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”
“Hulagu was humane compared with the Americans.”
I read a recent report that at one of the forward bases in the western desert, mil personnel, cooks etc., beat “PUCs” for diversion on their lunch hours.
Hersh. yesterday on the televised conversation this week between Sy and Ritter, discussed that mil officers are using “genocide” with disgust for what we did over three months assault on Tal Afar. An assault only lightly reported as Katrina intervened…
BRING THEM HOME. The battlefield has gone insane. This is unwinnable. Untenable. We have made it into a game preserve. The closing half hour of last week’s Frontline said there is widespread torture, we routinely beat and abuse ordinary Iraqis in the night time sweeps.
REMEMBER: the ICRC, specifically, has never stated that the torture ever stopped.
BRING THEM HOME.
was that the use of past tense in the first two quoted sections improperly gives an impression that this torture has stopped.
the link in the first blockquote will take you to an overview of the report at HRW, and there is a link there to the whole .pdf report.
IIRC, the report doesn’t indicate explicitly one way or another, but Hersch has been reporting it is ongoing and systemic.
Even in the best of men. The emotions released by war are powerful. Like drug addiction, it becomes easier and easier to fall into depravity, and after a while — it becomes a necessity.
This is the true Bush legacy: He is a War Lord.
The culture has costs, but with the exception of a very small minority, there is no indication of a great groundswell within the US demanding an immediate cultural shift.
The warlords produce video games designed to entice American children into the exciting career of exterminating human beings, for a while they had one where the targets wore turbans, they may have made a cosmetic change to that one by now, as plans are made to expand the theatre to include the far east and Latin America. And even in the oil lands, not everyone wears a turban. Kids could get the wrong idea and think it would be OK to let the bare headed ones live.
And yes, the torturers will either become unusable in the course of performing their tasks, and be repatriated in bags and boxes, or they will be repatriated, even if only temporarily, still alive and able to practice their trade on the domestic front.
And it is Americans who will then hide in closets from them, beg them to seek “help” from the same entity who empowered them to cast off any whimsical notions of right and wrong that they may or may not have been taught at home, (“That’s how girls like Lynddie was raised”), it is Americans who will take out restraining orders against them, Americans who will learn that those restraining orders do not save them from the brutes, Americans who will pack their children hastily into the car, without even pajamas or favorite plush, and go speeding off into the night, praying that the brute does not know where cousin Edna lives, Americans who will tearfully say they are sorry, but they also have kids, and isn’t there somewhere else you can hide from him? And Americans who will be guiltily relieved when the asset is redeployed to another theatre, for another tour of stress relief, guiltily relieved that it will be someone else’s child who will receive the benefit of all that training – at least for a while.
Good thing Americans have so much Resolve.
I think it’s too easy to blame video games or any other one or two causes. I happen to play VERY violent video games and enjoy reading Tom Clancy and Richard Marcinko books from time to time. I find it helpful to adopt a POV different from my usual. It’s good to touch base with these impulses.
The real problem, IMHO, is how Americans have given up almost completely on reason, honest communication and settled almost completely on a winner-take-all, war of all-against-all model for ALL aspects of our life. Bad outcomes are “failures”, and “failure” is a measure of moral worth in this country, and if bad things happen you had it coming, and so does everything else.
This country went the-rest-of-the-way insane after nuking Japan and then inflating the threat from “godless communism”. We’ve gotten increasingly batshit crazy since. For all of our Hallmark sentimentality, we truly have forgotten that there are other measures of worth other than money and body counts.
I do think that the “official” warlords offering such games to American children says more about the cultural values than the fact that a video game company makes violent games.
Even among those who disapprove of torture, the question of individual moral responsibility is a very controversial issue, as we have seen even here.
Were the shoe on the other foot, if torturers from Iran or Syria were running wild through the suburbs of AnyTown, USA, it might not seem like such a wedge question, but that brings us back to the ingrained belief in exceptionalism, without which it is unlikely that US would produce so many young men and women who do not think of torturing Iraqis, or Afghans, for example, as “wrong.”
There may not be too much hard and active support visible for the Americans who have refused to commit atrocities, but they stand as evidence that all men are not such weak-willed and suggestible moral zombies that they will torture their brothers when told some gobbledygook by a politician, or because they wish to receive a benefit, or because they are upset and need stress relief.
If only a few dozen have the capacity to know right from wrong with enough certainty in their own hearts and minds to understand what is meant by defending their country, and their constitution, this does not bode well for the US having any armed force at all, even the most rudimentary one for purely defensive purposes, and offers Americans an opportunity to examine their culture and make some difficult decisions on how they feel about having a future.
Video games for fun are fine, but video games produced by the army with the express purpose of attracting children to the idea of participating in military aggression is a red flag, just in case the material in the reports cited by the diary is not.
good point, and I didn’t make the connection that you were referring to the freeware America’s Army game. Braindead today.
One of the most horrifying things about this mess is the utter lack of support, and frequent retailiation, from brass when a principled officer or troop comes forward.
Children can’t consistently distinguish between fantasy and reality. Continually playing violent video games hour after hour after hour desensitizes children to violence. The centers in the brain that react to violence in the real world cease to be aroused in the face of violence, and sometimes the pleasure centers in the brain become aroused such that kids begin to find pleasure in hurting others,.
It isn’t such a far leap to what we see in the shameful torture done in the name of our country. I learned long ago that our country was not all it was portrayed to be, but these past four years have been an outrage of shame beyond all ken.
Thank you for this insightful diary. It’s very important for Americans to first of all confront what is being done in our name, and ask how our young Americans, our sons and daughters, could possibly engage in this behavior.
And second, to understand the nature of the people we are torturing and trying to subjugate. Even people who are against torture often consider these victims as something like Third World children, with no culture or tradition or education or sensitivities to beauty. This is the cradle of civilization, with cultural subtleties we can’t even imagine.
This is part of the tragedy, and part of what we must know about what we are doing.
And that is exactly why the Army operations manual has such carefully laid out rules for treating prisoners of war… because the only way to prevent such atrocities (or at least keep them down to what really ARE a few ‘bad apples’ that can be discovered and dealt with), is to have clear and unambigious procedures and regulations as to how such persons are to be treated while in military custody, coming from the highest level on down, and enforced by all levels of command.
But such policies, procedures and so on MUST start at the top and come down, and they MUST be consistently enforced across the board and up and down the ranks.
But the current policy coming down from the top is that anything can be justified by “war on terror” — and so the whole system is broken from the top down.
When John Kerry returned from Vietnam and testified to the atrocities committed by American troops on civilian Vietnamese, he was reviled.
Where leadership is unscrupulous, or weak, or even missing, it seems that an “anything goes” climate is created. Arrogance, misplaced patriotism – chauvinism -and the encouragement of military brass and higher: all these things give scared and unsophisticated soldiers the impression that they have a license to be as bad as they want to be.
Did you read John Yoo’s theory that the President has unlimited power in wartime? It was today, but I don’t remember where, or I’d give you a link. Maybe the Boston Globe. I could not believe my own senses when I read that Maybe I misread. I’m hoping this is the case, but would like to hear if any of you can add to this, or correct it.
here it is.
Yoo is a sick one.
Whoo is Yoo, anyway? I wish I could remember where I read this.
Madman, I completely overlooked your link. I’m sorry and thank you. “A conservative legal scholar.” He may be sick; he sure is scary. Yoo is a true advocate of torture it seems.
he’s so amazingly eager to be a court toady for the iron fist.
I find it especially amazing when this kind of dangerous crap comes from a child of immigrants, immigrants from South Korea, a country which suffered for many years after the authoritarian North launched a brutal invasion. One would think he would have learned some lessons from that history.
for what we are doing and what we are becoming. We are basically living off center and can so easily be swept up in some made scheme or other without knowing where we are going. There are reasons why people who lust for power want us all off center and enjoy the chaos we see now. And the animal in me wants them pinned to the wall with all their secrets exposed and all their ravening madness put on view to the world.