Gulag Stories

It's impossible to keep up with everything in the current media feeding frenzy over torture in the Pentagon's gulag system.  But I wanted to post links to several articles that have struck me as particularly noteworthy.

First, though, I did want to mention that the question of torture in the gulag is not the same as the question of whether a particular war is justified.  The abuse of prisoners is obviously connected in various ways to the failure of the Bush Administration in the Iraq War, a failure which may well be irreperable at this point.

But the question of legal conduct in war situations, including the treatment of prisoners of war or other occupants of Bush and Rummy's gulag, is a separate issue from whether the Iraq War was justified or whether an extended occupation is desirable or practical.  The low-level defendants are trying to use the "I was just following orders" argument.  It's not a valid defense argument, legally or ethically.  If prosecutors can flip some lower-level participants to nail some of those higher up in the chain, that may be a good thing, depending on what the prosecution gets out of it.

It's important to remember that some soldiers, faced with the same orders and demands and conditions, obeyed the law and fulfilled their obligations as soldiers and Americans.  I'll start the list of articles with one that illustrates what I mean:

Chain of Command by Seymour Hersh New Yorker (posted online 05/09/04).  Includes a graphic photo of a naked prisoner being menaced with dogs.

In his devastating report on conditions at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, Major General Antonio M. Taguba singled out only three military men for praise. One of them, Master-at-Arms William J. Kimbro, a Navy dog handler, should be commended, Taguba wrote, because he “knew his duties and refused to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure from the MI”—military intelligence—“personnel at Abu Ghraib.” Elsewhere in the report it became clear what Kimbro would not do: American soldiers, Taguba said, used “military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.”

Soldiers' warnings ignored Baltimore Sun 05/09/04

The two military intelligence soldiers, assigned interrogation duties at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, were young, relatively new to the Army and had only one day of training on how to pry information from high-value prisoners.

But almost immediately on their arrival in Iraq, say the two members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, they recognized that what was happening around them was wrong, morally and legally.

They said in interviews Friday and yesterday that the abuses were not caused by a handful of rogue soldiers poorly supervised and lacking morals but resulted from failures that went beyond the low-ranking military police charged with abuse.

The beatings, the two soldiers said, were meted out with the full knowledge of intelligence interrogators, who let military police know which prisoners were cooperating with them and which were not.

A report from a British man who found himself in the Guantanamo branch of the gulag:  My Hell in Camp X-Ray Daily Mirror (UK) 03/12/04.

A British captive freed from Guantanamo Bay today tells the world of its full horror - and reveals how prostitutes were taken into the camp to degrade Muslim inmates. ...

The father-of-three, from Manchester, told how he was assaulted with fists, feet and batons after refusing a mystery injection.

He said detainees were shackled for up to 15 hours at a time in hand and leg cuffs with metal links which cut into the skin.

Their "cells" were wire cages with concrete floors and open to the elements - giving no privacy or protection from the rats, snakes and scorpions loose around the American base.

Red Cross saw 'widespread abuse' BBC News 05/08/04

Laura Rozen at her blog has additional details from the Wall Street Journal's print edition on the Red Cross' findings: May 7, 2004 post.

UK forces taught torture methods Guardian (UK) 05/08/04.  This piece illustrates why many observers concluded right away that the torture photographed in Abu Ghraib was not just the on-the-spot ideas of a few out-of-control guards.  The techniques utilized were immediately recognizable to those schooled in state-of-the-art methods of inflicting pain and humiliation on prisoners.

Joe Conason in Lack of Protection Salon.com 05/07/04 makes it clear that January was not the first time that high-level military officers became aware of abuses in the gulag.

Background on the Crisis in Iraq from Human Rights Watch has links to various reports from this human rights group.

Amnesty International USA: Pattern of brutality and cruelty -- war crimes at Abu Ghraib 05/07/04.

Despite claims this week by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to be "stunned" by abuses in Abu Ghraib, and that these were an "exception" and "not a pattern or practice", Amnesty International has presented consistent allegations of brutality and cruelty by US agents against detainees at the highest levels of the US Government, including the White House, the Department of Defense, and the State Department for the past two years.

Last July, the organization raised allegations of torture and ill-treatment of Iraqi detainees by US and Coalition forces in a memorandum to the US Government and Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq. The allegations included beatings, electric shocks, sleep deprivation, hooding, and prolonged forced standing and kneeling. It received no response nor any indication from the administration or the CPA that an investigation took place.

Despite repeated requests, Amnesty International has been denied access to all US detention facilities.

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, preparing for an official visit to the US, called for punishment of those responsible for torture in Abu Ghraib: Fischer fordert Bestrafung der US-Folterer Der Spiegel Online 05/08/04.  The article says that both his own Green Party and the opposition Free Democratic Party (FDP) are pressuring Fischer to make a strong protest about torture in Iraq in upcoming meeting with US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice.  Claudia Roth, the incoming chairperson of the Greens and the German government's chief human right official, said raising the issue was not one of interfering in the internal affairs of the US, "but about international law."

You have to wonder what Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman or George Marshall would think about Germany giving the United States lessons on human rights.  And being in the right in doing so.  I'm sure they would be glad to know that Germany had become such a constructive force for democracy and international law.  Their reaction to what Bush and Rumsfeld have done in creating a gulag system outside of any law would not be a mild one.

Fareed Zakaria is apparently seeing that he previously placed far too much faith in the Bush team and their alleged competence:  The Price of Arrogance Newsweek 05/17/04 issue.

The basic attitude taken by Rumsfeld, Cheney and their top aides has been "We're at war; all these niceties [i.e., international and American law] will have to wait." As a result, we have waged pre-emptive war unilaterally, spurned international cooperation, rejected United Nations participation, humiliated allies, discounted the need for local support in Iraq and incurred massive costs in blood and treasure. If the world is not to be trusted in these dangerous times, key agencies of the American government, like the State Department, are to be trusted even less. Congress is barely informed, even on issues on which its "advise and consent" are constitutionally mandated.

Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.

It's ugly.  And more ugliness is likely to come out.