foreboding tales from Liberal Street Fighter
… and I have no power to stop it.”
Torture in Iraq – By Human Rights Watch
Residents of Fallujah called them “the Murderous Maniacs” because of how they treated Iraqis in detention. They were soldiers of the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, stationed at Forward Operating Base Mercury (FOB Mercury) in Iraq. The soldiers considered this name a badge of honor.(2)
One officer and two noncommissioned officers (NCOs) of the 82nd Airborne who witnessed abuse, speaking on condition of anonymity, described in multiple interviews with Human Rights Watch how their battalion in 2003-2004 routinely used physical and mental torture as a means of intelligence gathering and for stress relief. One soldier raised his concerns within the Army chain of command for seventeen months before the Army agreed to undertake an investigation, but only after he had contacted members of Congress and considered going public with the story.
According to their accounts, the torture and other mistreatment of Iraqis in detention was systematic and was known at varying levels of command. Military Intelligence personnel, they said, directed and encouraged Army personnel to subject prisoners to forced, repetitive exercise, sometimes to the point of unconsciousness, sleep deprivation for days on end, and exposure to extremes of heat and cold as part of the interrogation process. At least one interrogator beat detainees in front of other soldiers. Soldiers also incorporated daily beatings of detainees in preparation for interrogations. Civilians believed to be from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) conducted interrogations out of sight, but not earshot, of soldiers, who heard what they believed were abusive interrogations.
We have loosed our darkest selves out onto a nation that never attacked us, a nation that had already been victimized by a monster of our own creation, a tyrant who celebrated his ego and will in blood, debauchery and wasted treasure. As has historically happened, in order to distance our proxies, our soldiers, from the inhumanity they were being urged to demonstrate, it was necessary to make our victims (un)human:
Detainees in Iraq were consistently referred to as PUCs person under control. This term was devised in Afghanistan to take the place of the traditional designation of prisoner of war (POW), after President Bush decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply there. It carried over to Iraq, even though the US military command and the Bush administration have continually stated that the Geneva Conventions are in effect. […]
Detainees at FOB Mercury were held in so-called PUC tents, which were separated from the rest of the base by concertina wire. Detainees typically spent three days at the base before being released or sent to Abu Ghraib. Officers in the Military Intelligence unit and officers in charge of the guards directed the treatment of detainees. Soldiers told us that detainees who did not cooperate with interrogators were sometimes denied water and given only crackers to eat, and were often beaten. There was little done to hide the mistreatment of detainees: one of the soldiers we interviewed observed torture when he brought newly captured Iraqis to the PUC tents.
The torture of detainees reportedly was so widespread and accepted that it became a means of stress relief for soldiers. Soldiers said they felt welcome to come to the PUC tent on their off-hours to “fuck a PUC” or “smoke a PUC.” “Fucking a PUC” referred to beating a detainee, while “smoking a PUC” referred to forced physical exertion sometimes to the point of unconsciousness. The soldiers said that when a detainee had a visible injury such as a broken limb due to “fucking” or “smoking,” an Army physician’s assistant would be called to administer an analgesic and fill out the proper paperwork. They said those responsible would state that the detainee was injured during the process of capture and the physician’s assistant would sign off on this. Broken bones occurred “every other week” at FOB Mercury.
This isn’t to say that the soldiers are monsters, that we swept up the barbarians amongst us and sent them off marauding, but rather that some of us were sent off unmoored from the controls and strictures we choose to follow and some let loose the barbarian WITHIN all of us, all human beings, and all of the anger and hate and greed and fear and ugliness we like to pretend we don’t feel was cut free, id allowed to rape, torture and plunder.
Iraq is an old and sophisticated culture, a culture being ground into the desert sand by first a puppet regime and now more directly. The have suffered this before, and come back, but at what cost. So much damage, and only a small number left to celebrate and continue a culture responsible for so much beauty:
After an hour of cocktails and conversation, Mr. Shukur carefully removed his oud from its cloth case. An ancestor of the guitar, the oud is a round-backed, 11-stringed wooden instrument that closely resembles a European lute.
Gazing at the instrument, Mr. Madfai chuckled and recited an old line of Iraqi poetry: “No violin or oud can relieve my sorrow.” Several guests laughed on hearing the verse, part of a familiar rhyme.
Mr. Shukur began to play. The sound was a mesmerizing succession of quiet melodies that varied in speed, and were often hard for the unpracticed ear to follow. […]
After the applause subsided, Mr. Shukur explained in a quiet, scratchy voice that what he had played was a makkam called “Husseini.” It was composed, he said, around 1400 by a man who had fled from Baghdad to Karbala disguised as a dervish after he aroused the suspicion of Tamerlane, the great Mongol conquerer.
Conversation resumed, and the guests began chatting about the depredations of the Mongols. Hulagu Khan, who sacked Baghdad in the 13th century, is said to have made a pyramid of the skulls of the city’s poets, scholars and religious leaders, Mr. Madfai said.
“Hulagu?” said Fatina Hamdi, a philosophy professor at Baghdad University. “Hulagu was humane compared with the Americans.”
The oft forgotten damage wrought by this descent into inhumanity is the stain and rot introduced into the torturer, and the culture that welcomes him/her home. We often fail to confront the way war wounds bodies, let alone the damage it does to people’s spirits. What about the damage wrought when one confronts in rising memories not only the “normal” damage of war, but of actual criminal acts beyond “normal”? Will the whirlwind we’ve loosed continue it’s destruction here, a culture already quick to anger and bouts of deadly road rage … a land awash is weapons and failing hopes?
The beast in me
Is caged by frail and fragile bars
Restless by day
And by night rants and rages at the stars
God help the beast in meThe beast in me
Has had to learn to live with pain
And how to shelter from the rain
And in the twinkling of an eye
Might have to be restrained
God help the beast in me— Johnny Cash, “The Beast in Me”