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Mon. Aug 23, 2004

Three Sides of Abu Ghraib

Slowly but surely, the people we’ve come to know as the “principals” of Abu Ghraib are facing the music. To be sure, there are others whose name we don’t know as well, who share responsibility for what happened. The ones now facing court martial don’t rank above Sergeant. But of the names we do know, it’s interesting to see how they are facing their fate. One appears to be trying to do the right thing, one appears to be a lying waste of skin, and one is in protective custody due to death threats, even though he didn’t abuse a single Iraqi. And, eventually, he has a vast tale to tell.

For now, there seem to be plenty of people willing to paint a picture of a few poor under-trained troops led by the nose by superiors. The logic used to do so is painful:

The senator [John Warner, R-Va.] explained, “These youngsters didn’t understand the nuances of Muslim culture.” They wouldn’t, therefore, have known how to stage these photographs. Those pictures, he understood, were meant to be used as threats to get the prisoner to come up with valuable information.

This was not quite the explanation given by one authority who had been on the scene. Pfc. England told investigators in May that she and the others thought the piles of naked prisoners and others posed simulating sexual acts “looked funny” and that was why the pictures were taken. No special instructions had come down about getting prisoners to talk, she testified under questioning, even while holding fast to her claim that she and the others had only been following orders. She would later change her tale. As the Abu Ghraib story began exploding, her part in it taking on ever larger dimensions, she told TV interviewers that superiors had provided detailed instructions on the posing of the pictures.

In no other period in memory than this — even granted the exceptional political bitterness in the air — have we seen so persistent an effort to deflect blame from the individuals actually guilty of perpetrating reprehensible acts, to others. In our current moral accounting, apparently, the idea of individual guilt doesn’t appear to count for much, certainly when it comes to the military. Workaday privates are the salt of the earth, at the mercy of the amoral men wearing brass — so films and cartoons have instructed us for decades. That we are not, in the matter of Abu Ghraib, dealing with cartoons, seems to have been clear to at least one soldier of modest rank — Sgt. Joseph Darby of the 372nd — when he downloaded the pictures and turned them in.

OpinionJournal: “The Youngsters at Abu Ghraib”

Sgt. Darby. He’s the one guy who either [1] retained a functional sense of right and wrong while those around him lost theirs, or [2] willfully disobeyed the “orders” the others claim they were following when they abused the prisoners. More about Darby later. Much more.

But Sen. Warner’s phrase, “these youngsters,” is laughable. Two of the accused, Sgt. Ivan “Chip” Frederick and Specialist Charles Graner are 37 and 35 years old, respectively. They may be half Sen. Warner’s age, but they are more than old enough to know better than some “youngster.”

But I’ve covered all this before. There’s no excuse that you were “just following orders,” because any soldier is taught they have a duty to disobey illegal orders. And these orders, if they existed, are pretty clearly illegal to anyone familiar with the Geneva Convention or the relevant Army manuals. There’s no excuse that you weren’t trained in the Geneva Convention or the relevant Army manuals, when they are available online to anyone with an Internet connection. Like the Internet connection they used to spread these pictures around.

However, I have to hand it to Charles Graner (and his lawyers) for such bald faced audacity (emphasis mine): “A U.S. soldier at the center of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal sought on Monday to strike from his court martial potentially incriminating photographs at a hearing before a military judge in Germany. Specialist Charles Graner and three others are accused of sexually humiliating and, in some cases, beating Iraqi detainees at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison [...] Graner’s lawyers said the photographs had been taken without his consent.”

I do believe in “innocent until proven guilty,” but on this one matter, I think I’ve got all the physical evidence I need. Does the man at the top of this prisoner pyramid look like he’s being photographed without his consent? How about this Smiley Boy, leaning in to pose with a dead Iraqi? Or here, smiling again and looking straight at the camera, with his arm around the woman with whom he committed adultery, the now infamous Lynndie England (oh, yeah, there’s tapes of that, too, and in the military, adultery is actionable).

“Graner, 35, is accused of photographing a detainee being dragged by Private First Class Lynndie England on a leash, and posing for a picture by a pile of naked detainees in November.” Of course, he was forced to take that photo, without his consent, I’m sure. Sgt. Darby says that when he asked Graner about the photos, Graner said to him, “The Christian in me says it’s wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, ‘I love to make a grown man piss himself.’”

And of course, inside a Good Man, the corrections officer wins out over the Christian every time. Well, I’m no corrections officer, but I hope Graner is the one pissing himself today. Because he appears to me to be 250 pounds of shit in a 200 pound bag, a pitiful waste of skin. Oh, you might think, what do you expect a man on trial to say?

Well, how about the truth? How about being a man? Like your former buddy, Chip Frederick.

Staff Sgt. Ivan L. “Chip” Frederick II, of the Maryland-based 372nd Military Police Company, said in a written statement e-mailed to The Associated Press by his attorney: “I have accepted responsibility for my actions at Abu Ghraib prison. I will be pleading guilty to certain charges because I have concluded that what I did was a violation of law.”

He also expressed concern about Spc. Joseph M. Darby, a member of the 372nd credited with tipping off Army investigators to the abuse. Relatives of Darby said last week that he is in protective military custody, partly because of threats from people in their communities who believe he betrayed his fellow soldiers.

Frederick said he harbored no ill will toward Darby: “He did what he thought was right, and it was right,” Frederick wrote.

ABCNEWS.com: “Abu Ghraib Soldier Admits to Some Charges”

Frederick not only admits he did wrong, he expresses concern for the whistleblower, Sgt. Darby. Joe Darby and his family are in hiding, due to the death threats. Because he saw a horrible wrong, and did the right thing by exposing it. And he wants you to know what he’s been through, and that he only exposed a fraction of it.

Coming back was like parachuting into a jungle with only glimpses of what lay below. What would people think? The military had been kind to him; but then, the military knew the truth. It was easy to be kind when you knew the truth, when you knew what else happened at Abu Ghraib, how far the abuse had gone, how much farther than all those photos in the news, farther than all the rumors and gossip, farther than almost any decent person could imagine. It was easy to be kind when you knew the depths of the depravity he had found in that cold concrete prison with the fresh coat of yellow Coalition paint and the slow fans chopping overhead. But the public didn’t know all that. The public didn’t know the truth. Oh, they knew about the piles of naked prisoners, and the hooded figure attached to electrical wires. They knew about the inmates being forced to imitate sex acts, and being terrorized by attack dogs. But how would they feel when they knew the rest? That was the real question.

Down at the gas station, Clay overheard some guys say that Joe was “walking around with a bull’s-eye on his head,” just casually, just like, oh, everybody knows Joe’s dead. Some of Bernadette’s family even let her know that other members of the family were against her now, that they couldn’t support a traitor. The more Bernadette heard, the more paranoid she became. How serious was this? [...] Within a few minutes, everything began to shift around Bernadette, and it was hard to tell what was happening. She found herself in the passenger seat of an unmarked government vehicle, speeding down the highway to some unknown destination, Clay’s truck right behind her with Maxine and the kids packed inside, the whole group snatched up by military protective custody without any prior warning or even a clear idea of why. Bernadette called Virginia and said, “We’re in protective custody now. I don’t know where we’re going, but we’ll call you when we get there.”

The whole thing felt insane. Could all this really be happening? Did they know something she didn’t?

Well, yes. Quite a few things, actually. Like, one thing Bernadette didn’t know — because almost nobody knows it, because almost everybody who does know has either been lying or keeping it a secret — is the rest of the story, what really happened at Abu Ghraib. Oh, you hear allusions to the fact that certain things haven’t been told, like Rumsfeld saying in May that the whole story is “a good deal more terrible” than what you’ve seen. But you don’t hear Rumsfeld saying any more than that, or explaining what “more terrible” means.

You don’t hear anybody explaining, for example, how Private Lynndie England, the woman in so many of those pictures, the one smiling and laughing and giving the thumbs-up, wasn’t even supposed to be in the cellblock, how she didn’t have any police authority and shouldn’t have been dealing with inmates in the first place. You don’t hear much of anything about her job, because the truth is, her job was something else entirely. Lynndie England was an administration clerk; not an MP like Joe but the equivalent of a secretary.

There are pictures of at least one Iraqi man being raped with a light stick. You didn’t see those pictures on the news though, didn’t hear Rumsfeld talk about that. Just like nobody except Janis Karpinski is talking about the three military-intelligence officers who were sent home in January after the sexual assault of two female prisoners. That case is confidential, just like the roughly 5,950 pages of Major General Antonio Taguba’s 6,000-page investigation of the Abu Ghraib scandal are “confidential.” Just like all the pornography coming out of Abu Ghraib is being kept from you, the videos of Lynndie England fellating an unidentified man, the pictures of soldiers having sex. The members of the United States Congress apparently couldn’t tell who the man was when they watched the highlight reel on a loop in a dark room on Capitol Hill one afternoon in May, an event that one Congressman calls “Bizarro World,” with representatives coming and going while hundreds of pictures and videos rolled by, people like Nancy Pelosi sitting in front of a screen of depravity, with a military minder occasionally interjecting, “This one’s from Tier 1A.”

That wasn’t on 60 Minutes II, either.

Just try calling your senator and asking him about that. Ask him what he saw. Any children? Pornography? Sexual abuse? Richard Durbin: No comment. Lindsey Graham: Can neither confirm nor deny. Joseph Lieberman: No response. Sam Brownback: No response. Carl Levin: No comment. Joseph Biden: No comment. Ron Wyden: Can neither confirm nor deny. Tim Johnson: Can neither confirm nor deny. Jon Corzine: No comment. Chuck Schumer: No response. Barbara Boxer: No comment. John Warner: No comment. Lincoln Chafee: No comment. Dianne Feinstein: No comment.

It’s an election year, by the way.

Three months in protective custody have been a mixed blessing [...] It’s not a bad life, really, being swept off the floor of reality. The army provides a daily stipend for their groceries, and they’ve had more free time than you can imagine, almost enough time to make up for all the nights together they’ve lost. But the investigations into the Abu Ghraib scandal will be over someday soon, and Joe’s gag order will be lifted, and they will emerge back into the world. The reporters will all come flocking to them again, and the phone will return to ringing, but this time Bernadette and Joe are ready. They’ve had three months to think about it, and they have a lot to say. There is still a lot more to know. They want you to hear it.

GQ: “The Conscience of Joe Darby”

That extensive quote is just one small part of a nine page article you owe it to yourself to read.

The article makes it clear, as bad as it has been, this is far from over. As much as we think we know, we don’t know half the tale. And no matter how horrible the things we’ve already seen, there’s much worse that we haven’t been allowed to see. Your elected representatives have, but they’re not talking. Joe Darby has seen it. And some day, he will tell us.

At this low end of the scandal (enlisted and non-commissioned officers) we seem to see about a 50-50 split on denial/truth. Do you think we’ll see the same half and half split as we move up the chain of command? If we ever do?