of what my country has done, ostensbily in my name ("We the people of the United States"), first by the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq, and then by the atrocities since, the abusive arrests of so many who had no connection to violence, the continued use of overwhleming firepower that kills and wounds civilians as collateral damage in our futile attempts to suppress the ever-increasing insurgency.
I thought my ourage had reached its limit. Yes, I had reach Sy Hersch on Abu Ghraib, both his artilce in Atlantic, and about half of his book (so far).
But then my wife handed me the October 7 issue of The New York Review of Books
The lead article is Mark Danner. Entitled "Abu GHraib: The Hidden Story: it is presented as a review of publications, as are so many of the more insightful of the NY Review's essays. In this case he is reviewing both the Schlesinger report and the earlier (and classified) report on military intelligence by Major General George R. Fay.
This article, which is available on line here, perhaps puts togeether the information in a way in which it is impossible not be throughly disgusted, in a way that even the released photos have not shocked me. It is not just the horroble actions that were done, ostensibly on behalf of our security as Americans. It is that, from the record that Danner presents, it is absolutely clear that this was authorized at the highest levels of our government, and the supposed lack of awareness of details expressed by some such as Rumsfeld cannot hold water.
I will not attempt to recapitulate the entire article. While long, it is well worth the time to read. I will offer only a few selections, to give a flavor, and to encourage others to take the time to read, and reflect upon, the horror.
As I noted elsewhere on this site today, we executed in Manila a Japanese general named Yamashita because his troops committed atrocities. Under the theory of command responsibility we held him accountable for the actions of his troops. On this basis, the people in the Office of the Secretary of Defense should be held to account, and perhaps the Secretary himself. And the president, who apparently told his subordinates that he did not know where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other prisoners of high value were being held, also must be responsibility.
If we as Americans are unwilling to confront these horrors, then we will have little basis on which to complain when people in other nations decide that we are not worthy of the basic respect that should be the absolute right of every human being, no matter how horrible their alleged actions.
We as a nation have allowed ourselves to be degraded by those who have acted ostensibly in our behalf. If we do not to the best of our ability seek to depose those who ahve so shamed us as a nation, then we cannot be acquiesce in the international opprobrium that will surely be our fate. That, and much worse, as we can no longer claim the protection of international agreements, treaties and conventions that are supposed to prevent such atrocities when our government seeks instead to withdrew from said agreemetns. or to claim the unilateral right to decide when they applicable, or to simply flat out abrogate them.
I weep for those we have tortured, for the lives, families, and societies we have destroyed. Those include the lives destroyed among Americans -- for those who have under orders participated in such atrocities are themselves vicitims of this administration's war crimes and crimes against humanity -- and I use those terms with full knowledge of the implication of my language. I cannot and will not accept that American exceptionalism means we do not have to abide the standrads of basic human decency and international accountability.
I likewise accept that in making a public posting such as this I may well subject myself to opprobrium or far worse. I am not that hard to identify. The nuts may decide to try to attack me, or destroy my career. Yet if I let that deter me from speaking out, then I would be acquiescing in the evil that so repels me. That I cannot in good faith do.
I consider myself neither particularly strong nor courageous. I certainly am aware of my failings, as teacher, as spouse, as human being. But I cannot use my weakness or my lack of courage as a justification by which I can remain silent. And so this post.
In a sense, Abu Ghraib is at once the microcosm of the Iraq War in all its failures and the proverbial canary in the mineshaft, warning of what is to come. In fighting a guerrila war, the essential weapon is not tanks or helicopters, but intellgience, and the single essential tool to obtain it is reliable political support among the population. In such a war, arresting and imprisoning thousands of civilians in murkily defined "cordon and capture" raids is a blatantly self-defeating tactic, and an occupying army's resort to it means not only that the occupier lacks the political support necessary to find and destroy the insurgents but that it has been forced by the insurgents to adopt tactics that will further lessen that support and create still more insurgents. It is, in short, a strategy of desperation and, in the end, of weakness.
the next quote comes after a discussion of how American John Walker Lindh wasbrutally treated during his interrogation:
Lindh's responses during these interrogations were cabled back to the Defense Department as often as every hour. During the coming months and years, as the United States gradually built a network of secret and semisecret prisons in Bagram and Kandahar, Afghanistan; Guantanamo, Cuba; Qatar and Diego Garcia, as well as Abu Ghraib and Camp Cropper, Iraq, this direct attention from senior officials in Washington has remained constant. As Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the head of the Joint Intelligence and Debriefing center at Abu Ghraib, told General Taguba in December, 2003, "Sir, I was told a couple of times ... that some of the reporting was getting read by Rumsfeld, folks out at Langley [CIA headquarters], some very senior folks." For Jordan, that meant a lot of pressure to produce. it also meant that what went on at Abu Ghraib was very much the focus of the most senior officials in Washington.
the next section is an analysis of part of the Fay report:
The problem here is that it is quite obvious from the report that the military intellgience officers were "aware of what was being done to the detainee" -- indeed, that they ordered it.
The delicate bureaucratic construction now holding the Abu Ghraib scandal firmly in check rests ultimately on President Bush's controversial decision, on February 7, 2002, to withhold protection of the Geneva Convention both from al-Qaeda and from Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The deicsion rested on the argument, in the words of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez, that "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," in fact, a "new paradigm [that] renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions ..." In a prefiguring of later bureaucratic wars, lawyers in the State Department and many in the military services fought against this decision, arguing, prophetically, that it "would undermine the United States military culture, which is based on a strict adherence to the law of war."
PLEASE -- read the entire article