"No Blood, No Foul"

by Katherine

(10th in a series. Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

Human Rights Watch has a new report out on abuses in Iraq. As important as their report last fall on Captain Fishback's allegations were, I think this one may be more so. It hammers about 19 nails into the coffin of the "few bad apples" theory.

There are interviews with three soldiers: an interrogator with Task Force 121/6-26 at Camp NAMA; a sergeant with the 82nd airborne at Forward Operating Base Tiger, near the Syrian border; and  Tony Lagouranis, an army interrogator stationed near the Mosul airport.

The report uses the pseudodym "Jeff Perry" for the soldier from T.F. 121/6-26, the classified special forces/CIA task forces. "Perry" states that the other interrogators at Camp NAMA wore civilian clothes, and he never knew their full names:

We called the colonel by his first name, called the sergeant major by his first name. . . . I couldn’t tell you the sergeant major’s last name if I tried. Same with the colonel. A lot of my fellow interrogators, I didn’t know their last names either. Some I did, ‘cause I knew them from Huachuca [the U.S. military interrogation school in Arizona]. But yeah, when you asked somebody their name they don’t offer up the last name. . . . The consensus was, more often than not, when they gave you their name it probably wasn’t their real name anyway.

After raising concerns about abuse with his superiors, he got a Power Point presentation about how it was legal as long as they didn't leave marks:

Jeff was not comfortable with what he was seeing. Jeff said that after a few weeks of seeing abuse—and in particular the abuse of the detainee described above who was stripped naked, thrown in the mud outside in the cold, and put in front of an air conditioner—he began to feel uneasy.

A few more weeks of this, and a group of us went to the colonel there and told him we were uneasy about it. . . about four of us. Told him we were uneasy about this type of abuse, or just the treatment. . . . I think he said, I'll get back to you. . . .

And within a couple hours a team of two JAG officers, JAG lawyers, came and gave us a couple hours slide show on why this is necessary, why this is legal, they’re enemy combatants, they’re not POWs, and so we can do all this stuff to them and so forth. Yeah, they came the very same day. . . .Oh, it was very fast. We – [laughing] it was like they were ready. I mean they had this two hour slide show all prepared, and they came in and gave it to us and they stopped interrogations for it. It was a PowerPoint. It was on a computer laptop. . . .

The JAG presentation took place during a change-of-shift meeting, and Jeff said numerous interrogators and other personnel were ordered to attend.

Some of the slides were about the laws of war, the Geneva Convention, but it was kind of a starting-off point for them to kind of spout off, you know: why we don’t have to follow these Geneva Convention articles and so forth. Like, you know, inhumane and degrading treatment, well, this specifically relates to POWs, so we don’t have to do this. So basically, we can do inhumane and degrading treatment.

And then they went on to the actual treatment itself, what we were doing, what we’d signed off on and those types of things: cold water and nudity, strobe lights, loud music—that’s not inhumane because they’re able to rebound from it. And they claim no lasting mental effects or physical marks or anything, or permanent damage of any kind, so it’s not inhumane. And then there was also [discussion about] degrading [treatment]. Like what’s more degrading than being thrown completely naked in the middle of a mud pile, with everybody looking at you and spraying water on you. . . .

The Red Cross was barred from Camp NAMA, as was the Army Criminal Investigative Division:

Absolutely not. I never saw any Red Cross people.

HRW: Was there any discussion of the Red Cross coming?

Yeah, they said that the Red Cross would never be able to get in there at all.

HRW: Why would somebody bring that up?

I think because the Red Cross and a couple other agencies were going around different places around Iraq, different facilities, and they were getting access. So somebody brought it up to somebody else. I think the colonel, or somebody in charge. You know, will they come here? It was the colonel, yeah. And he said absolutely not.

Jeff explained that the colonel told them that he “had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in.” Jeff did not question the colonel further on how these assurances were given to those in command in Camp Nama.

He explained that they were told: “they just don’t have access, and they won’t have access, and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating. Even Army investigators.”

HRW: Even CID investigators?

CID was not allowed. No, it was very closed off. We were very tight.

All of this is extensively corroborated by news reports and government documents.

The second soldier, whose allegations are reported under the pseudonym "Nick Forrester," was stationed at Forward Operating Base Tiger, in al Qaim near the Syrian border.

Nick told Human Rights Watch that almost all of the detainees captured and interrogated at Tiger were subject to serious mistreatment, either in detention or while being interrogated. Specifically, he told Human Rights Watch that he and other guards, under orders, subjected detainees to severe sleep deprivation and exposure to dangerously high temperatures, forcing them to stand with their faces to the wall for twenty-four hours straight inside a metal shipping container, with the door open, but with little ventilation. And he said that he repeatedly saw interrogators subjecting detainees to severe mistreatment, including beatings and threats.

"Forrester" states that "Early on, when I first got there, it only got up to about 115, but by July and August, we were regularly between 135 and 145 [Fahrenheit]." I don't know whether this was the temperature inside the shipping container, or if that was the outdoor temperature and it was even hotter inside. I think the latter but I'm not certain.

Nick described one of the worst cases he saw, which took place around July 2003, involving a detainee who a Special Forces team had arrested, and who the Special Forces team had decided had valuable information about insurgent activities. “They brought him back [to FOB Tiger] and he got the mess beat out of him,” Nick said. “He got the hell beat out of him.” Nick told Human Rights Watch what he saw when the detainee was brought into the interrogation building:

He wouldn’t say anything, and they kept screaming at him and screaming at him. And they picked him up and threw him against the wall—and it’s a concrete wall. They threw him up against the wall, they punched him in the neck, punched him in the stomach—you know, gut shot—they threw him down. [At one point,] they actually threw him outside—they had two guys [other detainees] outside watching—threw him outside the building, just threw him outside like that. And then they picked him up, dragged him back, pulling him by the hair and stuff. . . . They hold his arms like this [out behind his back] and then beat him down—enough so they could break it, to give you a little bit of the pain. Same with the kneecaps: kicked him in the kneecaps, you know, really hard, with those boots—combat boots.

They were [usually] very conscious of trying not to leave marks [on the body] most of the time, but with that guy—they really didn’t [i.e., they made no effort to avoid leaving bruises and cuts]. . . . [Later,] they took some of the sani-wipes from the MRE pack [Meals Ready to Eat], you know, clean his face off and stuff like that, but the next day, he was pretty bruised.

The detainee was beaten and interrogated for about two hours, Nick said. “He was there for a long time, a long time.” Later on, Nick said, the interrogators told guards and other soldiers that the detainee had inflicted the damage on himself: “They blamed it on him—a ‘falling-down-the-stairs’ deal or whatever.”

As it turned out, the detainee who was beaten was Iranian: Nick said he was a middle aged man, probably in his late 40s, and said he was probably a small-time businessman or smuggler who brought electronics to and from Syria and through Kurdish areas in Iran and Iraq. The fact that the man didn’t speak Arabic apparently made the interrogators beat him more severely:

The guy didn’t speak Arabic at all; he spoke Farsi. And there was nobody who spoke Farsi on the post and he just kept getting the crap beat out of him because they thought that he was being silent when he only spoke Farsi....they really thought this guy had a bunch of information, and he never opened his mouth except to scream incoherently, when he was getting hit.

Again, there is corroboration for this. Among other things, FOB Tiger  was the same base where Iraqi General Abed Hamed Mowhoush was killed in 2003.

The third interrogator, Tony Lagouranis, has spoken to the press before, but this report contains more detail and much more corroboration.

If you're not up for the whole 53-page report, you might read this story in Esquire, which describes and quotes from Human Rights Watch's interviews with the Camp NAMA interrogator. Actually, you should read the Esquire story anyway, for the profile of Marc Garlasco and John Sifton, the two HRW employees responsible for the report. (I actually know, and have run many a google search for, Sifton). They're quoted in the press pretty regularly, but this is the first story I've ever seen that gives any sense of what they actually do, or what it costs them. 

I'm sometimes afraid that these endless series of endless posts I write about this stuff just make people feel numb and hopeless. They shouldn't. There's another side to this, which I can never quite figure out how to convey without sounding excessively starry-eyed, self-congratulatory or both....These posts are much less depressing for me to write than for everyone else to read. I daydreamed about being a crusading investigative journalist through much of high school. One of my college essays was an imagined interview with I.F. Stone (I was a weird kid, though my parents certainly helped put me up to it.) After graduation I wound up at a little newspaper where I covered zoning meetings, and wrote feature stories on such fascinating topics as "what's the deal with zip codes?" and "the unsightly newspaper vending machines that menace our streets " and "why the pancake breakfast our newspaper is hosting next Thursday is going to be the most awesome thing ever." So working on this stuff is a nice contrast.

And you don't work on it alone, either--you get to meet some truly amazing people, and to know you're on the same side as others you haven't met. You realize: The JAG corps includes the officers who gave that briefing on how humane treatment means you don't leave permanent marks--but it also includes Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift. There's General Geoffrey Miller, and there's Admiral Alberto Mora. John Yoo worked for the OLC; so did Marty Lederman. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld got their start in the Ford administration; so did Justice John Paul Stevens. Joseph Margulies is as much a lawyer as David Addington. Marc Garlasco is as much a veteran as Charles Graner. John Sifton is as American as any CIA interrogator in any secret prison.

This country contains multitudes. It always has. The horrible things in this report--yes, they are part of what America is, now. But so are the human rights workers who wrote it. So are the soldiers who came forward. So is every citizen who decides this has to end.

Comments

[jaywalker]

I am belatedly reading Niall Fergueson's Colossus (2005, p.49): "It was not a pleasant war [in the Philippines 1901]; nor was it to be the American military's last taste of jungle warfare against guerrillas indistinguishable from civilians. Senior officials swiftly resorted to harsh measures: Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith ordered his men on the island of Samar to take no prisoners (...): I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and the more you burn the better you will please me ..."

So, what happened to the general? Wikipedia has the answer: "In May of 1902, Smith faced court-martial for his orders, being tried not for murder or other war crimes, but for "conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline". The court-martial found Smith guilty and sentenced him "to be admonished by the reviewing authority." "Admonishment" is a verbal reprimanded. To ease the subsequent public outcry in America, Secretary of War Elihu Root recommended that Smith be retired. President Theodore Roosevelt accepted this recommendation, and ordered Smith's retirement from the Army, with no additional punishment."

In view of the Oliver North charade (now a FOX host), America's officers can still expect lenient treatment.

Next time you watch A Few Good Men, remember, in reality the bad guys win, even if some guys and girls keep up the good fight. Thanks, Katherine.

[dmbeaster]

It is heartening to think about the fact that this sickening behavior is coming out (slowly) because there are people who want to see it stopped.

What is really different right now is the large number of people who affirmatively defend this behavior anyway, or refuse to see anything wrong with it. It contiues to thrive despite being exposed to scrutiny.

The "few bad apples" theory is part of the official lie to conceal the extent of the torture regime (or to distinguish "torture lite" from true organ failure torture). Funny how there are no Power Point presentations concerning the non-torture methods of interrogation so that there are fewer bad apples, instead of carefully organized justifications for torture that no doubt helped some of those apples go bad.

The situation is kind of like Bush's famous remark about the terrorists -- you are either for the torturers or you are against them. Being a Bush supporter makes you a supporter of the torture regime. Sorry -- no middle ground anymore.

[socratic_me]

Thank you Katherine.

[marblex]

the danger in relying on "half" quotes is that the meaning of the phrase gets distorted.

A FEW BAD APPLES SPOIL THE WHOLE BARREL

That is the actual phrase. Obviously, the phrase "a few bad apples" without the rest suggests, contrary to the obvious meaning of this old bromide, that a "few bad apples" is nothing to worry about. However, tack on the REST of the saying and it is obvious why the "few bad apples" are a problemn.

Too late for the United States though. The whole barrel is already spoiled. American taxpayers have become Nazi-like enablers. Many will, as the "good Germans" did, go along to get along. They will watch like stupid cows, as their neighbors are carted off, "disappeared" under the auspices of der Shrubenfuhrer's unlimited powers. The ass-clown Congress of life will be relegated into permanent oblivion and the whorelike courts, all appointed by der Chimperor, will rubber stamp anything and everything.

But hey...it's just a "few bad apples"...right?

Enjoy new Weimar sheeple....it's way too late now.

Oh BTW Election 2006 will be decided by Diebold as were the last THREE national elections. The REPUBLIC is dead. You have a full blown fascist dictatorship now.

[pecunium]

My disgust is immeasureable.

The only thing I can say is the outside temperature wasn't 135. The record for Baghdad (absolute, not humidity adjusted) is 127F.

I don't know, hopeful signs aside, how to fix this. A root and branch cleansing is in order, but to what degeee, mere cashiering of anyone who might be tainted (which would probably include me) with jail for anyone who can be proved to have taken part, or a mere purge of anyone who took part.

TK

[joel]

The detainees at Nama deserved what they received. One in particular was responsible for the bombing of several hundred iraqi civilians. His time in the black room was nothing compared to the loss experienced by the families of his victims.