Five American soldiers are charged with plotting the rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman. They allegedly also killed most of her family, including a child, then tried to cover up the crime by burning her body. If this is true, and it seems like a strong case based on the testimony of a fellow soldier, then it is the strongest evidence yet that our country has truly entered the wilderness, a wilderness that is beginning to look a lot like purgatory. There is no doubt that that Iraqi woman and her family found themselves in Hell. How did we get here? Neocon theorists and their journalist mouthpieces paved the way. First torture, now "ferocity." Welcome to Ferocity 101.
Today's
WaPo has the story, from AP.
BEIJI, Iraq -- Investigators believe American soldiers spent nearly a week plotting an attack in which they raped an Iraqi woman, then killed her and her family in an insurgent-ridden area south of Baghdad, a U.S. military official said Saturday.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing, said the attack appeared "totally premeditated" and that the soldiers apparently "studied" the family for about a week before carrying out the attack.
The U.S. Army will investigate charges that five American soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, were involved in the killings of four Iraqi relatives, including a woman who had been raped, military officials said Friday - the sixth current inquiry into the alleged slayings of Iraqi civilians by American troops.
Perhaps this kind of thing is what Shelby Steele was suggesting when he wrote in the WSJ about how we need to go to war with "enough ferocity to win." I could be accused of exaggerating, but I have an analogous case: torture. Soon after 9/11 various pundits were discussing the morality of engaging in torture. Matthew Miller is one "liberal" columnist who mused in print about the necessity of torture in some cases. And here we are, widely seen, rightly, as the world's biggest hypocrites, the fools who threw out the constitution so that we can squeeze worthless confessions out of terrified victims who may or may not be terrorists.
So Steele suggests ferocity, but his suggestion leaves the details of ferocity to the imagination of the lucky soldiers who get to carry out the ferocity policy. Looks like some of the boys have exceedingly fertile imaginations. Perhaps some ferocity training would help them direct their creativity in ways that would be less harmful to public relations.
So this is now a well-worn process, the Overton Window that opens onto the gates of Hell. Torture is OK, ferocity is OK, mass reprisal is OK, on and on down the world's slipperiest slope to the ruin of the greatest democracy the world has ever known.
This is not only a matter for the courts. They will grind on, and perhaps convictions will be secured. I personally volunteer to get back into fatigues and supervise every rock these goddamned evil minded sons of bastards break down in Leavenworth. But that is beside the point. What must happen is that we, the people insist that the Congress goes to the Pentagon and insists that the word comes down all the way from the Joint Chiefs to the last platoon sergeant and let them all know that we will fill a thousand Leavenworths with their asses, we will break an Everest of Rocks, we will hold each and every one of them responsible, right up the line, for each civilian death or injury. This kind of thing happens when there is a leadership vacuum. Some company commander, or battalion commander, or brigade or division commander, is not doing his job, which is to lead. These guys plotted this for weeks. Where was their platoon leader? Their company commander? How could you be in the field with these guys and not know they were up to something like this?
I was in the Army Reserve and almost all the guys I was in with were upright men who would do the right thing without thinking about it. But there were a few hard cases, men who demonstrated that they had no moral compasses. Such people are an insult to the Army and to courageous men like Captain Ian Fishback, who exemplified everything that is best in America when he bucked his chain of command to report on abuse in Abu Ghraib. To preserve the honour of great Americans like Captain Fishback, we must stop, in our public discourse, encouraging the slide of our government into the abyss of torture and "ferocity." The face of ferocity is the burning corpse of a raped girl lying on a street in iraq.