Author: Helena

It looks like a good, well-reported copy of Newsweek is about to drop on our doorstep. (Actually, two of them, since for some reason we seem to have two concurrent subscriptions. Sorry about all those trees.)
John Barry and an investigative team have been at work on one large chunk of the brutality in the gulag story. And Michael Isikoff has meanwhile gotten hold of both the Alberto Gonzales memo to W of Januray 25, 2002 urging him to junk the Geneva Conventions with respect to captives taken in Afghanistan, and an (unsuccessful) attempt by Colin Powell, also in memo form, to persuade Gonzo to change his mind.
These memos are now posted on the Newsweek/MSNBC website. Gonzo here and Powell here.
Gonzo was apparently most concerned to protect US intel operatives from any charges they might otherwise be subject to, in US courts, under the 1996 War Crimes Act, which bans any Americans from committing war crimes. (!)

Continue reading “Newsweek revelations”

Yankeedoodle gives his own very detailed and clear analysis of the Taguba report in his Today in Iraq blog today. Check it out. It’s toward the bottom of that post.
YD’s a genius.
His conclusion:

Coupled with the Hersch piece, MG Taguba’s AR 15-6 report and a few other news items I’ve posted recently, it seems to me that there was indeed a blanket policy of coercive interrogation applied to the Iraqi detainees in US custody at Abu Ghraib. The media is missing the story here. The scandal isn’t the lower-ranking MP soldiers we’ve seen in the infamous pictures or their piss-poor leadership– and I’m not defending either of them.
The issue is a blanket policy of coercive interrogation. Somebody made the decision to apply that policy through Military Intelligence channels. Presumably, the decision-maker made a conscious cost-benefit analysis, weighing the potential intelligence value of detainees against the damage that would result if word of the abuse that results from such a policy were made public, especially in light of the administration’s War on Terror.

Continue reading “Yankeedoodle on Taguba”

This morning, Bill the spouse and I were speculating about what the point of all the officially sanctioned brutality in Abu Ghraib prison was.
Once we accept that this was no “furtive”, rogue operation, we have to understand that someone in the military chain of command–most likely the Military Intel command– was actually, under very difficult operational circumstances, devoting quite a lot of manpower and other resources to running these sessions of organized brutality. This, in a situation where manpower is stretched incredibly thin.
Plus, by the accounts of some of the front-line perpetrators, they were given the cameras by superiors and instructed to take the photos and videos.
So what was it all in aid of?

Continue reading “Brutality in the gulag: what for?”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of brutality recently. (Haven’t
we all?) Two recent instances have been the videotaped beheading
of U.S. citizen Nick Berg in Iraq, and the reported display by some
of the people of Gaza of the mortal remains of six Israeli soldiers
blown to smithereens on Tuesday when their APC was the target of an explosive
device in the Gaza City neighborhood of Zeitoun.

News of those incidents comes against the backdrop of continuing revelations
about the depth and extent of the depravities that have been carried out–many
of which are probably still being carried out–within the far-flung reaches
of the United States’ own globe-wide gulag of abuse.

The mainstream media here in the US gives, quite predictably, huge
amounts of coverage to the fate of Berg and the six Israeli soldiers.
I don’t want to underestimate the horror of what happened to those
people. But I do note that Berg, apparently a lone adventurer, voluntarily
traveled into a known war-zone in a distant country, “in search of work”.
Videotaping him while in captivity was already an abuse, as of course–above everything else– was killing him. So, too,
was the videotaping of his decapitation and the subsequent distribution
of both segments of the tape. But Berg was fully clothed throughout
the taping. Of the decapitation, it was reportedly rapid, though it can’t have been painless. His father was
reported
(in the NYT) as saying, “That manner was preferable to a long and torturous
death. But I didn’t want it to become public.”

Of the Israeli soldiers, I note that they were most likely conscripts
in the Israel Defense Forces’ lengthy and as-yet unsuccessful counter-insurgency
operations in Gaza. I ache for their families, and for the families
of all the Israeli conscripts in that war. But it does seem probable
that their deaths were also, like Berg’s, pretty rapid. And though
abuse of human body parts is a ghastly thing to contemplate, I don’t think–either
in that case or that of the US contractors killed in Fallujah in March–that
people should get disproportionately steamed up about that kind of abuse
as compared with the abuses that have been visited (and continue to be
visited) on the bodies and minds of people who are still alive, sentient,
and suffering continuing pain and humiliation.

(I accept that other people may differ with me on this view of abuse
of the mortal remains of people who are already dead versus prolonged abuse
of still-living people.)

But this brings me back to the still central issue of the behavior
of the people running the United States’ global network of mass detention/punishment
centers, and will in short order bring me back to the
need–now, more than ever!–to restate all the norms and practices embodied
in the Geneva Conventions…

Continue reading “On brutality in war”