Save Them From Themselves, Part I : Staying the Course

Just as our Independence Day weekend came to an end this year, I came across a headline reading “Iraq says may agree to timetable for U.S. withdrawal.” The article quoted Iraq’s Prime Minister Maliki saying, “Today, we are looking at the necessity of terminating the foreign presence on Iraqi lands and restoring full sovereignty (1).” And the next day, the headlines continued. Apparently, the Iraqi government was demanding “specific dates” for U.S. troops and other forces to pullout of Iraq (2). So just a few days after we celebrated the 232nd anniversary of our independence, Iraq’s government seemed to suggest that it was ready for its independence—that it wanted its experience of colonization on fast-forward to come to its end. The timing probably couldn’t have been any better. In the end, not too much was made of that story at that time, but with Obama’s recent visit to Iraq and Afghanistan, the issue has come up again. This time, the spokesman for the Iraqi government said that they “are hoping that in 2010 that combat troops will withdraw from Iraq (3).” Of course, the U.S. response to all of this is that any withdrawal has to be “conditions-based.” And what exactly are those conditions? Well, let’s flashback a few years and look at the course of this war to see if we can figure that out.

On May 1, 2003, George Bush announced that our mission had been accomplished in Iraq; major combat had ended. Yet as the future exposed, the U.S. occupation of Iraq had only just begun. That’s because throughout the course of this “war,” the goals and reasons for keeping troops in Iraq seem to have continuously changed and oftentimes it remained unclear what the ends were and whether any objectives existed at all. The initial rationale for invading Iraq was alleged “weapons of mass destruction,” supposedly harbored by Saddam Hussein. However, no such “weapons of mass destruction” were to be found. Immediately, our focus changed to one of nation-building—installing democracy and deposing Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein. This was accomplished in stages with the creation of a U.S.-led interim government in April 2003, the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003, the Iraqi general elections in 2005, the formation of a permanent constitutional government in May 2006, and finally the assassination of Hussein on December 30, 2006 (4). However, this being accomplished, one expected warfare to no longer be necessary, that is, if it was necessary to begin with. But, the U.S. again switched its focus to constructing civil unity, eliminating ‘sectarian violence,’ and ensuring stability. Essentially, we decided that our forces were no longer a warring side in this war, but rather a form of law enforcement or police. In effect, the war was not a war but an occupation.

Our constantly changing goals and ambiguous rationale for this war-occupation have served as excuses to allow us to maintain a military and political presence in Iraq and thus remain in effective control of that nation. If this sounds uncannily like the informal or even formal empires of the last century, it should not be surprising. What this means is that we better start reevaluating the way we think of ourselves and our role internationally. Are we a liberating nation or a colonizing one? Are we really any better than our European cousins were? If not, how do we change? It’s time for a self-diagnosis.

Symptom 1: One of the main arguments being made now to justify the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq is that we are needed to provide security for the country because Iraqis, as yet, are unable to do so themselves. In his speech to the nation on September 13, 2007, President George W. Bush said, “America has a vital interest in preventing chaos and providing hope in the Middle East,” and “The premise of our strategy is that securing the Iraqi population is the foundation for all other progress…The goal of the surge is to provide that security and to help prepare Iraqi forces to maintain it (5).” Bush didn’t stop there but went on, at the same time acknowledging our ever-changing “mission” in Iraq: “As terrorists are defeated, civil society takes root and the Iraqis assume more control over their own security, our mission in Iraq will evolve.” Bush even asserted that the Iraqis themselves know that they are incapable of succeeding on their own by saying that the Iraqi leaders, “understand that their success will require U.S. political, economic and security engagement that extends beyond my presidency (6).” Interesting to note that a week later in a press conference, Bush claimed that the U.S. goals in Iraq are not shifting and have not shifted: “the goals are the same.” And what are those goals? “[H]elping Iraqis provide their own security.”

And it’s not just Bush who’s saying these things. General Jack Keane, a former Army Vice Chief of Staff made a similar assertion in a discussion led by ABC News on September 5, 2007, called “Seeking Solutions in Iraq.” Keane said that some of the Iraqi population is “seeking reconciliation, and…they’re using the United States to achieve that for them with the Iraqi government (7).”

So essentially, our argument is that the Iraqis are not capable of governing themselves and that their government is ineffectual at maintaining order; therefore, it is the duty of the United States to do this for them. We may not always put it in those exact terms, but that’s exactly what we’re implying with the words we do use. But wait a minute, we have put it in those exact terms. According to the National Intelligence Estimate, “Iraq's political leaders remain unable to govern effectively…(8)” Maybe it’s just me, but to insinuate and even verbalize that any people don’t know how to govern themselves is demeaning and degrading. Talk about adding insult to injury. First we invade your country and then we suggest that you don’t know how to control yourselves. And we forget that much of the disorder was sparked by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in the first place.

So are such statements really a symptom of imperialism? Well, when you look into it, such talk does seem to come from the colonial period. One of the common justifications of British Imperialism was that colonial subjects were not yet capable of self-rule and therefore had to be ruled by Europeans. Europeans needed to keep order in the lands of savages. This ‘civilizing mission’ was frequently employed by apologists of imperialism. Rudyard Kipling’s well-known poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” written to urge the U.S. to do its duty in its newly acquired Philippines, expressed these views disturbingly well.

The Amritsar massacre of 1919 which was discussed in previous posts also brought up rhetoric similar to what we’ve been seeing in the U.S. regarding Iraq. In the words of the Dictionary of National Biography, O’Dwyer, one of the men who led the Amritsar massacre, believed in “the necessity of British control of India for that country’s welfare (9).” Scholar Derek Sayer wrote of the Amritsar incident that its perpetrators Dyer and O’Dwyer saw, or at least claimed, that their duty was to keep order, “and the supreme value placed on order was in turn predicated on their construction of Indians as unfitted to govern themselves…The maintenance of order was justified by Anglo-Indians as being in the interests of their Indian subjects, and it was the Indians whom they would be failing if they ‘shirked’ this duty, however unpleasant (10).” Sound familiar? Back in December ’06, Bush told Shiite parliamentary leader Al-Hakim, “We will fail in Iraq if we pull out our troops before we’re in a position to help the Iraqis succeed (11).” Succeed in what—their goals or ours?

According to Sayer, what permitted the Amritsar massacre to occur and to go without the type of condemnation that would have been present had it occurred in white colonies was the idea of Indians as being children “who once abandoned to their own devices would revert to savagery.” The British did not just have this attitude toward their Indian subjects; a similar attitude was held of their African subjects. Harvard professor Caroline Elkins discusses this with regard to the Mau Mau situation in Kenya as follows: “Despite the fact that these men on the spot, the young members of Britain’s ruling elite who considered themselves to be the protectors of ‘their natives,’ were watching Kikuyu country rapidly deteriorate around them, many continued to believe they had come to Africa to oversee a slow, organic change from savagery to civilization. They were trustees who acted in the best interests of the African, who after all had to be protected from himself…(12)” Likewise, we too are supposedly acting in the best interest of the Iraqi—overseeing a gradual change from a so-called Islamic dictatorship to democracy. During the Mau Mau situation, Britain did not envision granting independence to Kenya for at least another generation. And even after that, like the U.S.’s attitude today vis-à-vis Iraq, the British believed that their settlers would maintain a strong political influence in order to protect British interests and rear Kenyan leaders to likewise protect these interests (13). Maintain a strong relationship?! Bush said the same thing.

It’s obvious that the timetables proposed this month do not sit well with the White House. Press Secretary Dana Perino had this to say on Monday July 21st about the troop withdrawal: “it will not be something that Americans say, ‘We’re going to do—we’re going to leave at this date (2).'” But is this really something that we have the power to decide—to dictate when we’re going to leave someone else’s country? (Well, we did dictate when we were going to invade the country, so I guess you could say, "why not?"). But, if Iraq wants us out by 2010, then let’s get out by 2010. I thought Iraq was a sovereign nation. Or is it only in name?

To conlcude our diagnosis for today, let’s ask a few more questions. How do we measure security? I mean when do we know when Iraq is secure enough for us to leave? If we say our withdrawal will be based on conditions, but the required conditions continue to change, we’re not saying much. The proposal Iraqi officials originally made at the beginning of this month calls for the withdrawal of U.S. forces by at most five years after the U.S. hands control of security in Iraq’s 18 provinces back over to Iraq. But when will that happen? Nine provinces have been handed over to Iraqi control so far; the handover of two other provinces was delayed until further notice, supposedly because of bad weather. It seems that not only does the White House not want to specify a timeline for withdrawal, they don’t even want to specify conditions for withdrawal because that means committing to leaving. But if we really are acting in the best interest of Iraq, let’s take a hint from Iraqis themselves. And according to Shiite lawmaker al-Adeeb, a timeline is “what the Iraqi people want (1).” Or as Prime Minister al-Maliki put it, “it’s the business of Iraqis to say what they want. And that’s where the people and the government are in general agreement: The tenure of the coalition of troops in Iraq should be limited (14).” Or are we going to say that they don’t even know what they really want either?

Next time we’ll take a look at some other symptoms.

1. Yates, Dean and Ahmed Rasheed, “Iraq says may agree to timetable for U.S. withdrawal,” Yahoo! News, 7 Jul 2008, "http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080707/wl_nm/iraq_dc&printer=1;_ylt=AsFy5sCFxqId" ...
2. Abdul-Zahra, Qassim and Sebastian Abbot, Associated Press, “Iraq Presses US on Timeline for Troop Pullout,” ABC News, 8 Jul 2008, http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=5328327
3. Murphy, Brian, Associated Press writer, “Iraq sees hope of US troop withdrawal by 2010,” Yahoo News, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080721/...
4. Iraq War Timeline-Iraq 5 Years Later. http://www.msnbc.com/id/23694433
5. ABC News.com “Transcript: Bush Addresses Iraq, President Outlines Surge Strategy, Endorses General’s Recommendations,” "http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=3600417". accessed 9/14/2007, p. 1
6. p. 3.
7. “Seeking Solutions in Iraq,” ABC News, "http://abcnews.go.com/print?od=3563247", p.2
8. Quoted in a report on ABC World News on August 23, 2007
9. Sayer, 136.
10. Sayer, 160.
11. Associated Press, “Bush Meets with Iraqi Shiite Leader” published in The Harvard Crimson December 5, 2006.
12. Elkins, 21.
13. Elkins, 60.
14. Reuters, "Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki Backs Obama Troop Exit Plan," 19, July 2008. accessed 26 Jul 2008. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/19/iraqi-pm-backs-obama-troo_n_113751.html?v...

The More Things Change...

Last week, the Supreme Court made a landmark ruling that put at front and center an issue that often gets overlooked in this ‘war.’ In a 5-4 decision, the Court decided that Guantanamo Bay detainees are entitled to trials in U.S. civilian courts to contest being detained indefinitely without charges. In the previous posts, we’ve been looking at human rights and physical abuse, but a discussion of another type of rights—legal rights—must not be left out of any analysis of this war’s injustices, and the Court’s ruling on Thursday, June 12, makes such a discussion even timelier. While this subject may not get as much attention as the physical abuse scandals, constitutional rights have been just as much under attack when it comes to the so-called war on terror. When the Detainee Interrogation Bill was passed in September 2006 and signed into law as the Military Commissions Act that October, it stipulated that those considered as enemy combatants could be held indefinitely without a chance for appeal, and habeas corpus—the right to contest incarceration—was not extended to detainees. And while the Court’s recent decision effectively overturns that stipulation of the Act, the controversy over the constitutionality of such policies has not ended. But as we keep reiterating, we’ve seen this all before. The same questions about the rule of law and infringement on rights have been raised in the past. We only need to turn to our ally, Britain, and look at its experience as one of the most powerful empires in history.

One illustrative and infamous episode from Britain’s imperial history is the Amritsar massacre of April 13, 1919 in India. The incident began when civilians were meeting against colonial orders which prohibited congregating. British General Dyer ordered troops to fire on the non-militant crowd, resulting in at least 379 deaths and more than a thousand more injuries. Martial law was then instituted days after the massacre, and this included degrading punishments such as public beatings and even requiring all people passing through a certain road to crawl on their hands and knees. After the event, physical coercion was often used to force witnesses to make false statements, and as we discussed in the last post, many acknowledge that similar coercive practices are currently being used during interrogations in US detention centers.

In an article on the Amritsar event, author Derek Sayer concludes that “martial law, declared after the major disturbances had been put down, served to facilitate punishment rather than to control disorder. There was scant regard for the hallowed principles of British justice.” Yet “British justice” had already been abandoned in the month leading up to this massacre when the Rowlatt Bills were passed —a point of contention among Indian subjects. The bills “provided for the trial of political offenders by three High Court judges, with no jury or right of appeal…The executive was empowered to arrest, search without warrant and confine suspects without trial for renewable periods of up to a year.” By comparison, the 2006 US bill mentioned above had provisions that “give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them...” as a New York Times editorial sums it up. Maybe it’s just me, but that description of the US Detainee Interrogation Bill sounds awfully similar to the Rowlatt Bills in British India.

In yet another British colony several decades earlier, similar disregard for constitutional rights of colonial subjects also became standard policy. During the1865 riots in Jamaica while martial law had been instituted for thirty days even though rioting had long ended in the first few days, British officers led by Governor Eyre killed and tortured hundreds of Jamaican blacks, including parliament member George William Gordon. Eyre transferred Gordon from Kingston, which was not under martial law, to Morant Bay where it was in place in order to be killed. Again, the US has similarly been sending terror suspects to other countries that lack the fundamental protections awarded people under US law or that are even known to practice torture. That’s basically what the U.S. has been attempting to do for the past nearly 7 years, by keeping so-called “enemy combatants” in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In a more extreme example, a German man named Khaled el-Masri says he was kidnapped by CIA agents who drugged him, beat and stripped him, put him in a diaper and shackled him to a plane floor to ship him to Afghanistan for four to five months. Germany’s interior minister was reportedly even advised by the US not to discuss the case, because, as the US claimed, doing so may have revealed information about “extraordinary rendition,” a secret US program of catching suspects of terrorism and sending them abroad to be interrogated. El-Masri’s lawsuit against the US was also dismissed by the Supreme Court on the grounds that it would reveal state secrets. Such a practice of holding terror suspects abroad and under foreign jurisdiction has raised concerns amongst many, including the United Nations Committee Against Torture.

Back to Jamaica in 1865, the notorious episode after the riot led to a prolonged investigation and trial that at the time polarized Britain over what qualifies as injustice, in particular, whether martial law belonged in the British system at all. Some believed that constitutional rights only applied in settled British colonies rather than conquered ones while others were of the position that, “…through our empire the British rule shall be the rule of law; that every British citizen, white, brown, or black in skin, shall be subject to definite, and not indefinite powers.” Judging from our recent record under the Bush administration, I guess America prefers having indefinite powers, and it seems as if the Bush administration has no problem ignoring the rule of law, whether it be inside or outside the United States.

But we need only look back to our very own war for independence and the disregard for rights shown by our British cousins back then. Habeas corpus was suspended for Americans then as it has been for detainees of the US war on terror until now, and British parliament member Edmund Burke openly opposed such policies and Britain’s role in the Revolutionary War itself, asserting that “we have forgotten or thrown away our ancient principles.” As former victims of rights violations, you’d think that we’d try to avoid perpetrating such injustices ourselves, but it seems like we’re still adding to the trash pile of principles.

Now, these few historical cases are just the tip of the iceberg as they say, only a representative sample from my limited knowledge, and I’m sure many of you can point to lots of other cases of the rule of law being selectively abandoned by governments that are supposedly rooted in it. But the fact of the matter is, we’re seeing it again despite previous warnings. Although martial law has not officially been instituted by the US with regards to terrorism, it has effectively been in place with all the legislation and secret prisons that deny many Arabs and even U.S. citizens the legal rights that are supposedly the foundation of our country, such as the assumption that one is innocent until proven guilty. Case in point, although the Supreme Court had already made two decisions prior to last Thursday’s which allowed Guantanamo Bay detainees being held without charges to appeal to civilian courts, the administration and the then Republican-dominated Congress altered the laws in order to prevent court trials for the detainees. And Bush has already expressed his disapproval of the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday. It seems as if we haven’t heeded the advice from our predecessors like Burke, and instead have chosen the footsteps of the British imperialists.

While some argue that certain exceptional circumstances like war warrant revoking the rule of law, even considering such situations, I think it’s clear to everyone when such disregard for the law and legal rights has gone beyond its intended purposes—as the scholars have noted in the Amritsar and Jamaica situations and as Justice Kennedy has acknowledged in the case of our current war with his declaration that “The laws and the Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.” Had it not been for the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday, I would have ended this post by saying, “Perhaps, as historians have typically done, we’ll also have to wait another hundred years or so before we begin to analyze, realize, and criticize our current war policies. But why should we wait?” But I think the Supreme Court beat me to the punch, so instead, I’ll end with a quote from the Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights Vincent Warren: “The Supreme Court has finally brought an end to one of our nation’s most egregious injustices…By granting the writ of habeas corpus, the Supreme Court recognizes a rule of law established hundreds of years ago and essential to American jurisprudence since our nation’s founding.” Let’s hope so.

Sources:

Associated Press, “Supreme Court Backs Gitmo Detainees,” 12 June 2008, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25117953/

Associated Press, "Court Nixes Suit Claiming CIA Torture," October 9, 2007, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21205942.

Associated Press, "Report: CIA Wrongly Jailed German," The Real World News in Brief, The Harvard Crimson, December 5, 2005.

“Military Commissions Act of 2006,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Commissions_Act_of_2006, (accessed 16 June 2008).

“Rushing Off a Cliff,” New York Times Editorial, September 28, 2006.

Derek Sayer, “British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre 1919-1920,” Past and Present, (No. 131): 130-164

Bernard Semmel, Democracy Versus Empire: The Jamaica Riots of 1865 and the Governor Eyre Controversy, Garden City, New York: Anchor Books Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1969

Tom Wright, “U.S. delegation faces UN panel: Committee Against Torture listens skeptically to explanations” International Herald Tribune May 6, 2006 http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/05/news/geneva.php?page=1

Abusing the system--and others in the process

After the long hiatus, I think it’s more than time for another post, so here’s something to think about.

Peruse through some of the recent news stories about detainees in U.S. Custody, and you may be disheartened by what you find: In October, a torture lawsuit was filed against Donald Rumsfeld¹; in April, it was revealed that Cheney, Rice, and others had approved some of the harsh interrogation techniques used on detainees²; and just last week the CIA was ordered to surrender a memo citing waterboarding as an interrogation method to use on prisoners,³ and Cheney's chief of staff was subpoenaed to testify in an investigation into the possible torture of detainees.⁴ It seems the accusations of detainee abuse and cruel interrogation techniques continue to mount against the U.S. So, let’s take a closer look at the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody and find out why I believe we haven’t learned our lesson from the past. (Just as a heads up, there are a few somewhat disturbing or graphic accounts in this post, so be warned if you do not take such things well.)

Several allegations of abuse of prisoners at detention centers in the U.S., in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, have surfaced during the course of this current “war,” and at this point in the blog, you’ve probably guessed what our argument will be: there's nothing new about the tactics used on prisoners by U.S. intelligence officers, interrogators, and army personnel; in fact, many of these tactics have been tried in the past but did not have positive results. One case that we are going to examine here because of its similarities to the Iraq situation is the Mau Mau war of Kenya.

In the early 1950s, a group of “insurgents” known as the Mau Mau fought to oppose the British occupation and colonization of Kenya, much the way “insurgents” in Iraq are fighting against U.S. occupation of their country. The Mau Mau wanted independence, and instead they got war from the British who refused to grant independence. The Royal Air Force was sent to fight Mau Mau rebels in the mountain areas, and during the 8 years of the Mau Mau war—from 1952 to 1960—a state of emergency was declared. British colonial officials placed thousands of Mau Mau in detention camps where many men were abused, beaten, tortured, and forced to work. Women and children were relocated to enclosed villages where countless were raped and mistreated. Kikuyu were rounded up, much like in the FBI’s PENTTBOM operation after September 11th, but on a much larger and more extreme scale. Virtually all of the Kikuyu population—about 1.5 million people—was detained. The Mau Mau were portrayed by the British as ruthless terrorists who were out to kill, who were against Christianity, and who wanted to botch Britain’s attempts to ‘civilize’ the area.⁵ Replace ‘Britain’ with ‘the U.S.’ and ‘civilize’ with ‘democratize,’ and this characterization of the Mau Mau is nearly the same as that we have given to the ‘insurgency’ in U.S.-occupied Iraq today.

But, for now, let’s focus our attention on the detention camps used to house Kikuyu during the Mau Mau war. What happened in these detention camps and following the war’s end was something that should never be repeated, but unfortunately, it appears as if we are on the road to repeating similar actions in our “War on Terror.” Regrettably, the types of abusive interrogation methods used back then can be compared to those that some U.S. officials have been using today in their attempts to get information out of suspected terrorists. In this post, we are going to look at some of these interrogation techniques and other injustices that were and sadly are still being committed against detainees both then and now.

From the early days of the Mau Mau emergency, the colonial government began “screening” or interrogating Kikuyu captures to find out who was involved in the Mau Mau insurgency; but the screenings often took a devilish turn in order to force confessions out of Kikuyu. Screenings of Kikuyu sometimes lasted hours or days with the aim of gaining information about planned Mau Mau activities, names of Mau Mau oath takers, and unorganized or unofficial Mau Mau support among the population. Although government-sanctioned screening centers were monitored, harsh interrogation techniques were still used. The screening centers were typically run by European settlers, but Kikuyu loyalists working for the colonial government also perpetrated violence against the detainees. One detainee interviewed by Harvard Professor Caroline Elkins recalls suffering burns on his back. He and other male and female Kikuyu detainees were stripped and beaten during interrogations, and others were electrocuted.⁶

But that’s not all. More extreme tactics were also used in the screenings. Kikuyu detainees often had objects such as broken bottles, knives, snakes, guns, and hot eggs forced up their anuses or vaginas; pliers were used to pinch detainees’ breasts or testicles; men were castrated or beaten on the genitals until their scrota burst; according to some accounts, some men were made to eat their testicles. And of course many detainees were killed.⁶ In 1959, 10 Kikuyu detainees were beaten to death at Hola detention camp, causing public outcry, and by the end of Kenya’s Mau Mau war in 1960, 11,000 Kikuyu were reported dead, though investigations by Elkins reveal that the number was more than likely over 50,000.

Although the stated purpose of such indecent treatment of Kikuyu detainees was to get crucial information about Mau Mau activities, the underlying motivations were much less admirable, and that’s assuming that there was something to be admired in Britain’s repression of the Mau Mau to begin with. The crimes (and that’s exactly what they were) committed against Kikuyu detainees reveal the way many British viewed their colonial subjects at the time. I mean, really, was it that necessary to strip people or force objects into their anuses to potentially get information out of them? Let’s be honest. We all know that such treatment had nothing to do with “information;” rather it was designed to humiliate, belittle, degrade, and dehumanize the Kikuyu—to deny them membership in the community of worthy human beings. It reflects the fact that many British imperialists and apologists of empire thought of their colonial subjects as less than human, and it was a way to make sure their subjects felt as if they did not belong to humanity. It was also a way to scare those they had colonized into subjugation. There was nothing remotely laudable or even excusable in the treatment of detainees during the Mau Mau Emergency. The acts committed against Kikuyu detainees were done for all the wrong reasons.

So how do such stories compare to the abuses being committed against detainees in U.S. custody today? Well, the incidents at Abu Ghraib have perhaps been the most condemned acts of prisoner abuse throughout the course of this “War on Terror.” In April of 2004, pictures showing U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners were released to the public. One of the accused soldiers, Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, admitted to forcing detainees to masturbate and attaching wires to the hands of prisoners and threatening to electrocute them.⁷ Private First Class Lynndie England became one of the most infamous people charged in the Abu Ghraib scandal. She was shown in photos pointing to the genitals of a naked prisoner and leading a nude, hooded prisoner on a dog leash.⁸ FBI agents also reported that prisoners at Abu Ghraib were deprived of sleep,⁹ and in one report, an Iraqi prisoner was punched in the face by a task force officer until he needed medical care. Other detainees in Baghdad had burns on their backs, bruises, and kidney pain,¹⁰ similar to the injuries sustained by Kikuyu detainees as mentioned above.

Likewise, prisoner abuse in Guantanamo Bay has received a lot of attention. One story which was highly publicized was that of Mohammad al-Qahtani who was suspected of being one of the intended hijackers for the September 11^th, 2001, attacks. Interrogators strip-searched al-Qahtani in the presence of women, forced him to wear a brassiere, put him on a leash, made him do dog tricks, kept him from saying his prayers, squatted on top of his Koran, and drenched him with water, among other things.¹¹ In other incidents, reports have revealed that a Guantanamo prisoner’s genitals were grabbed by a female interrogator. Another had his head covered with duct tape and yet another was terrorized with a dog and then placed in isolation, suffering “extreme psychological trauma.”¹² At the end of November 2004, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) gave the Bush administration a confidential report which criticized the way the U.S. was handling suspects at Guantanamo Bay. The report called the treatment, “‘tantamount to torture,’” though the Bush administration denied that prisoners at Guantanamo were abused. Even a recent visit to Guantanamo by a U.N. human rights investigator, in light of the CIA’s destruction of interrogation tapes, led the investigator to conclude that torture was occurring at the prison.¹³

But abuse is not just something that is perpetrated by stressed soldiers or interrogators miles from home; Ali Partovi, the detainee mentioned earlier who was captured following September 11^th, 2001, also claimed to have been abused in the prison where he was being held here in Arizona: handcuffed, kicked and punched in the abdomen and kidneys, doused with ice water and hot coffee.¹⁴

As during the Mau Mau Emergency, lengthy interrogations are also being conducted on detainees in U.S. possession today, and extreme abuse has likewise been perpetrated against some of these detainees though little attention has been received for these cases of torture. A Time Magazine article from June 2004 reports of a man who charges the U.S. with wrongfully arresting him and keeping him in detention in Abu Ghraib. Like the brutal accounts from the Mau Mau war described above, this Abu Ghraib detainee claims he was electrocuted on his penis to the point that a blood vessel ruptured but was denied medical attention.¹⁵ And just as Kikuyu men and women were sodomized while in detention during the Mau Mau Emergency, a detainee held by the U.S. at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, had a chemical light and broom stick inserted into his anus, and there have been other similar accounts.¹⁶ And lest you begin to think that the situation in Iraq, unlike that in colonial Kenya, has avoided the abuse and detention of women and children, think again. The Taguba Report lists abuse of female detainees by military police personnel. CBS has also reported that nearly 200 women and their children are being imprisoned in Khadimiya jail in Iraq. Many are being held because they or their husbands are terrorism suspects, and others do not know what exactly they have been arrested for. There too, as during the Mau Mau war, allegations of rape and abuse have been made. Though the report failed to give details on who arrested the women, who charged them, who committed the rapes and assaults against them, or whose intelligence is being used to hold them, one of the women in the prison stated, “I was detained in the Green Zone by the Americans two years ago. I have no idea what’s happened to my family.” It seems the U.S. is in some way involved in the holding of these women and their children.¹⁷

To make matters worse, we too have had our share of detainees dying in our custody. For example, in Afghanistan, twenty-eight U.S. soldiers were implicated in the deaths of two prisoners who were held in an American-operated prison. The investigation into the deaths spanned two years.¹⁸

So it’s evident that there are similarities between our treatment of detainees of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the treatment of Kikuyu detainees in colonial Kenya half a century ago. But what is important is not just that we are repeating the misdeeds of others from times past; it is what underlies our treatment of detainees. Although our government maintains that it is working in the interest of Iraqis and Afghanis, the all too frequent cases of abuse of detainees by U.S. military personnel and others demonstrate the disregard many Americans have for the lives of others. A number of these detainees have not even been charged with any crimes, yet rather than just extracting information from them—as we claim to be doing—establishing their guilt or innocence, and then releasing those who have no business being imprisoned, we have to make it a point to humiliate those we have captured and scare them into submission, just as colonizers did in the last century and preceding ones. We have to make a point of showing the world that some of us think of those under our occupation as inhuman—inhuman enough to be led around on dog leashes and have pictures taken as if they were in a circus show. It is unfortunate that some of the Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan, and here in the U.S. think of those they claim to be protecting as animals; that is a dangerous situation for any country to put itself in if it wants to avoid the ‘mistakes’ of other empires. The truth is that if the world really wants to leave behind its days of injustice, oppression, genocide, conquest, war, et cetera, it also has to leave behind the mindsets that it uses to excuse such things—namely the view that those who are not us are not equal and do not deserve to be treated as human beings. I don’t think that anyone has ever truly believed that other human beings are inferior; people just pretend to believe so in order to exploit others without feeling guilty about it. As has often happened in the past, it is probable that the future will look back on the U.S’s treatment of detainees with disdain, comparing them to the war crimes of other conflicts and lamenting the fact that the world allowed such abuses to happen. Then, we will avow, as we have often done in the past, not to let such atrocities be repeated in the future. But is it not far better to correct ourselves before we allow more human beings to suffer than to wait until our only option is to make (empty) promises for the future?

1Associated Press, “Torture Suit Against Rumsfeld Filed in France” October 31, 2007. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21570133/

2Associated Press, “ Top Officials OK'd Harsh Interrogation Tactics,” April 10, 2008. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24055778

3Associated Press, “Judge May Make CIA Torture Memo Public,” CBS News, 8 May 2008.http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/05/08/national/main4081847.shtml

4Ferraro, Thomas, “Cheney Aide Subpoenaed to Testify to Congress,” 7 May 2008, http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080507/pl_nm/usa_congress_cheney_dc_2

5 Elkins, Caroline. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, New York : Henry Holt and Company, 2005. (5? This part was probably from the cover though)

6 Elkins, 65-68, 302.

7 Associated Press, “Soldier Gets 8 Years For Prison Abuse,” published in The Harvard Crimson, October 22, 2004

8 Associated Press, “England Pleads Guilty to Abuse” published in The Harvard Crimson May 3, 2005.

9 Associated Press, “Memos Say Special Forces Threatened Iraq Torture Witnesses.” Published in The Harvard Crimson. December 8, 2004.

10 Associated Press, “Memos Say Special Forces Threatened Iraq Torture Witnesses.” Published in The Harvard Crimson. December 8, 2004.

11 Dedman, Bill. “Can ‘20^th hijacker’ ever stand trial?” October 26, 2006. MSNBC Interactive 2007. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15361462/?GT1=8618.

12 Associated Press, “Memos Say Special Forces Threatened Iraq Torture Witnesses.” Published in The Harvard Crimson. December 8, 2004.

13 “UN Expert: Tapes Point to CIA Torture.” Yahoo News. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071213/ap_on_re_eu/un_cia_torture_1;_ylt=AvxEEWlbjmfBdDAO0e.4O7yMwfIE.
December 13, 2007

14 Associated Press, “1 Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps,” published on MSNBC.com October 14, 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15264274/page/2/

15Novak, Viveca and Douglas Waller, “New Abuse Charges,” Time Magazine , 20 June 2004. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,655389,00.html

16 Taguba Report, Findings and Recommendations, Part One (Detainee Abuse), “Regarding Part One of the Investigation, I Make the Following Specific Findings of Fact,” 6; Myers, Steven Lee, “The Reach of War: Detainees; Testimony from Abu Ghraib Prisoners Describes a Center of Violence and Fear,” New York Times 22 May 2004. See also Unbossed.com.

17 “Inside Iraq’s Only Women’s Prison.” CBS News. December 22, 2007, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/12/22/eveningnews/main3642350.shtml.

18 “U.S. Soldiers Charged with Abuse in Afghanistan” The Real World News in Brief. The Harvard Crimson, October 15, 2004.

Detention

Hello again. I know it's been a long time, but suffice it to say that a lot has happened over the past two months, and I'm currently overseas. Now that things are starting to settle down, here's some more stuff to ponder. These next few posts will deal with detention--not the kind we were sent to in elementary school, but the U.S.'s holding of terror suspects in various facilities. In light of President Bush's veto on Saturday of a bill that would have barred the CIA from using coercive interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, on detainees, it seems even more pressing for us to evaluate our treatment of detainees. In these upcoming posts, we will compare practices and policies being used by the U.S. in this war with those used by others in the past. Hopefully, such a comparison will help us avoid perpetuating the types of human rights abuses that were common in the colonial era and are sadly still in practice today.

Immediately following the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, on September 11, 2001, the United States government quickly moved to keep the country from further harm by detaining a large number of Muslim men. By November of 2001, over 1000 Muslim men had been apprehended and detained in the United States without having charges pressed against them1, and the total number of individuals detained in the FBI operation called PENTTBOM rose to about 1,200 individuals. “They were caught in their bedrooms while they slept, pulled from the restaurant kitchens where they worked, stopped at the border, even federal offices where they had gone to seek help.”2 Hundreds of those arrested were not terrorists but were nevertheless taken into custody on immigration charges, and some of the men remained in custody for up to five years without criminal charges3 such as in the case of Ali Partovi.4 Furthermore, the basic constitutional right to habeas corpus review was denied to or suspended for several of the detainees. To make matters worse, the government refused to release much information to the public about who the detainees were or how many were still in custody. As we now know and will discuss below, other suspected Al Qaeda “members or supporters”5 who were captured in Iraq and Afghanistan, were taken to the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention center, where allegations have been made that abuse occurred.

After a 2003 report from the Justice Department discovered that immigration laws had been misused to detain terrorist suspects following the September 11th, 2001 attacks, the Department of Homeland Security established guidelines in 2004 to ensure the protection of the rights of those in detention. According to Dean Boyd, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, “We learned from the past.”6 However, it seems that we had already had a chance to learn from the past because unreasonable reactions to fear similar to the PENTTBOM operation have occurred before in our own history. Everyone knows the story of the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor when many Japanese-Americans were held in internment camps out of fear that they might be supporting the Japanese enemies. Their rights as citizens and human beings were abridged, and the internment has since been denounced. We had supposedly learned from that mistake, so why was a similar ‘mistake’ made again?

Nevertheless, the worst stories of the detention of terrorist suspects were yet to come. As of September 2006, 14,000 detainees were being kept by the U.S. military in prisons abroad, meaning they were outside of U.S. jurisdiction, and many suspects have been captured, intensely interrogated, and held for months or years before being released without any kind of remuneration, explanation, or apology.7 Some of the first major scandals of the “War against Terror” which caught the world’s attention were the abuses at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prison facilities, and yet again, such incidents were not new at all. Countless episodes in history were replayed in these scandals, and the discourse which surrounded the scandals bears very close resemblance to discourse that accompanied the injustices of British colonial history . When reading newspapers or listening to newscasts over the past 4 years, I feel almost as if the words are being copied straight out of an 1865, 1919, or 1959 British newspaper, and you will see soon see why.

To be continued

1 According to a New York Times article from October 2002
2 Associated Press, “1 Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps,” published on MSNBC.com October 14, 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15264274/page/2/
3 Associated Press, “ High court bars Gitmo prisoners’ appeal” April 2, 2007 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17911662/
4 Associated Press, “1 Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps,” published on MSNBC.com October 14, 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15264274/page/2/
5 Dedman, Bill, “Battle Over Tactics Raged at Gitmo” October 23, 2006. © 2007 MSNBC Interactive
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15361458/.
6 Associated Press, “1 Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps,” published on MSNBC.com October 14, 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15264274/page/2/
7 Associated Press wire reports, “Discussion and Debate Over Secret Prisons Continues.” Published in The Harvard Crimson.The Real World News in Brief September 18, 2006.

The Language of War, Part 2

Happy New Year. I know it has been a while since the last post, but with all the holidays and other tasks, I never got around to it. Last time—if you haven’t read the previous post, scroll down or use the archive links at the side to check it out first—I was discussing language and terminology used in this war in Iraq in comparison with apartheid South Africa. I left off with a quote by William Blum about the “word games” the government plays in such war situations to stretch the truth and garner support. I’ll continue this discussion using other examples.

The US government plays even more word games with its legislation on the treatment of terrorist suspects. For example, a New York Times editorial in response to the Senate passing the Detainee Interrogation Bill September 28, 2006 details the bill’s problems, which include a vague definition of “enemy combatant” that could apply widely to almost anyone, and a restricted definition of coercion as well as of torture, which excludes many forms of sexual assault. Debate over what constitutes torture has especially become an issue with the growing controversy over waterboarding, along with other physically severe CIA interrogation methods euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” When the US went before the UN Committee Against Torture on May 5, 2006, experts even requested that the US clarify its classification of torture and be willing to abide by international standards instead of setting its own. More recently, in an Associated Press article about Bush’s defense of interrogation policies and denial of torture allegations, White House press secretary Dana Perino declined to define what counted as torture in interrogations, commenting, "I just fundamentally disagree that that would be a good thing for national security," she said. "I think the American people recognize that there are needs that the federal government has to keep certain information private…”

This appeal to secrecy was also a hallmark of the apartheid regime’s crimes against humanity. According to Gobodo-Madikizela’s book that I discussed in the prior post, it “formed the very basis on which the covert operations program was established. Top-level government officials used the need to keep the program secret to justify their use of secret language. But in reality what kept the program secret…was the relative lack of overt publicity about it.” Like the South Africans, the US has kept much of its activities against terror suspects a mystery as Perino’s comment indicates. At the same meeting with the UN Committee Against Torture mentioned above, the lead US delegate John Bellinger could not comment on the intelligence information that the Committee questioned, yet the committee was aware of new hidden detention sites. Even within days of 9/11, the FBI undertook the highly secretive PENTTBOM operation, abducting people from their own homes on immigration and terrorist suspicions. In an October 2006 article about it, Lee Gelernt with the American Civil Liberties Union remarked that “after 9/11, everyone was caught off guard. There was so much secrecy surrounding the government’s policies that it took a number of months before the public and civil-liberties groups began unraveling what the government was doing.” And even years later the U.S. government still had not made information public on these detainees’ identities or what was done to them. We also still know few details of even the more famous detention sites, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, again because of supposed security needs. Though the Taguba Report on the Abu Ghraib offenses is publicly available, many parts of the document are still withheld, like the detainee, witness, and suspect statements.

In my opinion, it is because of the discrepancies between the actual motives of the war and the publicly projected ones mentioned in the last post, namely freedom and fighting terrorism, that we see abstractness in references to the Iraq war operations—like the abstract references to “the enemy”. Time and time again, President Bush and his cabinet as well as the media use the term “enemy” when discussing the war on terror and Iraq. Far too many instances of this are available to pick examples from, but even looking at sources I’ve already referred to before, we can see it numerous times. In Bush’s speech aboard the USS Lincoln to announce the end of combat in Iraq, he asserts, “…we will continue to hunt down the enemy before he can strike.” And in the 60 Minutes story on Haditha, the narrator says in reference to the murder of six Marines prior to the incident: “the enemy put it on the Internet” and later: “they [Wuterich and his men] couldn’t see the enemy, but it was clear the enemy was watching them.” Not only does the use of the term “enemy” allow the US government to avoid specifying against whom a seemingly aimless war in Iraq—or at least a war with an ever-changing aim—is being fought so that they do not have to confront the fact that the war is not what they say it is, it also becomes a catch word that turns the human targets into an inhuman force, facilitating the use of violence against them. Its negative connotations are used to evoke sentiments of fear and anger that enable the maintenance of public support against the “bad guys”. Recent coverage on former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s “snowflake” memos reveals precisely such a desire to sway public opinion on the war and “keep elevating the threat” through language, such as by using “bumper sticker statements” and even renaming the war on terrorism to consider it fighting a “worldwide insurgency” in order to see what effects the change would have on the public. When running for re-election, President Bush also manipulatively used the term “enemy” throughout one of the 2004 presidential debates. For instance, in response to a question about Iraq and whether he’d consider future preemptive action, he responded that he never planned to use military force “but the enemy attacked us.” In other words, he suggested that the “enemy” who committed the 9/11 attacks was the same “enemy” that necessitated invading Iraq. Senator Kerry luckily made a point to call him out on confusing Saddam Hussein with Osama Bin Laden.

Certainly, the term “enemy” is frequently used by militaries and governments in wars, yet the failure to acknowledge what is behind that word but to use it almost exclusively suggests some persuasive motive, or at least some sense of secrecy or uncertainty. When I ask myself who the “enemy” is in this war, I am hard-pressed to find answers. There is no Iraqi government that has declared war on the US or any official Iraqi military force or opponent that we are fighting. So is it the Iraqi people? It can’t be; we’re fighting for them. Some might answer the insurgents, but that response is very complicated when you examine who they are, whether they even existed before the war, whether they are acting offensively or defensively, whether they have a right to resist occupation—especially considering that this war was not mutually agreed upon but was self-proclaimed on a country that did not ever attack the US. Even the very fact that the term “enemy” is mistakenly used in cases that resulted in civilian deaths, such as in Haditha, raises suspicions.

In other past so-called wars mentioned previously, a similar labeling of “enemy” was also common practice to justify violence. Anti-apartheid blacks were “justifiably” subjected to state-sponsored terror in that “war” because they were “enemies of the state” and Colonel Meinertzhagen also refers to “the enemy” in his operations in colonial Kenya. I guess not much has changed.

Thus, these last two posts have shown that, though apartheid fortunately ended in 1994, the type of language and tactics used to justify the system continue to live on as the US justifies the Iraq war. We could go on and on with examples of word choice in the war in Iraq, such as the vague references to the “mission” of military operations, discussions of trying to achieve “victory” or “succeeding” in the war—whatever that means since no one seems to ever explain when that would be or what exactly “success” entails—and the list goes on, but I think after these two posts, you get the picture. However, there is one specific group that has a term of its very own which warrants a separate discussion: the insurgency. In an upcoming post, I’ll go more in depth with that to try to understand what’s behind this popular word “insurgency”.

Sources:
-Jennifer Loven “Bush Defends US Interrogation Methods” Yahoo! News, Sunday, October 7 2007, http://beta.malaysia.news.yahoo.com/ap/20071005/twl-bush-terrorism-1be00ca.html
-Tom Wright, “U.S. delegation faces UN panel: Committee Against Torture listens skeptically to explanations” International Herald Tribune May 6, 2006 http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/05/news/geneva.php?page=1
-Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died That Night: A South African woman confronts the legacy of apartheid (New York, Houghton Mifflin Company 2003), 62, 65-66
-“The Killings in Haditha” CBS News 60 Minutes September 2, 2007 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/03/15/60minutes/printable2574973.shtml
-Colonel R. Meinertzhagen, Kenya Diary: 1902-1906 (London, Oliver and Boyd Ltd. 1957), 50
-“Full Text: Bush Speech Aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln” Washington Post, May 1, 2003 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2627-2003May1
-Associated Press, “1 Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps: Detainee Has Not Been Charged, Not Seen As A Threat, But Is Behind Bars,” MSN News Oct 14, 2006 http://www.msnbc.com/id/15264274/page/2/
-Robin Wright, “From the Desk of Donald Rumsfeld…:In Sometimes Brusque ‘Snowflakes,’ He Shared Worldview, Shaped Policy,” Washington Post, Nov 1 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/31/AR2007103103095_pf.html
-Commission on Presidential Debates, “Debate Transcript September 30, 2004: The First Bush-Kerry Presidential Debate,” http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2004a_p.html