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Sun. May 16, 2004

Another Iraq Roundup

Once again, rather than vent my own steam, I’ve collected quotes from a few articles over the past few days. Most debate the question of “was this just seven aberrant Guardsmen, or command policy?” Make of them what you will.

We start with one of the seven charged so far, and his sworn statements:

When a fresh crop of detainees arrived at Abu Ghraib prison one night in late October, their jailers set upon them.

The soldiers pulled seven Iraqi detainees from their cells, “tossed them in the middle of the floor” and then one soldier ran across the room and lunged into the pile of detainees, according to sworn statements given to investigators by one of the soldiers now charged with abuse. He did it again, jumping into the group like it was a pile of autumn leaves, and another soldier called for others to join in. The detainees were ordered to strip and masturbate, their heads covered with plastic sandbags. One soldier stomped on their fingers and toes.

The soldiers knew that what they had done was wrong, Specialist Sivits told investigators, at least enough to instruct him not to tell anyone what he had seen. Specialist Sivits was asked if the abuse would have happened if someone in the chain of command was present. “Hell no,” he replied, adding: “Because our command would have slammed us. They believe in doing the right thing. If they saw what was going on, there would be hell to pay.”

Why did he not report the incidents? He replied: “I was asked not to, and I try to be friends with everyone. I see now where trying to be friends with everyone can cost you.”

“I was in the wrong when the above incidents happened,” he said. “I should have said something.”

NY Times: “Accused Soldier Paints Scene of Eager Mayhem at Iraqi Prison“

Next is the story with the big buzz, the latest installment in The New Yorker from Seymour Hersh:

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

The American military and intelligence communities were having little success in penetrating the insurgency. One internal report prepared for the U.S. military, made available to me, concluded that the insurgents “strategic and operational intelligence has proven to be quite good.” [...] The success of the war was at risk; something had to be done to change the dynamic.

The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents [...] The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan — pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets — and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’” — the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails.

In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights. “They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,” Horton told me. “They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it’s going to occur.”

Seymour Hersh: “The Gray Zone”

And The Washington Post offers other evidence that “Knowledge of Abusive Tactics May Go Higher”

Army intelligence officers suspected that a Syrian and admitted jihadist who was detained at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad knew about the illegal flow of money, arms and foreign fighters into Iraq. But he was smug, the officers said, and refused to talk. So last November, they devised a special plan for his interrogation, going beyond what Army rules normally allowed [...] The plan was sent to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.

But the fact that a plan for such intense and highly organized pressure was proposed by Col. Thomas M. Pappas — a senior military intelligence officer in Iraq who took his job at the insistence of a general dispatched from the Pentagon — suggests a wider circle of involvement in aggressive and potentially abusive interrogations of Iraqi detainees, encompassing officers higher up the chain of command, than the Army has previously detailed.

The fact that prison interrogations were so directly controlled by these military directives, as well as the apparent cultural sophistication of some of the abuses, has already led some lawmakers to conclude that much more experienced and senior officers were involved than the seven military police now charged by the Army with wrongdoing.

Washington Post: “Knowledge of Abusive Tactics May Go Higher”

And from a seemingly unlikely source, New Scientist, we get this viewpoint:

The type of mistreatment Iraqi prisoners have suffered at the hands of US soldiers is unlikely to have occurred without the knowledge of higher authorities, say psychologists by contacted by New Scientist – adding support to allegations that the abuse may have been condoned by superiors.

“A lot of people had to be in the know for this to happen. The very fact people felt confident enough to take pictures suggests that this was not something which was a secret,” says Ian Robbins, a consultant clinical psychologist at the traumatic stress service at St George’s Hospital in London, UK, who has treated both victims of torture and torturers.

Robbins told New Scientist: “It looks to me that it was a well thought through process.” He says acts of ill-treatment by rogue operatives acting alone are more likely to be routine low-grade violence — “the odd slapping” — and neglect, such as withholding food or access to toilets.

He also points out that the methods of humiliation depicted in the images would be particularly offensive to Arab men. “If you really wanted to humiliate an Arab man, you would strip him, have a woman present, and then have a woman degrade him.”

New Scientist: “Abuse of Iraqis ‘well thought through’”

And finally, another opinion … from the right … that Rumsfeld has become a burden in the War on Terror, within the very roost he rules:

Rumsfeld has maintained a positive image with much of America because he controls information fanatically and tolerates no deviation from the party line. Differing opinions are punished in today’s Pentagon – and every field general who has spoken plainly of the deficiencies of either the non-plan for the occupation of Iraq, the lack of sufficient troops (in Iraq or overall) or any aspect of Rumsfeld’s “transformation” plan has seen his career ended.

It’s especially noteworthy that the officers who respectfully differed from the views of the Rumsfeld cabal turned out to be right. Consider former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who was right about the need for more troops and even right about the kind of vehicles we’d need in Iraq. For his service to our country, he was treated dismissively and mocked publicly.

I’m privileged to spend a good bit of time with our military officers, from generals to new lieutenants. And I have never seen such distrust of a public official in the senior ranks. Not even of Bill Clinton. Rumsfeld & Co. have trashed our ground forces every way they could. Only the quality of those in uniform saved us from a debacle in Iraq.

Of course, those in uniform don’t get to pick the SecDef. And they continue, as they always will, to loyally carry out their orders to the letter. But to be effective, a SecDef must be respected. He doesn’t have to be liked. But, especially in wartime, he must be trusted.

Rumsfeld has failed the most important test of all.

Ralph Peters: “Why The Troops Don’t Trust Rummy”

But as others have noted, Rumsfeld isn’t going anywhere. First off, to get rid of the Rumsfeld mindset, you’d basically have to scoop out the civilian brain of the Pentagon. Those below him are devoted sycophants. Secondly, if Bush fires Rumsfeld, he’s basically saying the guy who’s been running the Iraq campaign for over a year is a failure. And Bush not only hired him, he gave him full discretion to run the shop as he saw fit, and didn’t provide sufficient oversight. After all, how else could one of his underlings have failed?

You won’t see that kind of admission of failure, even as a part of a much needed course correction. Not in this election year.