Category Archives: Torture

In the wake of Yet Another Torture Allegation (YATA), this time that soldiers in the 82nd Airborne were torturing Iraqis for the fun of it (and — more seriously — that senior officers refused to investigate when put on notice by a junior officer) Senator John McCain, himself a victim of vicious torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese, a conservative Republican Senator with unique moral authority to speak out against this evil, and a man who so far has said remarkably little on the subject, speaks.

And pretty much all he can bring himself to say is Prisoner Abuse Hurts U.S. Image:

Sen. John McCain said Sunday that abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers, alleged anew in a report and under investigation again by the Army, is hurting the nation’s image abroad.

OK, yes, he also said,

“We’ve got to make it clear to the world that American doesn’t do it. It’s not about prisoners. It’s about us,” he said.

…but if the AP is to be trusted, that’s in the context of our image, not any moral imperative.

McCain is a co-author of a bill that seeks to put greater limits on torture by our armed forces, but carefully avoids making the prohibition apply to the CIA’s world-wide torture centers, and also fails to address the CIA’s organized complicity with foreign torturers.

McCain’s near-silence on this issue is highly likely to be related to his Presidential ambitions in 2008 — ambitions that would be severely damaged by seeming to undercut a GOP president on a military issue, not to mention any hint of being “soft on terror”.

It is hard to accuse a man who obviously displayed great physical and moral courage as a young man of being a moral coward now that he’s considerably older. But there it is.

This man does not deserve to be President.

Neither, of course, does the current occupant of the White House. That man is not only presiding over this moral atrocity, but also over the conversion of the doctrine of military command responsibility into a doctrine of corporate responsibility diffusion in which executives seek personal deniability while assuring themselves that no one is to blame.

This cartoon by Tom Tomorrow explains how to reason properly about torture.

We know that four-star generals — or indeed any general officers other than one female reservist who claims to be a scapegoat — do not get disciplined, much less cashiered, over little things like presiding over very substantial quantities of torture by their subordinates. (We used to claim to adhere to command responsibility, so one would have accepted responsibility to flow upwards, not curdle down at the level of NCOs.)

One could even be forgiven for thinking that if having your troops stringing prisoners up with mock electrodes or beating them to death in sleeping bags wasn't the sort of thing that got a general in trouble, nothing would.

Well, it seems there is something. Some unspecified “personal misconduct,” that can get a 4-Star General Dismissed.

What could it be? Fiddling the accounts, or sleeping with the wrong person perhaps. But not torture, even if he did run the Army Training and Doctrine Command. We don't go after ranking officers for that—got to save something for the war crimes tribunals.

Update: Yup. The Washington post reports that the great crime was “an extramarital affair with a civilian.”

I suppose, in all fairness, this hierarchy of military offenses is consistent with our impeachment priorities. That said, I do find this part of the Post story more offensive than sad,

The Army has been hurt over the past year by detainee-abuse cases and has been accused of not going after top officers allegedly involved in such abuse. Army officials said relieving Byrnes was meant to show the public that the service takes issues of integrity seriously.

“We all swear to serve by the highest ideals, and no matter what rank, when you violate them, you are dealt with appropriately,” said one Army officer familiar with the case.

After a fallow period, Fafblog! is back in full fettle:

All of us love freedom, and all of us want to protect freedom, and surely to protect freedom it was necessary to tie Abed Hamed Mowhoush in a sleeping bag and an electrical cord, and surely to secure our basic liberties it was essential to beat him with a club and a length of rubber hose, and certainly it was vital to the preservation of our way of life to bludgeon him to death over a period of days in an interrogation room, just as it is critical to keep these and other methods of torture legal at all costs. But why, if the deed was just – and it can't not have been just – did the Army and the CIA cover up the murder, classify the autopsy, put out a whitewashed account for the press? Why do they continue to deny to this day what we know to be true, what the president's actions defend as the truth: that torture is the official policy of the United States?

Is it some foul act of self-sabotage or some perverse modesty that causes the Pentagon, the CIA and the White House to cravenly hide behind their underlings instead of triumphantly claiming the 2005 Golden Mengele for themselves? Whatever the explanation, George Bush and his administration are shortchanging themselves and the millions of Americans who deserve to know exactly how these men have been proudly protecting and defending their values. Don't be shy, gentlemen, Mr. Secretary, Mr. President. These corpses are all yours.

More information about how the torture-murder of Iraqi Gen. Mowhoush came to light — and the context in which it ocurred. Utah GI exposed abuses at prison. His reports were brushed off until fellow Utahn stepped in:

The Army captain appeared confused. “You’re using ‘sledgehammer’ figuratively?” he asked the enlisted soldier sitting before him.

“No sir,” the soldier replied, lifting his hands about 15 inches apart. “The handle of a sledgehammer, about this big . . . to assault the detainees with.”

For Sgt. 1st Class Michael Pratt it would have been far easier to look away.

(spotted via Amygdala, How Sgt. 1ST Class Michael Pratt blew the whistle)

Continue reading →

Marty Lederman gives a full, and quite sickening, analysis of the legal and political context of the Iraqi torture-murder story I noted below.

This administration is not only morally bankrupt, it has soiled the military, which had, I thought, rebuilt its honor after the then-nadir of Vietnam. Official torture and murder with the connivance or malign neglect of higher-ups is almost as bad as governments get, short of genocide.