'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

On brutality in war

I've been thinking a lot about the nature of brutality recently. (Haven't we all?) Two recent instances have been the videotaped beheading of U.S. citizen Nick Berg in Iraq, and the reported display by some of the people of Gaza of the mortal remains of six Israeli soldiers blown to smithereens on Tuesday when their APC was the target of an explosive device in the Gaza City neighborhood of Zeitoun.

News of those incidents comes against the backdrop of continuing revelations about the depth and extent of the depravities that have been carried out--many of which are probably still being carried out--within the far-flung reaches of the United States' own globe-wide gulag of abuse.

The mainstream media here in the US gives, quite predictably, huge amounts of coverage to the fate of Berg and the six Israeli soldiers. I don't want to underestimate the horror of what happened to those people. But I do note that Berg, apparently a lone adventurer, voluntarily traveled into a known war-zone in a distant country, "in search of work". Videotaping him while in captivity was already an abuse, as of course--above everything else-- was killing him. So, too, was the videotaping of his decapitation and the subsequent distribution of both segments of the tape. But Berg was fully clothed throughout the taping. Of the decapitation, it was reportedly rapid, though it can't have been painless. His father was reported (in the NYT) as saying, "That manner was preferable to a long and torturous death. But I didn't want it to become public."

Of the Israeli soldiers, I note that they were most likely conscripts in the Israel Defense Forces' lengthy and as-yet unsuccessful counter-insurgency operations in Gaza. I ache for their families, and for the families of all the Israeli conscripts in that war. But it does seem probable that their deaths were also, like Berg's, pretty rapid. And though abuse of human body parts is a ghastly thing to contemplate, I don't think--either in that case or that of the US contractors killed in Fallujah in March--that people should get disproportionately steamed up about that kind of abuse as compared with the abuses that have been visited (and continue to be visited) on the bodies and minds of people who are still alive, sentient, and suffering continuing pain and humiliation.

(I accept that other people may differ with me on this view of abuse of the mortal remains of people who are already dead versus prolonged abuse of still-living people.)

But this brings me back to the still central issue of the behavior of the people running the United States' global network of mass detention/punishment centers, and will in short order bring me back to the need--now, more than ever!--to restate all the norms and practices embodied in the Geneva Conventions...

First of all, then, the gulag. How big is it? According to a really excellent piece of reporting by Dana Priest and Joe Stephens in yesterday's WaPo:

All told, more than 9,000 people are held by U.S. authorities overseas, according to Pentagon figures and estimates by intelligence experts, the vast majority under military control. The detainees have no conventional legal rights: no access to a lawyer; no chance for an impartial hearing...

Priest and Stephens write:

The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq ... is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers -- many of them secret and all off-limits to public scrutiny -- that the U.S. military and CIA have operated in the name of counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

These prisons and jails are sometimes as small as shipping containers and as large as the sprawling Guantanamo Bay complex in Cuba. They are part of an elaborate CIA and military infrastructure whose purpose is to hold suspected terrorists or insurgents for interrogation and safekeeping while avoiding U.S. or international court systems, where proceedings and evidence against the accused would be aired in public. Some are even held by foreign governments at the informal request of the United States.

In a piece in today's WaPo, Bradley Graham and Thomas Ricks refer to a document distributed by the Senate Armed Services Committee that lists the US military's "Interrogation Rules of Engagement" for Iraq. Unfortunately, though the paper version of the newspaper presents a copy of this document as a graphic along with the article, they don't present it at all, that I can find, in the web version.

Anyway, on the left of this sheet they list fifteen "Approved methods for all detainees", which include such familiar means of psychological manipulation as "We know all", "Futility", "Rapid Fire", etc. There are three items in that list that look particularly interesting: "Fear Up Harsh", "Fear Up Mild", and "Reduced Fear"...

But the more interesting list is at the top of the right of the sheet. It's headed, "Require CG's Approval: Requests must be submitted in writing". (CG is the "Commanding General, which would I think be Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.) These techniques include the following:

• Change of scenery down [HC-- what on earth is this a euphemism for?]
• Dietary Manip (monitored by med)
• Environmental Manipulation
• Sleep Adjustment (reverse sched)
• Isolation for longer than 30 days
• Presence of Mil Working Dogs
• Sleep Management (72 hrs max)
• Sensory Deprivation (72 hrs max)
• Stress Positions (no longer than 45 min)

Beneath that extremely troubling list, is a list of "Safeguards". These include that the techniques used "must be annotated in questioning strategy", that "Approaches must always be humane [!] and lawful", and, amazingly, that "The Geneva Conventions apply within [the Iraq field of operations]". The first of those safeguards indicates that-- if it was indeed complied with at all-- somwhere in the records there might well be a very full list of instances in which any of the methods from the second list have been applied.

Shouldn't we, the US public who pay the goons out there at work in the prisons to do this work, demand to see this list?

Nor, it seems, is it only in Iraq that such IROE's are in place. In today's NYT, Carlotta Gall has a great piece of reporting on the account given by a former police colonel in Afghanistan, Sayed Nabi Siddiqui of Sheikho, near Gardez. Siddiqui said he was (quite mistakenly) taken into custody by the US forces last July. Gall writes that Siddiqui:

gave a graphic account in an interview this week of being subjected to beating, kicking, sleep deprivation, taunts and sexual abuse during about 40 days he spent in American custody in Afghanistan last summer. He also said he had been repeatedly photographed, often while naked.

Siddiqui said he had been:

held for 22 days at the American firebase at Gardez, where United States infantry and Special Forces are based, and where he said the worst abuses occurred. He then spent 12 days at the Kandahar air base in southern Afghanistan, and finally about a week in Bagram [the US air-base outsife Kabul], he said.

He described being humiliated repeatedly during his detention in all three places.

"They were taunting me and laughing and asking very rude questions, like which animal did I like having sex with, and which animal do you want us to bring in for you to have sex with," he said of his time in Gardez.

"They were mimicking the sounds of a sheep, a cow and a donkey," he said, "and asking which one I would like to have sex with. They kept insisting, and they were kicking me so much that eventually I said a cow."

"And they made insults about our women," he added. He said the American interrogator, through a translator, had taunted him, asking: "Do you know that your wife and daughter are prostitutes now?"

"The Americans were asking this and the translators were translating, and they were all laughing," he said. "And I was in my full police uniform with insignia showing my rank."

More than once, he said, soldiers inserted their fingers into his anus. He said one had touched his penis and asked, "Why is this unhappy?"

"There was a translator there," Mr. Siddiqui went on, "and I said, `Maybe because I am away from home.' "

So that was last summer, in Afghanistan. The practices that Siddiqui--who was later cleared of any wrongdoing--reported were eerily similar to many of those reported more recently in Iraq.... And then, of course, there is the General Miller connection between the practices in prisons in Iraq, and those at Gitmo. (Also known, in the context of Miller being sent back to Iraq most recently, as the "fox deployed to guard the henhouse" phenomenon.)

Folks, this is serious. This abuse of people's most basic human rights and human dignity is being carried out by US government employees and contractor--allegedly on behalf of all those of us who are US citizens!--on a truly massive scale. This abuse is expressly sanctioned by the suits in the Pentagon, and it is truly globe-circling... Which brings me back to the need to re-state at the highest levels and through all organs of the U.S. government and its military, the applicability of the longstanding "laws of war" and the primacy that should be given to them over any other considerations.

There is so much more I could write (and may well soon get around to writing) on the subject of the Geneva Conventions and the other laws of war. But the thing I want to note now is the essentially mutual and reciprocal nature of the relations among states and peoples that are embodied in them. The rules listed in all these Conventions are the same for everybody. That's the mutuality part of it. No "special exceptions" for a state that claims to fighting for justice, democracy, mom's apple pie, etc., etc. (Indeed, all states that fight wars always claim to be fighting "just" wars. Did you ever hear of any leaders stating, "I commit myself to fighting this great war for an unjust cause.") No "special exceptions" even if you claim ( à la General Boykin, or Usmama Bin Laden) that your side is "righteous" that it is literally "doing God's work". No. One set of rules for everyone.

The other aspect of the Conventions are their essentially reciprocal nature. In essence, this says something like, "I won't mistreat your soldiers or civilians if they come under my sides's sway-- and in return, you're not allowed to mistreat my soldiers or civilians if they should come under your side's sway." It's this clearly understood aspect of reciprocity which has given all the "laws of war" an impressive--though of course very far from perfect-- ability to be applied internationally, even in the total absence of any effective international enforcement mechanism.

Instead of having any such mechanism, what the crafters of all the laws of war-- that is, broadly speaking, the Hague Conventions of 1907 and the Geneva Conventions of 1949-- planned, and what in fact happened, was that as the governments party to these conventions ratified them through their own legislative processes, then the provisions of the conventions entered into the domestic and military legal codes of these states. In the case of the United States, the provisions of the international conventions supplemented provisions already existing in the U.S. Laws of Land Warfare, ever since the days of the Lieber Code, promulgated during the U.S. Civil War.

The people in Rumsfeld's office who, over the 32 months since September 2001, have written the new "Interrogation Rules of Engagement" that explicitly allow administrators and staff in US-run detention facilities around the world to engage in truly bestial behavior should have given a thought to the reciprocity aspect of these international agreements. I do not condone for a moment the actions of the masked men who beheaded Nick Berg and videotaped that whole process. But they did state that their actions were "in retaliation" for the abuses/torture carried out at Abu Ghraib, and that claim will find resonance in many parts of the world.

Meanwhile, the US, in whose detention facilities unknown numbers of people have met their deaths, some number of them apparently at the end of processes of what can only be called torture, has absolutely no leg to stand on as it tries to protest such behavior.

This is why, incidentally, many people in the uniformed military--people considerably higher up the chain of command than Lynndie England-- understand that it is in the interests of their own soldiers (many of whom are currently deployed in very far-flung places, in worryingly small numbers) that the norms embedded in the Geneva and Hague Conventions be as widely respected and applied as possible. General Antonio Taguba is not some kind of outlier on this issue; he represents a long-term body of very serious opinion in the U.S. Army...

Among all the many laws of war, of particular relevance in Iraq are the 4th of the Hague Conventions of 1907, the one relating to the Law of War on Land, and the third and fourth Geneva Conventions-- the ones relating to the treatment of prisoners of war and to the treatment of the civil population of a territory under military occupation. The United States is, it perhaps needs to be restated, a full party to all these Conventions.

I urge all JWN readers to become acquainted with these Conventions! The Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is the official depositary for all the signatures of the governments that are party to these conventions and many others in the field of international humanitarian law. It also has an important and recognized role as the safeguarder of the integrity of the whole process of international humanitarian law, as well as actual implementer of many of the provisions of these and others Conventions. For example, the ICRC helps to organize notification of the families of people taken into detention. Under the Conventions it also has a right and a duty to inspect places of detention-- it most certainly does NOT do this as a "private contractor", or as Rep. James Inhofe notably put it yesterday, as a "do-gooding humanitarian organization crawling about our detention facilities..." [HC paraphrase there]. It does so under longstanding treaty obligations, that are binding on both the ICRC and the US military.

Anyway, my point here is that the ICRC's excellent, multi-lingual website is also a great resource for anyone wanting to be brought or kept up to speed on the content, background, and interpretation of the laws of war. The links I gave above are to texts provided there. You can find out much more if you spend a bit of time cruising around that site, especially its section on International Humanitarian Law.

I'm fairly familiar with Geneva-3 and Geneva-4, but I felt I needed to renew my familiarity with Hague-4. Here, below, are some relevant Articles in the last section of the Convention. The bolding there, I did myself:

Art. 42. Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.
The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.

Art. 43. The authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.

Art. 44. A belligerent is forbidden to force the inhabitants of territory occupied by it to furnish information about the army of the other belligerent, or about its means of defense.

Art. 45. It is forbidden to compel the inhabitants of occupied territory to swear allegiance to the hostile Power.

Art. 46. Family honour and rights, the lives of persons, and private property, as well as religious convictions and practice, must be respected.
Private property cannot be confiscated.

...

Art. 50. No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible.

...

Art. 55. The occupying State shall be regarded only as administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests, and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile State, and situated in the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these properties, and administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct.