There are several approaches, and all of them will find a sympathetic niche audience. And they all will appear in various forms of sophistication, from lowbrow to mid-brow (if there is such a word) to highbrow.
For the drooling-at-the-mouth crowd, there is the outright justification of torture. Rush Limbaugh has already been out there with this one. There is the “yuk-yuk, it’s just good ole boys (and gals) blowing off steam" version. Then there is the more serious, “this is war and anything we do is okay” variant.
At this point, people who are focusing on the dialogue in Congress and from official representatives may be inclined to dismiss this as fringe nonsense. That would be a mistake, because that’s not how it works in today’s Republican Party. For the country-club Republicans, polite and respectable rhetoric is the order of the day (see below). But Rush’s pronouncements, whether inspired by Oxycontin or not, are welcome to the party barons as providing red meat for the base. Even in the meat is infected with BSE. As Mark Fullman put in Salon’s War Room blog:
The administration may have good reason to stand by and let Limbaugh run his mouth: By measure of his sizable audience alone he's an influential conservative voice in America -- and he also has some close ties to the Bush White House. According to Media Matters.org, in 1992 Limbaugh was an overnight guest in the White House of then-President George H.W. Bush. And on March 22 of this year, the White House tapped Limbaugh to help it run damage control during the political firestorm set off by Richard Clarke's book and damning testimony before the 9/11 commission on Bush's national security policy. In an unusual public-relations move, Vice President Dick Cheney went on Limbaugh's radio show as a guest where he sought to undercut the former counterterrorism director by calling him "out of the loop." Together with Limbaugh, the essential thrust was to mock Clarke, in hopes of discrediting him.
This is important to keep in mind, because this is a key way in which the political dialogue is shaped these days. If you think the Republicans are relying on the respectable argements, exclusively or even primarily, that’s a real mistake. You’re not hearing the White House or "respectable" Republicans telling the red-meat wing of the party to shut up with this nonsense. The "respectable" arguments are there to give affluent suburbanites an excuse to pretend that the Republican Party isn’t dominated by militarists and warmongers, Confederate flag fans and Christian Right zealots.
It’s kind of like a variant on the old anti-drug ad: "This is your Republican Party. This is your Republican Party on Oxycontin."
Very close to outright justification is the "culture war" excuse-making. Rush’s suggestion that Britney Spears is to blame falls into that category. So do other variants like pornography is to blame, violent movies are to blame, women in the military are to blame. Then there’s the perennial favorite: It’s all Bill and Hillary Clinton’s fault.
There’s always a hide your head in the sand variety. That’s our friend Chuckie’s approach right now. This is more than changing the subject. It’s more like refusing to deal with the subject at all. I checked the Christian Coalition’s Web site mid-day on 5/10/04, and couldn’t find any mention of the torture issue, although the News link did have an item about how conservatives in the United Methodist Church were increasing their influence despite "pro-homosexual activism." The site of another leading Christian Right organization, Focus on the Family, seems equally indifferent.
After Christian Right activists made such a big deal about "what will we tell the children" about Bill and Monica, you might think they would be worrying about what to tell the children about the pictures of soldiers they’ve heard being idolized as heroes using attack dogs to bite chunks out of the flesh of naked prisoners.
Among the more serious strategies, the ones that are likely to be more effective in blunting investigation and criticism, is focusing on the public relations problem. Dick Cheney’s "get off his back" (Rummy’s, that is) is a variant of this. Stop investigating. Stop reporting. Gen. Richard Myers gave a good example of that in his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on 05/08/04 (my emphasis):
This argument will enter the conservative stream of consciousness as "the media endangered our troops by showing the photographs." At least some in the military will learn the same lesson they learned by misunderstanding the role of war reporting in the Vietnam War: that they need to focus on controlling news and information more tightly.
Since this will be a conservative favorite for decades, it’s worth noting now the basic flaw in this argument. It was excessive secrecy and the abandonment of the Geneva Conventions by the Bush-Cheney-Rummy government that allowed the practice of torture to begin in the extralegal gulag system they created, practices illegal under American and international law. As the system flourished in Afghanistan and Guantanamo without serious challenge by Congress, it also flowered in Iraq as soon as the US occupation began. Without the public exposure of the practices, in both text and photos, it would have continued. In fact, without much further exposure by the press, Congress and the courts, the torture will continue. The gulag system Rummy’s Pentagon has set up inevitably allows such crimes to occur.
Another "respectable" line of argument is to use the excuse of war pressures. Myers in his testimony worked in hostages and the Fallujah standoffs in talking about the torture photos. He phrased it carefully to avoid perjuring himself, but the kinds of illegal practices pictured in these photos were going on long before the Fallujah standoff. We know now from published reports that the Red Cross was complaining to the Pentagon about mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq a year ago. There were also complaints from human rights organizations and press reports on misconduct toward prisoners in Afghanistan and Guantanamo as early as 2001.
This is a press account that in itself can be useful as an analysis of how war conditions can lead to abuses. But that’s exactly why we have laws of war, including those related to treatment of prisoners. And this will be transmuted into an excuse.
As Insurgency Grew, So Did Abuse Washington Post 05/11/04
It think we could consider the "I was just following orders" position as a variant of this. Unless there is real evidence that there was a credible threat of physical violence against the soldier being given the order, this is not valid as a defense.
The other major "respectable" kind of excuse-making I see is to try to minimize discussion and analysis and investigation of the war crimes by couching every mention of them in stump-speech homages to the Good Soldiers. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-VA) provided an excellent example of this on the PBS Newshour of 05/08/04. This are his comments edited for those parts I’m referencing here:
And todaywas an extraordinary one, for any number of reasons, given the tragic nature of these facts, the implications on our foreign policy, the implication on our forces, our forces which are bravely fighting on all over the world in the cause of freedom. …
But it does provide, unfortunately, the media of the world an opportunity each day to grind a new chapter. And I'm just hopeful that our men and women of the armed forces understand that we are pursuing this revelation of facts according to the deeply rooted democratic principle of this country of freedom of information, freedom of speech, sharing with the public, and getting it all out there so the sooner it's behind us, they can then put it behind them. I'm talking about 99.9 percent of the men and women of the armed forces who are valiantly and courageously carrying out their missions throughout the world and here at home. …
And each one of our witnesses today offered the same apology and total condemnation of the breakdown of discipline, the non-professional behavior, and the obtaining-- if they did obtain, we are not sure of that-- obtaining of information and in fact by means of cruelty that just is not a part of our military history. …
I've always been of the opinion that our young men and women, when they leave the towns and villages of this nation, going through the arduous training to become soldiers, sailors or airmen, marines, they're the finest that we have. And they want to go abroad in the cause of freedom and fight, if necessary, or do their duties and respond to the orders of their superiors, whether that superior be a sergeant or a lieutenant or up the line. And I can't imagine that all these individuals, collectively put together, got into this unit and suddenly began to do things which are contrary to what they were taught at home as young people and taught in their schools. If not, someone hadn't instructed them to, in some way, deviate.
The evolution of this approach into a stock feature of the conservative canon is predictable. At this stage, it’s a matter of burying every discussion on the problem of war crimes with reminders that 99.9% of our troops are good, brave, wonderful, etc.. A sentiment with which no one is likely to argue at this point, though it’s obvious already that Warner is using it to minimize the seriousness of the Pentagon’s gulag problems.
Pretty soon it’ll be transformed more and more into, "There have certainly been some problem with misconduct by a few, but it’s not fair to accuse all our good, brave, wonderful, etc. soldiers of that." It will be worth reflecting when this becomes common just who is actually saying that all our good, brave, wonderful, etc. soldiers are acting that way.
It’s will also be worth noting that the idea that prosecuting war crimes by American soldiers, or even mentioning them, is somehow insulting to all soldiers would only occur to those for whom all soldiers are under suspicion of war crimes. That would include a few radical pacifists. But mostly that would be the Oxycontin crowd that celebrates war crimes as a necessary part of war. (See above.) In their minds, criticizing war crimes is the same as criticizing all soldiers.
The final transmutation will be a variant of the "spitting on veterans" urban folklore: "Antiwar types called anyone who fought in Iraq 'baby killers' and 'war criminals'." Again, it’s worth reflecting in real-time who actually may be saying such things. Save the newspaper clippings when they happen, if they do. It may help researchers 10 or 20 years from now when they’re trying to identify any such incidents actually occurring. And, no, the two bad-taste criticisms of Pat Tillman that I’ve discussed before don’tqualify.
We're seeing played out in real time right now the reason there is a need for laws of war: to attempt to limit the destructiveness of military conflicts.
The Bush Administration has attempted to undermine international law, as least as it applies to the United States. They haven't done the country or our soldiers any favors by doing so.
11 comments:
"I think we could consider the “I was just following orders” position as a variant of this. Unless there is real evidence that there was a credible threat of physical violence against the soldier being given the order, this is not valid as a defense."
I agree! But as my husband told me this morning, "Do I believe they were told to treat the prisoners like that? Yes. But that doesn't excuse them or release them from culpability."
Yes, many conservatives will try to put a "spin" on the pictures. But how seriously am I to take this complaint, when you refer to the situation as the "Pentagon's Gulag System?"
Consider the denotation and connotation of "gulag."
The denotation, the literal definition, is the USSR penal system which consists of labor camps. If you look up labor camps, one definition is a jail in which forced labor is conducted; a second is a camp for migratory laborers. There is nothing in the definition that would satisfy the "torture" that is intended.
The connotation of "gulag," that is, what comes to mind when we run across the word, is a prison with tortuous conditions. So this argument depends on the reader using the worst thing he can imagine to get the point.
While there is no doubt that what went on in this prison was inappropriate, to refer to this as the "Pentagon's Gulag System" sounds to me as if you're expanding this problem to an intentional, universal plan that precludes the possibility of any other type of treatment. Is it not possible that there are soldiers who are part of the "Pentagon's Gulag System" who are not behaving in this manner? Does this make them BAD soldiers??
If it's wrong to "sweep this under the rug" by attempting to make it smaller than it is, are we to believe there's nothing wrong with sweeping generalizations that portray the intent of EVERYONE involved through exaggeration?
Patrick, I don't try to hide by own partisanship on this blog. Andy Jackson's ghost would be stalking me if I were using "Old Hickory" for the blog name and *not* being a partisan Democrat!
But "gulag" isn't meant to be a purely partisan term here. I actually picked it up from this article in Salon by Sid Blumenthal (who *is* a partisan writer, though):
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2004/05/06/torture/index.html
I quoted from it and added another link in this post:
http://journals.aol.com/bmiller224/OldHickorysWeblog/entries/1185
So "gulag" is meant more to describe the extralegal system of prisons that Rumsfeld has established in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Iraq, and possibly beyond. It doesn't necessarily refer to torture, as such. Although it's pretty much inevitable that once you create an extralegal prison system like that, that human rights abuses will occur.
I don't know if you meant the question about soldiers working in the "gulag," to be rhetorical. But ther might turn out to be some sticky legal problems involved for people who are a part of it, even if they didn't commit acts of torture. I hadn't thought about that particular angle before. - Bruce
You left out Ann Coulter blaming it on women in the military and feminism. The right is also blaming the academic left and Muslims...
http://mediamatters.org/items/200405070003
More thoughts on Patrick's question about others working in the Bush-and-Rummy Gulag.
At one point, I did a bit of research on the case of Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, who was barred from travelling to the US and most other countries of the world because of his involvement with Nazi war crimes.
Now, I have no idea how closely the laws that applied to him in the Second World War are similar to those applying to US soldiers today in this regard. But the one of the controversies in which he admitted to the facts, was that as an intelligence officer in the German Wehrmacht, he had processed some Italian soldiers after Italy's surrender who were being sent to imprisonment illegally. And his participation was technically an illegal act. I doubt that any German soldier was ever charged with a war crime for just processing paperwork, which that instance involved, but his involvement did put him in violation of law.
A far more serious charge involved the fact that as an intelligence officer, he almost certainly participated in the interrogation of British prisoners of war who then executed afterward. Fortunately for him, his unit had destroyed a lot of the records, so it could never be established in a legally convincing sense that he had done so, though the circumstantial evidence was persuasive to me. But even though he wasn't the one pulling the trigger, and even though he was not the one giving the order, participating as an interrogation of a prisoner of war that he had reason to think would be executed afterwards was a war crime under the relevant laws.
As I say, I don't know how closely the current law applicable to American soldiers is to that. But the Waldheim case does remind me that facilitating a process in which war crimes are being committed at some stage, even if the person facilitating is not directly participating in the criminal act, could get someone in deep legal trouble. - Bruce
Cherie, that's definitely correct. The Nuremburg trials of war criminals after the Second World War established clearly that "I was following orders" is not a valid legal defense. And even if they were specifically instructed in the details of what was legally prohibited, that also doesn't get them off the hook legally.
There is a legitimate concern that the lower-level participants are going to be scapegoated by being prosecuted while those who set the policies and gave the orders get off with lesser legal consequences.
If the prosecution is handled honestly and correctly, it's possible that some of the "smaller fish" might be able to cop a plea of some kind for lesser charges if they provide evidence against higher-ups. On the other hand, if the prosecutors have solid evidence to build a case against the higher-ups without that, they may have no need to cut a deal with the direct perpetrators.
Ther is no question in my mind from the publicly available evidence that this torture in Abu Ghuraib was a policy sanctioned at higher levels than the prison guards. But how much higher it goes, and how strong the legal cases are that can be made at the higher levels, remains to be seen. - Bruce
Hey, I wondered how long it would be before we heard from Mad Annie Coulter on this one!
One of the sadder instances was Joe Lieberman's bizarre comment at the Armed Services Committee hearing where he made a ritual statement of disapproval of American torture followed by a recital of the 9/11 attacks and the mutilation of the bodies of the soldiers-for-hire in Fallujah, arguing in effect (and almost explicitly) that the latter two events justified the torture seen in the pictures.
If logica mattered to an argument like that, we could point out that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and no Iraqis were involved. And that the Fallujah incident happened *after* the documented torture at Abu Ghuraib was already taking place.
But logic has nothing to do with most pro-torture arguments. - Bruce
In response to: "There is no question in my mind from the publicly available evidence that this torture in Abu Ghuraib was a policy sanctioned at higher levels than the prison guards."
I wonder how you define "a policy sanctioned." There's no question that there was great failure here: failure on the part of the soldiers involved and failure on the part of the superiors for not stopping it when it first happened.
But having covered news for many years, I am well aware of the fact that the failure of various "superiors" -- in many different types of organization -- isn't always because they WANTED something bad to happen, but often because they weren't paying attention to what was happening under them or because they failed to instruct and train those under them properly about rules that they WANT followed.
I think there is definitely responsibility that goes all the way up...after all, failure is failure. But I'm not able to conclude with as much confidence as you are that those at the highest levels not only knew about every single thing going on in that prison (and others), chose to do nothing about it to correct the problem, AND encouraged it to continue.
Patrick
Believe me, Patrick, I *wish* today's Pentagon was run by a George Marshall or a Dwight Eisenhower or an Omar Bradley. But they are not.
Here's a Tom Tomorrow post with a couple of links on high-level responsibility (on of which I've already quoted in a post):
http://www.thismodernworld.com/weblog/mtarchives/week_2004_05_09.html#001526
The other is from the May 17 edition of *Newsweek*:
<< Donald Rumsfeld likes to be in total control. He wants to know all the details, including the precise interrogation techniques used on enemy prisoners. Since 9/11 he has insisted on personally signing off on the harsher methods used to squeeze suspected terrorists held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The conservative hard-liners at the Department of Justice have given the secretary of Defense a lot of leeway. It does not violate the spirit of the Geneva Conventions, the lawyers have told Rumsfeld, to put prisoners in ever-more-painful "stress positions" or keep them standing for hours on end, to deprive them of sleep or strip them naked. According to one of Rumsfeld's aides, the secretary has drawn the line at interrogating prisoners for more than 24 hours at a time or depriving them of light. >>
If Congress and the courts do their jobs, Rummy could wind up in prison over this. - Bruce
Via Atrios' blog (see my Other Journals link), there is this *Washington Post* report from last July (2003), in which Col David Hogg of the 4I (4th Infantry Division) openly bragged about using kidnapping, illegal under the Geneva Conventions.
Rummy should have seen to it that the colonel was removed from command and court-martialled. Congress should also have raised holy hell about it.
This stuff comes back to bite us. Not always right away, and not always in a totally obvious manner. But this kind of illegal conduct was tolerated at a high level. It can destroy military discipline, as well.
That's no small consideration: in Vietnam, assassination of unpopular officers, commonly called "fragging", became a widespread practice when the Vietnam War became as unpopular and as seemingly futile as the Iraq War has now become.
Rummy's mismanagement of the Pentagon has created a snake-pit of problems. - Bruce
More on the term "gulag". This from the *Washington Post*:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15981-2004May10.html
<< The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a unit of U.S. soldiers abused prisoners, is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers -- many of them secret and all off-limits to public scrutiny -- that the U.S. military and CIA have operated in the name of counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
<< These prisons and jails are sometimes as small as shipping containers and as large as the sprawling Guantanamo Bay complex in Cuba. They are part of an elaborate CIA and military infrastructure whose purpose is to hold suspected terrorists or insurgents for interrogation and safekeeping while avoiding U.S. or international court systems, where proceedings and evidence against the accused would be aired in public. Some are even held by foreign governments at the informal request of the United States.
<< "The number of people who have been detained in the Arab world for the sake of America is much more than in Guantanamo Bay. Really, thousands," said Najeeb Nuaimi, a former justice minister of Qatar who is representing the families of dozens of prisoners. >>
I've always thought that the main reason that Ashcroft agreed to let "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh cop a plea is that a full trial would have brought out various violations of law by US troops and/or allies, especially in the treatment of prisoners. - Bruce
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