Category: War crimes etc

The NYT had a good op-ed in today in which Milt Bearden, a 30-year veteran of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, made an eloquent plea for the US Supreme Court to uphold the principle that all detainees under US control should enjoy the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
From 1986 through 1989 Bearden was “the senior American intelligence officer during the final three years of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.” In the op-ed he describes how his experience persuaded him that that respect of the Geneva Conventions by the CIA and its allies there brought two notable benefits:

1. It offered the best chance (on the grounds of reciprocity) that operatives for the US and its allies who might be taken captive by their opponents would receive something like decent treatment, and
2. It offered the best chance that captured opponents would be kept alive if captured by CIA allies in Afghanistan; those captives might then become willing sources of intel for the CIA and its allies, and when released– either during or after the war– might become spokespeople for the view that the US was a decent, humane country. (He has a particularly good story there about Aleksandr Rutskoi.)

Well, I am sure that Milt Bearden’s insistence on strict observance of the Geneva Conventions was too frequently honored by the anti-Soviet “mujahideen” in Afghanistan only in the breach. Still, he seemed quite insistent in his piece that he and the rest of the CIA folks there had tried to enforce strict Geneva observance– and also that those attempts to uphold Geneva really helped the US effort in Afghanistan.
That was, of course, the “old”– pre-Porter Goss– CIA. Very 20th century. How much of that ethos still survives there, after Bush put his old buddy Porter Goss in as Director with instructions for a broad house-cleaning? Who knows? (Mind you, Wednesday’s story about the CIA’s global gulag did reveal that there are some present-day qualms inside the Agency about the way it treats detainees. So maybe the ‘old’ CIA is not completely dead…)
I guess, though, that this is really a measure of how bad things have become in the US imperium these days. If even wily old former CIA operatives like Milt Bearden now feel they need to speak out to protest the administration’s abuses– well!

I just checked, and the NTFU website is still up and operating today, even though its owner, Chris Wilson, was arrested yesterday. I think his servers are in the Netherlands. I imagine the anti-obscenity laws there are laxer than in most US jurisdictions.
But how about their anti-war crimes legislation there? I imagine that is much tighter and more effective than in most domestic US jurisdictions?
So can’t we persuade the prosecutors in the Netherlands to go after this site and close it down?
Anyone?
If you go to this page on the NTFU site, you will learn:

1. That whereas access to most of the “sex-trophy” pictures requires registration, and thus presumably also the payment of some fees, access to the two areas titled Pictures From Iraq And Afghanistan – General and Pictures From Iraq And Afghanistan – Gory require no registration and are thus available to anyone. (Also, at least one of the images in the latter category combines gory war-trophyism with sexual lewdness in a really troubling way.)
2. The site has 191,000 registered users.

Of course, it is quite possible that if the site gets shut down in the Netherlands, it would merely migrate to some less-policed corner of the globe. But does Netherlands really want to be known as the home of trophy-displaying war criminals like the ones posting their photos there?
A final point. Though I think it is very important that these photos be taken down off the web, it is even more important that US forces operating all around the world cease engaging in the torture and abuse of detainees that is continuing, to this day. For this to happen, as I have always argued, we need clear and unequivocal leadership from the very top…
And if there are to be prosecutions of US government personnel, these should go right up the chain of command to the very top and not be limited to the misguided grunts down at the bottom.

Chris Wilson, the Florida man who owns and runs the NTFU body-part pornsite, was arrested yesterday by the police in Polk County, Florida.
(That site was the one that posted grisly pictures of dead Iraqis and Afghans interspersed with links to other forms of photographic “trophies”, that is the sexual tropies of its numerous male participants… See how JWN helped break this story in late August, here.)
Wilson was charged with one count of wholesale distribution of obscene material and 300 misdemeanor counts related to 20 online films and 80 photographs obtained from his Web site. Bail was set at $151,000.
However, this Orlando Sentinel story revealed today that,

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said late Friday that the 300 obscenity-related charges against Wilson all involve sexual content on his Web site — and not graphic war-scene images posted by soldiers.

Sentinel reporter Anthony Colarossi added that,

Judd said his obscenity charges have nothing to do with the Army’s interest in the case, and he maintained in a lengthy interview that he was not pressured to investigate Wilson.
“We unilaterally initiated the investigation without any support, help or encouragement from the federal government,” Judd said.
… Before Wilson’s arrest, Polk County Judge Angela Cowden found probable cause that the images and tapes were obscene, Judd said. The obscenity statute is one of the few in which a judge must make such a determination before an arrest is made. Investigators also obtained a search warrant and removed computers from Wilson’s home.
They will be looking for customer lists and other documents to assist the investigation. Information that Army investigators might need in their search will be made available, Judd said.
Though Wilson’s equipment was removed, his Web site remained in operation Friday because the servers used to run the site are overseas.
“It’s never our intent to put somebody out of business,” Judd said. “All we ask is that they obey the laws of Florida. We’ve been investigating vice and pornography long enough to know pretty much what crosses the line. This didn’t just cross the line. This left the line many miles behind.”

It should be an interesting case. When Chris Wilson came onto this JWN comments board back in August, he argued about the pictures of body-parts of dead Iraqis and Afghans on his site that:

I think everyone should see them. This is a side of the war that is shown from the soldiers THEMSELVES. Where else can you go see that? Right now all we see are pics from the media. I don’t like the media feeding me things, I want to see first hand what’s going on there.
No one making you look, if you don’t like it; don’t look. You know exactly what you are going to see when you go there. There are no tricks, it’s spelled out in plain english.

His lawyer was quoted as saying much the same thing in Colarossi’s story. (Hat-tip to JS who sent me the tip-off on the arrest story.)

The US military has reportedly closed the disciplinary/criminal investigation that it claimed it had launched into the involvement of US military personnel with the the body-part porn website, NTFU.
Incredibly fast work, huh, given that this time nine days ago the army still claimed it had not even heard of the abusive activities at the NTFU site?
By the way, both of those links above link to JWN. The first of them is to the Al-Jazeera web-site’s story of today. It also quotes me as saying various wise things. (Check ’em out.)
Well, the Army might have hurriedly closed down that “investigation”. But now, another detainee-abuse issue seems about to explode in its face. That is the story of the more than 70 photographs and three videos depicting abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq– images that most members of the US Congress have had a chance to see but that the US public, which pays the salaries of both the members of Congress and the officers and soldiers responsible for detainee affairs, has thus far not been able to see.
Today, a federal court in New York agreed with the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) that these images should indeed be made available to the public.
Significantly, the judge in this case, Alvin K. Hellerstein, ruled that publication of the images will help answer to questions both about the behavior of the soldiers depicted therein– and also about,

the command structure that failed to exercise discipline over the troops, and the persons in that command structure whose failures in exercising supervision may make them culpable along with the soldiers who were court-martialed for perpetrating the wrongs…

The command structure that empowered (and quite possibly also encouraged) the commission of those abuses: Yes! That is exactly where public attention and governmental investigations now need to focus.
… Is there a disconnect in what I am arguing here? Namely, that the publication of some images of the desecrated bodies and body parts of some Iraqis and Afghanis (by NTFU) is something to be decried, while the publication of other images– that may well show scenes that are very similar, from inside Abu Ghraib– is something that is to be applauded?
No, I don’t think there is a disconnect. The context and intention of the act of making these images public is extremely important; and they are very different in each of these cases.
As a member of the US citizenry, I certainly want to be informed, in a responsible way, of the end-product of what it is that my taxes have been “buying”, in terms of the behavior of US soldiers during the war in Iraq. What I don’t want is that my taxes should support the ability of individual soldiers or groups of soldiers to engage in the “trophy-displaying” publication of images of the desecrated remains of Iraqis or Afghanis on commercial websites. (And especially, I would say, on commercial porn websites.)
In addition, the most important thing right now is to push all these investigations of abuse and malfeasance as far up the chain of command as they need to go. As I have noted all along with regard to the use of abuse and torture by US forces, the only way to stop it is through the clear and unequivocal exercise of leadership at the very top of the chain of command.
Since President Bush has thus far chosen not to adopt such a clear leadership role, then the best way we have left to change his behavior is through the relentless pursuit of investigations that come up the chain of his administration from the bottom up. Kudos to the ACLU– and to Human Rights Watch– for their dogged persistence in this regard.

When most people in the west think about people who perpetrate
atrocities, they shift immediately (if they were not already in it)
into “judgment and denunciation mode”; and for the vast majority of
western rights activists that shift seems also to involve shutting down their
normal human curiosity about their fellow-humans, altogether.

It strikes me this shutting-down is of as little utility in the case of
atrocity perpatrators as it is in that of terrorists.  Okay, we
all decry, oppose, are horrified by (or whatever) both terrorism and
the perpetration of atrocities… And maybe for some people it makes
them feel good to verbalize these denunciations in loud and judgmental
terms.

If, however, a person wants to end the perpetration of
either terrorism or other forms of atrocity, it is extremely helpful–
actually, indispensable– to try to find an answer to the question of
“why do some people end up doing these things?”  Then, on
the basis of the results of such enquiries one can perhaps start to
craft better approaches and policies that can end pepetration in the
present and prevent it in the future.

Undertaking such an enquiry need not detract from one’s moral
horror.  There is a problem, perhaps, in English, in the use of
the term “to understand”.  At a purely intellectual level, to
“understand” how a bicycle works implies no moral stance toward the
working of bicycles at all.  But to many people, the idea that it
might be worthwhile trying to “understand” why someone perpetrates
atrocities too often is taken to mean that one has (or is in danger of
developing) some sympathy toward the perpetrator.

I’ll say yes, that is a risk.  I have interviewed a number of
people of whose acts I very strongly disapproved– and quite
frequently, the process of doing the interviewing both increases my
intellectual and human understanding of why the person acted as he did and engenders some sense of
basic human commonality with him.  (This is not the same as saying that
I start to feel some approval of his devastating acts.  It is, I
think, a fairly immature individual who is unable to make any
meaningful distinction between a fellow human and the very worst of his
or her acts.)

But oh, how much easier to stay on one’s own moral high horse,
expressing one’s denunciations left, right, and center without
undertaking the arduous task of seeking to understand the motivations
of the person one denounces!

How easy just to say that person who commits atrocious acts is just
inherently “evil”, and that’s that.

… All the above is a very wordy introduction to something I want to
write here about the value of the still-tiny field of enquiry called
“Perpetrator Studies”.  It’s a field that we need a lot more
of!  (I see that the estimable, Cape Town-based Institute for
Justice and Reconciliation has been doing
a little of it; basing their approach on that used in one portion
of the TRC’s work.  Are there other good PS projects out there?)

I have just finished reading a remarkable book by the Croatian writer
Slavenka Drakulic, called They would
never hurt a fly: War criminals on trial in The Hague.  I
think this book– and Pumla Gobodo-Madikazele’s A human being died that night— 
between them provide a very useful gateway into “Perpetrator Studies”.

Drakulic is a very talented writer– of both fiction and
non-fiction.  I’ve written about her book Balkan Express here before. 
That was a collection of essays she wrote during the Wars of the
Balkans.  This latest book is based on a lengthy “research trip”
she made to The Hague, in order to observe proceedings at the
International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY).  In
the introduction she says:

It rapidly becomes clear in the body of the book what her answer is: not “monsters”, but the
“ordinary people like you or me.”

A key turning point in Drakulic’s narrative comes on p.50 of my Abacus
paperback edition, where she is describing and reflecting on the
trial of three Bosnian-Serb militiamen accused (and found guilty) of
having participated in and helped to organize the mass sexual demeaning
and defilement of literally hundreds of  Bosniak women and girls
whom they treated as sex-slaves.

She writes:

Continue reading “What causes the perpetration of atrocities?”

This morning, I asked if it was true that US service members are now trading grotesque pictures of Iraqis and Afghans who have been or are being terribly abused onto a porn site in Netherlands. I’d read about it (in my lousy Italian) on the Italian News Agency ANSA website, here. But I can’t really read Italian so I invited JWN commenters to help out.
As always when I ask for help here, I got it. Thanks to those who commented and to the creators and maintainers of this great information-leveraging system, the internet… Here’s what commenters said. (And a belated hat-tip to the Belgian informant from whom I gained the original tip.)

I posted the main post at 10:18 a.m. At 12:58 p.m. Christiane (who’s Swiss) came back with a first quick rendering of the ANSA piece in English. Later in the day she polished and completed it as follows:

Photo Horror- War in Iraq in exchange of free access to porn sites
Milano. As if they were [US-style baseball] ‘trading cards’, terrifying pictures of Afghans and Iraqis dismembered by war explosions are exchanged on the web in order to get free access to a pornographic site
The sending of the photographs, showing atrocious crudeness, is proposed to American soldiers on duty in the war fields. The website is meant for them and they are directly invited to send their horror material in order to get access to the pornographic section.
As can be seen by entering the network, more than a few weren�t able to resist to the call of the www.nowthatsfuckedup.com website, whose homepage says : �If you are an American soldier on duty in Iraq, Afghanistan, or in another theater of war and you would like a free access to the site, you can publish the pictures which you or your mates have taken during your service”.
The purely pornographic site is structured like a forum, where the users exchange amateur material not protected by a copyright. The pictures go from voyeuristic to hardporn pictures and video of pretended fianc�es and wives. There are two ways to access to the pornographic content : the users can pay a fee, or upload �interesting� material. And here enters the special discount for soldiers.
In two special sections the soldiers have the possibility to gain a free access to the hottest pictures, by uploading photographies and videos realized during their duty time. One part covers general themes, with portraits of troops, sometimes marked by a military sense of humour, while the other section looks like a true museum of the horrors, with mostly pictures of dead Iraqui and dismembered corpses. Actually, as soon as entering the section, you are warned that �it�s one of the most cruel, so persons who don�t want to look at that kind of material shouldn�t go further�.
Browsing through the posts is like entering an infernal spiral : each message in facts contains dreadful pictures, in an escalation of barbarty and crudeness increased by the comments of the site readers. Inflamed messages, not horrified at all by the view of these awful snaps taken on the theater of war. One sees corpses, carbonized, without head, without members, a face in a plate, the remains of a kamikaze, an arm, legs, all that featured with inhuman comments, nearly exulting about these butcheries. Adding to the horror of the members thrown in the dust and the crusched heads, there are captions like �The only good Iraqi is a dead Iraqi� or ironical references like �Poor boy ! what if the 72 virgins were all whores ?� Even the subject line of the posts struck by their cynicism : the pragmatic ones like �Some pictures in exchange of the access�, or �Dead men for the entry�, but also the barbaric quiz �Give a name to this part of human body�, preluding the vision of a piece of bloody flesh, burned out and crushed, in which it is difficult to recognize a human face.
Among the pictures found in the more general section are also some pictures of wounded US soldiers, sent by themselves. An Italian blogger whose nickname is Staib has drawn attention to this site of the horrors. He has talked about it vaguely on his own blog and also on several portals of counter information.
[Personal comment (from Christiane):
All this sounds like profanation of the dead and is clearly against the Geneva conventions. It shows also the kind of mental damages and cold inhuman behaviors which wars never fail to bring along. Who are the surfers visiting this site? are they mainly US soldiers on the theatre of war? or are there other sick minds developping a fascination for these morbid scenes ? Could it be a psy-op of the US intelligence in order to frighten the resistance and force it to cooperate? But as Susan Sonntag demonstrated : horror pictures can always be interpreted in different ways : as propaganda, in order to intimidate the enemy, or to increase the hate and the wish to fight, or as a means to denounce these horrors.

Thanks so much, C!
Along the way, commenter George (likely not the Prez, right?) contributed another rough (and machine-made) translation of the whole piece.
Mark from Ireland then came in with this:

Continue reading “Body part porn and war”

Today I was cruising the always informative portion of the American Civil Liberty Union’s website where the ACLU has been posting the documents re US torture that it has painstakingly been able to get released by the Dept. of Defense.
One of the documents they have there (see below) gives a graphic description– by a civilian contractor employee working in a “monitoring room” overlooking an interrogation room in Gitmo in April 2003– of extremely humiliating sexual abuse of a detainee being performed by a female military interrogator.
(The DOD is currently trying to say it can argue in secret as to why it need not comply with court orders to release further photos, videos, and other documents providing evidence of abuse of detainees in various US-run detention centers.)
Anyway, I was looking through this collection of government docs that was released– in heavily “redacted” form– by the government on July 26. ( A short guide to what’s in that large, lengthy PDF document can be found here.)
What interested me in the 139-page-long PDF collection was the “story” that gradually emerged there in which a contractor for a company called ACS Defense working alongside uniformed military personnel in Gitmo in April 2003, reported on some bad abuse he’d seen being used inside an interrogation room there… But what this guy did was he rported it to his own supervisors in the contractor company, rather than keeping his testimony within the military chain of command.
It’s kind of hard to read the story clearly… Primarily because of the huge swathes of black-out redactions, but also because the DOD unhelpfully released the docs in reverse order… The general effect is of reading a mystery novel in which only a small proportion of the “clues”, and of the final resolution of the story, are ever provided– plus, you have to read it backwards. Also, given that nmost of the names are redacted, the dramatis personae is very thin and hard to follow.
So anyway, if you go down to p.87 in the PDF file, you find the contractor’s original description of what he saw as he stood with others in a “Monitoring room” overlooking two interrogation rooms in Camp Delta, Gitmo, on April 22, 2003.
The author of this memo, which was dated April 26, 2003, describes himself as having previously been trained in, and used, interrogation techniques in the US army. He says, ” I had never seen in FM [Field Manual] 34-52 any section describing or prescribing what [the interrogator] had done to the detainee.”
So you’ll have to go to the doc to read what that contract employee saw… Basically, it was this:

Continue reading “Contract employees at Gitmo”

This afternoon I walked to the library in 94-degree heat to pick up some books I’ve been wanting to read for a while. On the way home, I already nearly finished reading (in English) Sartre’s “Introduction” to Henri Alleg’s classic testimony of his 1957 torture at the hands of the French in Algeria, The Question.
Alleg was a French-Algerian communist who had previously been a newspaper editor. The portion of his narrative that I’ve read so far already provides a chilling preview to what the US has been doing in its ongoing global gulag, including sickening descriptions of being tortured with electricity and of being “waterboarded”.
Plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose.
Oh, and at one point they tied his neck-tie onto him like a dog-leash and tried to parade him round on his knees like a dog. All that in the first 20 pages, and many more to go… Not for the faint of heart.
Regarding Sartre’s text there, he speaks very strongly to the current condition of US citizens regarding our society’s condoning of the vilest tortures and abuses of “the Other”. I did a quick Google search to see if I could find an online version of it and could not.
Might I suggest to the publisher of Harper’s magazine or some similar publication that they contact the publisher of this English-language edition, George Braziller, and get permission to republish Sartre’s entire text?
Not being able to link to an existing on-line version, I shall type out a few quick excerpts here:

Continue reading “Sartre speaks from beyond the grave”

So the Iraqi Special Tribunal is going to try Saddam for invading Kuwait in 1990– but not for invading Iran in 1980? This, despite the fact that the human carnage that resulted from the 1980 invasion was on a far, far greater scale than that occasioned by the 1990 invasion…
Can it be that the people organizing the Special Tribunal place a higher value on the lives of Kuwaitis than on those of Iranians?
Or did the decision come out this way because the US opposed the Saddamist aggression against Kuwait, but condoned, encouraged, and even supported the aggression against Iran?
Whatever the reason: shame on the Tribunal!