Tuol Sleng dishonoured

The stories of the 'torture' of Iraqi prisoners received mooted coverage in Australian papers just before I left, and similarly in Singaporean papers. By all accounts coverage is mooted in the States also, but wall-to-wall in Europe and the Middle East.

So which perspective is correct? Yes it is bad - but is it so bad as to warrant wall-to-wall coverage and cris-de-coeur? From another perspective, and while wrong, aren't these just glorified frat-party stunts?

The truly shocking thing is the posing by US soldiers: given the information such prisoners have, and the hundreds or thousands of lives that might be saved if such information is revealed (are the mass car bombs already forgotten now that the 'insurgents' have been contained?), psychological 'torture' (kept within the constraints of the Geneva conventions, which permits more than you might think) might be forgiven if professionally performed. For me, it's the rank amateurism that offends.

PS: Symbolism is important: Abu Ghraib should be closed down (not abolished: how convenient for the anti-war left that would be) and converted to a museum. That the United States will have added a chapter to any such future museum is shameful.

Memo to these academics and their instant imputation of male fides on the part of those who have actually had to make life and death decisions in their careers: My Lai it is not, not even as a potential slur. And why focus always on My Lai, and not the much worse North Vietnamese massacres at Hue etc etc? [Ed: Like moths to a Vietnam-era myth flame . . . . - And they are usually so quick to deplore cliche!]

Update: It all comes back to the lack of preparation for, and lack of man-power in, post-war Iraq. Shooting escapee prisoners is regretable but might be defensible on the grounds of necessity (if we were talking Fedaheen etc). But if prison conditions were so under-staffed and mis-managed that attempted escape became a dominant strategy for prisoners, then we are talking state-sanctioned murder.

Update II: The military's own report is now online and some of the acts were worse than the newspaper reports I had access to indicated initially, though on only two occasions (a rape and forced masturbation) is it qualitatively (as opposed to quantitatively) worse. The whole issue of how to get information out of valuable prisoners (ie, what is to be permitted, both under international law and morality) needs to be revisited in the light of the 'war of terror.' In particular, what might democracies permit themselves in their self-defence without untenably compromising their founding values. It is a debate that does not appear to have occurred outside of an exchange of pre-held positions. This is true both in the media, and (as far as I can tell) in academic legal/philosophical circles (especially in international human rights legal academic circles). It is related to the detainees in Guantanamo also (as the Supreme Court must soon consider). Indeed, only in military academies does this debate appear to be going on in a sophisticated way.

But all this appears to be beside the point with respect to Abu Ghraib. The sad thing is, as I mentioned above, most of this appears to have occured independently of the informational value of the prisoner/victim. It appears to have occured as a result of monkeys running the show while the organ-grinders dozed (or pretended to doze). Since it was a structural problem in that prison, those higher up the chain do share in the responsibility. And it does make one wonder about what has occured in Guantanamo, both from the perspective of the humanity of the prisoners and from the perspective of the safety of all of us which inefficient and amateur intelligence-extraction procedures compromise.

Posted by Richard Scheelings at May 2, 2004 09:02 PM