As I listened to an NPR interview with Seymour Hersh this evening discussing his New Yorker report about grotesque human rights abuses committed by some American soldiers in an Iraqi prison what angered me the most was the way the U.S. military completely bungled the investigation. What the military needs is a good dose of transparency and it is unconscionable, in a war on terrorism where images often mean just about everything, that military leaders still don’t seem to be able to buy a clue on this point.
The whole world, of course, found out about the abuses when disturbing and disgusting photographs taken by the criminals who carried out the abuse were leaked to the media and then broadcast around the world.
But the military, of course, knew there were problems months ago. According to Hersh’s report, the military “formally admonished and quietly suspended” the general who had been in charge of the prison and undertook a full-scale investigation of the abuse allegations. That investigation led to a scathing fifty-three page report in February that chronicled human rights abuses like this,
Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
Here’s what the military should have done in February: it should have held a press conference in which high-level American civilians and military officials announced that an investigation of conditions at the prison had revealed numerous suspected crimes, that those involved would be prosecuted to the full extent of military law, and that this sort of behavior would not be tolerated.
Instead, the usual suspects sat on this apparently thinking (hoping?) that they could deal with the problem like they had dealt with the general — quietly.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. The way to deal with potential problems like this is always immediate and full disclosure. That the military didn’t choose this route makes its behavior elsewhere suspect. If this sort of thing, apparently abetted by intelligence officials, was the norm at a prison in Iraq, then how do we know that these sort of abuses are not going on in Guantanamo? Or that they are going on in Guantanamo but that disciplining those involved has been kept quiet and hush hush?
Add a “cover-your-ass” mentality in the military to the long list of enemies of human freedom that the United States has to defeat in the war on terror.
Source:
Torture at Abu Ghraib. Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, April 30, 2004.