That was what Nuremburg and Mi Lai were about, but that is not what Abu Ghraib was about. At Abu Ghraib most of the events and acts that were made public, and most of what people are upset about was done by people who were violating orders—with some exceptions, and from what I can tell most of the exceptions were from non-military organizations.
I’m not going to waste a lot more time going into detail, but the people who went to jail went there for violating orders, and the people who got “retired” got it because they were shitty leaders and didn’t make sure their troops where well behaved.
In a “appeal to authority”, I’ve been briefed several times over the last 20 years on the rules of land warfare, I’ve spent time in that area (in fact when the original article was posted I was about 30 miles from Abu Ghraib) and a very good friend of mine was called in to help investigate/document what happened there. When his NDA expires I intend to get him drunk and get the real skinny.
This doesn’t change the thrust of your argument—which not only do I agree with, but is part and parcel of military training these days. It is hammered into each soldier, sailor, marine and airman that you do NOT have to follow illegal orders. Read “Lone Survivor”, a book by Marcus Luttrell about his Seal Team going up against unwinnable odds in the mountains of Afghanistan—because they, as a team, decided not to commit a war crime. Yeah, they voted on it, and it was close.
, but one of those things was not like the other and I felt I had to say something.
I’m not completely convinced that all the people who were punished believed they were not doing what their superiors wanted. I understand that that’s the way the adjudication came out, but that’s what I would expect from a system that knows how to protect itself. But I’ll admit I haven’t paid close attention to any of the proceedings.
Is there any good, short, material laying out the evidence that none of the perpetrators heard anything to reinforce the mayhem from their superiors—non-coms etc. included? Your sentence “the people who went to jail went there for violating orders” leaves open the possibility that some of the illegal activity was done by people who thought they were following orders, or at least doing what their superiors wanted.
If you are right, then I’ll agree that Abu Ghraib was orthogonal to the main point. But I’m not completely convinced, and it seems likely to me that it looks exactly like a relevant case to the Arab street. Whether or not there were explicit orders from the top of the institution, it looked to have been pervasive enough to have to count as policy at some level.
Torture and Democracy argues that torture is a craft apprenticeship technique, and develops when superiors say “I want answers and I don’t care how you get them”.
This makes the question of what’s been ordered a little fuzzy.
(This is a reply to both Mr. Hibbert and Ms. Lebovitz)
I’ve got a couple problems here—one is that there wasn’t an incident @Abu Grhaib, there were a couple periods of time in which certain classes if things happened. Another is that some military personnel (this is from memory since it’s just not worth my time right now to google it) from a reservist MP unit, many of whom were prison guards “in real life” abused some prisoners during one or two shifts after a particularly brutal (in terms of casualties to American forces from VBIEDs/Suicide bombers. These particular abuses (getting detainees naked piled up etc) were not done as part of information gathering, and IIRC many of those prisoners weren’t even considered intelligence sources. Abu Grhaib at the time held both iraqi criminal and insurgent/terrorist suspects.
I haven’t paid much attention to the debate since, and have not wasted the cycles on reading any other sources. As I indicated, I’ve been in the military and rejoined the armed forces around the time that story broke (or maybe later, I’m having trouble nailing down exactly when the story broke).
One thing that did come out was that during the period of time the military abuses took place (as in the shifts that they happened on) there WERE NO OFFICERS PRESENT. That is basically what got the Brigadier General in charge “retired”. (she later whined about how she was mistreated by the system. I’ve got no sympathy. Her people were poorly trained and CLEARLY poorly lead from the top down).
There were other photographs that surfaced of “fake torture”—an detainee dressed in a something that looked like a poncho with jumper cables on his arms—he believe the jumper cables were attached to a power source and would light him up like a christmas tree if he stepped down (again IIRC). This was the actions of a non-military questioner, and someone who thought he was following the law—after all he wasn’t doing anything by scaring the guy there was (absent a weak heart) no risk of injury. It was a really awful looking photo though.
Ms. Levbovitz:
I’ve known people (not current military, Vietnam era) who engaged in a variety of rather brutal interrogation techniques. The one I have in mind was raised in a primitive part of the US were violence and poverty were more common that education, and spent a long time fighting an enemy that would do things like chop off arms of people who had vaccination scars.
His superiors didn’t have to tell him anything. (Note I have never said that “we” haven’t engaged in these sorts of behaviors, only that it didn’t happen under our watch in Abu Grhaib (some of the stuff that happened before we took over, when it was Saddam’s prison? It’s hard for me to watch and I have a bit of tough stomach for that sort of thing).
And this notion that “a person being tortured is likely to say whatever he thinks his captors want to hear, making it one of the poorest methods of gathering reliable information” is pure bullshit.
Yes, if I grab random people off the street and waterboard them I will get no useful information. If 5 people break into my house and kidnap my daughter, but only 4 get out he WILL give me the information I want. He will say anything to stop the pain, and that anything happens to be what I want to hear.
This is again orthagonal to what I was discussing with Mr. Hibbert—I was not claiming that torture doesn’t happen (it does), but that most of what the public knows about what happened at Abu Grhaib wasn’t torture or abuse ordered by those above, and in some cases it was not even what the perpetrator thought of as abuse.
To pick a 2 year old Nit:
That was what Nuremburg and Mi Lai were about, but that is not what Abu Ghraib was about. At Abu Ghraib most of the events and acts that were made public, and most of what people are upset about was done by people who were violating orders—with some exceptions, and from what I can tell most of the exceptions were from non-military organizations.
I’m not going to waste a lot more time going into detail, but the people who went to jail went there for violating orders, and the people who got “retired” got it because they were shitty leaders and didn’t make sure their troops where well behaved.
In a “appeal to authority”, I’ve been briefed several times over the last 20 years on the rules of land warfare, I’ve spent time in that area (in fact when the original article was posted I was about 30 miles from Abu Ghraib) and a very good friend of mine was called in to help investigate/document what happened there. When his NDA expires I intend to get him drunk and get the real skinny.
This doesn’t change the thrust of your argument—which not only do I agree with, but is part and parcel of military training these days. It is hammered into each soldier, sailor, marine and airman that you do NOT have to follow illegal orders. Read “Lone Survivor”, a book by Marcus Luttrell about his Seal Team going up against unwinnable odds in the mountains of Afghanistan—because they, as a team, decided not to commit a war crime. Yeah, they voted on it, and it was close. , but one of those things was not like the other and I felt I had to say something.
I’m not completely convinced that all the people who were punished believed they were not doing what their superiors wanted. I understand that that’s the way the adjudication came out, but that’s what I would expect from a system that knows how to protect itself. But I’ll admit I haven’t paid close attention to any of the proceedings.
Is there any good, short, material laying out the evidence that none of the perpetrators heard anything to reinforce the mayhem from their superiors—non-coms etc. included? Your sentence “the people who went to jail went there for violating orders” leaves open the possibility that some of the illegal activity was done by people who thought they were following orders, or at least doing what their superiors wanted.
If you are right, then I’ll agree that Abu Ghraib was orthogonal to the main point. But I’m not completely convinced, and it seems likely to me that it looks exactly like a relevant case to the Arab street. Whether or not there were explicit orders from the top of the institution, it looked to have been pervasive enough to have to count as policy at some level.
Torture and Democracy argues that torture is a craft apprenticeship technique, and develops when superiors say “I want answers and I don’t care how you get them”.
This makes the question of what’s been ordered a little fuzzy.
(This is a reply to both Mr. Hibbert and Ms. Lebovitz)
I’ve got a couple problems here—one is that there wasn’t an incident @Abu Grhaib, there were a couple periods of time in which certain classes if things happened. Another is that some military personnel (this is from memory since it’s just not worth my time right now to google it) from a reservist MP unit, many of whom were prison guards “in real life” abused some prisoners during one or two shifts after a particularly brutal (in terms of casualties to American forces from VBIEDs/Suicide bombers. These particular abuses (getting detainees naked piled up etc) were not done as part of information gathering, and IIRC many of those prisoners weren’t even considered intelligence sources. Abu Grhaib at the time held both iraqi criminal and insurgent/terrorist suspects.
I haven’t paid much attention to the debate since, and have not wasted the cycles on reading any other sources. As I indicated, I’ve been in the military and rejoined the armed forces around the time that story broke (or maybe later, I’m having trouble nailing down exactly when the story broke).
One thing that did come out was that during the period of time the military abuses took place (as in the shifts that they happened on) there WERE NO OFFICERS PRESENT. That is basically what got the Brigadier General in charge “retired”. (she later whined about how she was mistreated by the system. I’ve got no sympathy. Her people were poorly trained and CLEARLY poorly lead from the top down).
There were other photographs that surfaced of “fake torture”—an detainee dressed in a something that looked like a poncho with jumper cables on his arms—he believe the jumper cables were attached to a power source and would light him up like a christmas tree if he stepped down (again IIRC). This was the actions of a non-military questioner, and someone who thought he was following the law—after all he wasn’t doing anything by scaring the guy there was (absent a weak heart) no risk of injury. It was a really awful looking photo though.
Ms. Levbovitz:
I’ve known people (not current military, Vietnam era) who engaged in a variety of rather brutal interrogation techniques. The one I have in mind was raised in a primitive part of the US were violence and poverty were more common that education, and spent a long time fighting an enemy that would do things like chop off arms of people who had vaccination scars.
His superiors didn’t have to tell him anything. (Note I have never said that “we” haven’t engaged in these sorts of behaviors, only that it didn’t happen under our watch in Abu Grhaib (some of the stuff that happened before we took over, when it was Saddam’s prison? It’s hard for me to watch and I have a bit of tough stomach for that sort of thing).
And this notion that “a person being tortured is likely to say whatever he thinks his captors want to hear, making it one of the poorest methods of gathering reliable information” is pure bullshit.
Yes, if I grab random people off the street and waterboard them I will get no useful information. If 5 people break into my house and kidnap my daughter, but only 4 get out he WILL give me the information I want. He will say anything to stop the pain, and that anything happens to be what I want to hear.
This is again orthagonal to what I was discussing with Mr. Hibbert—I was not claiming that torture doesn’t happen (it does), but that most of what the public knows about what happened at Abu Grhaib wasn’t torture or abuse ordered by those above, and in some cases it was not even what the perpetrator thought of as abuse.