Torturing prisoners: setting the tone at the top

Commonweal, Sept 10, 2004 by William Pfaff

The United States has suffered several defeats in the "war on terror," the latest and worst of them, conceded last month in two separate reports, being the "demoralization" and corruption of the U.S. Army in matters concerning the torture of prisoners. An independent inquiry headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger reported that the scale of abuses by soldiers and civilian contract interrogators at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison was much greater than previously admitted. Implicitly conceded: The whole story has not yet been told.

The Schlesinger report dealt with Abu Ghraib but had little to say about what has gone on at Guantanamo and in Afghanistan. Having been commissioned by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the panel did not ask what happens at the secret "holding facilities," which the CIA concededly operates in foreign locations. Aren't those facilities where they are (like the Guantanamo prison itself) so that things can be done that are illegal in American and international law?

The second report, the Army's own internal investigation, said that alleged cases of "abuse" now total 300, with 66 confirmed. (Could we not do away with military euphemisms and simply say "torture"?) Still, we are a long way from the "aberrations" committed by a few "hillbillies," which was the off-the-record description originally offered by some officials in Washington when the Abu Ghraib scandal became public. Although the Army report said there were "extenuating circumstances" for command failures, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former senior commander in Iraq, is unlikely to get his fourth star, and the future assignments of his deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, are likely to be confined to the Aleutian Islands or Camp Swampy.

Some Military Intelligence commanders are under inquiry. Still, the only people yet on trial or up for trial are enlisted men and women and junior noncommissioned officers from a single half-trained West Virginia Army reserve unit of military police. The Army's report said grudgingly that while those soldiers' claims to be carrying out the wishes of superiors are "self-serving," they "do have some basis in fact."

So it seems. And who were the "civilian contractors" these soldiers say told them to "soften up" the prisoners? To whom did these contractors report? Where did they come from? What qualified them for this line of work, with authority over American soldiers? I think we should be told.

The Schlesinger panel did not accept the argument that high American officials should be punished. Yet, the decisions to withhold from prisoners the right to be dealt with under the Geneva Conventions, and to set aside international and U.S. Army norms concerning torture were taken at the highest levels. The president's own legal counsel prepared a study of what could and could not be judged torture. He concluded that a surprising number of unpleasant practices are not really torture. (As Maj. Gen. George Fay of the Army inquiry said, torture is a "subjective" term.) All of this opened the way to these crimes. It was obvious even to those following the matter from outside the government that after 9/11 there were new rules. The president even joked about it.

The Schlesinger panel's members concluded that Rumsfeld should not assume command responsibility for what happened and resign. They said that if high-ranking officials accept responsibility, it "would be a boon for all of America's enemies." I would have thought that it would be a boon for America's friends, demonstrating that these practices were indeed "abuses" for which leaders were held accountable, rather than policy.

Irregular war, with atrocities and terror, inevitably corrupts regular armies. Armies by nature are conservative, rules-following organizations. You cannot hold an army together without elaborate regulations and standard operating procedures. When these are violated, people have to be held accountable or discipline breaks down. The "laws" of war represent an international consensus on what is permissible, thereby lending predictability and structure to the horror of combat.

Terrorism and guerrilla warfare demoralize armies because they are unpredictable and have no rules, no way to recognize enemies, no structure of what is and is not allowed. They automatically invite reciprocal atrocities, indiscriminate violence, and collateral killing of civilians. The psychological defense of soldiers against all that is to dehumanize enemy civilians, as well as enemy combatants.

The Abu Ghraib affair and the generalization of torture have been possible precisely because the enemy has been dehumanized by Americans. This was the message soldiers (and civilians) have gotten from the top down. People can become monsters in these circumstances, which invite atrocities and license sadism and gratuitous cruelty. War is awful, but guerrilla and terrorist wars are the worst of all. The people who fight them can only keep their bearings if the moral structure of their own army is intact. You might think Americans had learned that in Vietnam.