhere.

[Gromit]

Pat Buchanan on the McLaughlin Group today argued explicitly that the real problem here is the pictures. It's great to know that cultural supremacists who think torture is just dandy as long as the world is kept in the dark have a voice on public television.

[Jesurgislac]

If I'd read it on The Onion I'd be happier - from Time magazine via Electrolite concerning an unbelievably silly e-mail sent by someone at the Pentagon about the Taguba Report: the email's author in "Information Services Customer Liaison" said: "This leakage will be investigated for criminal prosecution. If you don't have the document and have never had legitimate access, please do not complicate the investigative processes by seeking information." As the type-face switched to high-alarm red, the 180-word email continues: "THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS REPORT IS CLASSIFIED; DO NOT GO TO FOX NEWS TO READ OR OBTAIN A COPY."

All sorts of proverbs come to mind. In a hole, stop digging. Horse gone, no good bolting barn door. And so on.