They Just Complied With Lawful Orders...

[Ivo Skoric]

1) With the charge that Hussein's Iraq produced WMD-s proving bogus, 
the "coalition of the willing" based its right to occupy Iraq on the 
fact that Saddam's was one of the most deplorable regimes in the 
history of the humankind. Recently, when Bush visited Canada, he said 
that there are no more torture chambers in Iraq. He was wrong. The 
only difference is that torture chambers are not run any more by the 
Baathists. Now, they are run by the US Department of Defense.
2) Under international law, all detainees, military or civilian, must 
be treated humanely. In no circumstances may they be subjected to 
torture or any other "cruel or degrading" treatment. Pleading 
"exceptional circumstances" or "higher orders" - as the lawyers for 
the US soldiers, currently court-martialed for their misconduct, 
apparently dare to claim - is no excuse, as we all remember well from 
the Nuerenberg trials.
3) Crimes against humanity are crimes against humanity, regardless if 
they are conducted by Serbs, Croats or Americans, and torture is a 
crime against humanity. It would be a double standard to treat 
Americans differently. They already insisted to be excepted from the 
reach of ICC, like they are some sort of holy cows, and they 
blackmailed many poor countries with economic aid into signing the 
agreement that those would not extradite international law breaking 
American boys (and girls, as we see now) to the ICC. That outraged 
other "civilized" countries. Now, that places even bigger burden of 
proof on the American legal system to deal with the scandal properly.
4) The Geneva convention applies to the US soldiers, as well. It also 
applies to those who never had read it. It was the job of those who 
recruited, trained, and commanded the soldiers involved in the abuses 
to make sure that all soldiers are well versed in the letter and 
substance of Geneva convention. Failure to do so reflects negatively 
on the entire US military recruiting and training procedure, as well 
as its top brass. It was their COMMAND RESPONSIBILITY to make 
absolutely sure that abuses like those NEVER happen at hand of the US 
military personnel. They failed to do their duty. If they are 
citizens of any other country, the US administration, would scream 
for their blood, threatening that country with sanctions, unless the 
generals are arrested and tried. But since they are Americans, they 
are not even going to lose their jobs, disgracing the very foundation 
of everything that America stands for. Geneva convention is not the 
"law in the service of terrorism," but precisely the opposite.
5) Claiming ignorance of the law, of the facts, and/or of the 
previous behavioral research analyses does not exculpate the US 
military leaders. With the budget 16 times greater than the entire 
Iraq's pre-war GDP, there simply should not be any free lunch for 
those who fucked up, including Rumsfeld. It is known from Stamford 
Prison Experiment conducted in 1971, that even completely sane 
individuals may turn into sadistic monsters within a week, when 
exposed to the encouraging environment - and Abu Ghraib obviously 
was. Pictures and videos demonstrate crimes against humanity 
committed by the US and British military men and women. Those crimes 
are clear breaches of the international law on the books. Pentagon is 
at fault for not doing anything to prevent this from happening in the 
first place, and for not acting earlier (there were warnings both 
from Amnesty International and ICRC) to stop it.
6) On the top of that, all of those improbably grinning soldiers in 
the pictures, should be sent in for a psychiatric evaluations. Orders 
or no orders, they, who grew up in the democratic society, should 
have known better then to engage in the crimes against humanity, AND 
take pictures of themselves doing that. So, not only are they 
psychopats, but they are also complete retards, putting themselves 
and the dignity of the country they serve in jeopardy. How the hell 
did they get into military in the first place? How did they score on 
psychology tests?
7) Bush supports Rumsfeld. And public, to my disbelief, as the polls 
show, still supports Bush, making us all the "willing executioners" - 
maybe it is time for Goldhagen to write a sequel to his book.

Links:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/10/international/middleeast/10ABUS.html
?th
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 9 — A 24-year-old military policeman from 
Pennsylvania will be court-martialed here on May 19, the first 
American soldier to face trial in the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu 
Ghraib prison, military officials said Sunday. In an extraordinary 
gesture to address outrage over the abuse scandal, the military is 
permitting broad public access to the trial and will invite the Arab 
news media.

http://domovina.xs4all.nl/
In 1999 Goran Jelisic was sentenced to 40 years imprisonment by ICTY 
Trial Chamber I; the Appeals Chamber affirmed this sentence in July 
2001. The Trial Chamber also reccommended Jelisic receive 
psychological and psychiatric follow-up treatment.  He is serving his 
sentence in Italy.
The ICTY has released tapes of the interviews its investigators had 
prior to his trial with Goran Jelisic.  One hour of these recordings 
from the Scheveningen Detention Unit is now available on the Internet 
in mp3 audio format. Audio is in English with integral translations 
to/from Bosnian. I found these interviews even more depressing than 
the Jelisic court sessions I saw; they depict a cold-blooded 
executioner showing compassion nor remorse.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1209846,00.html
BBC commentators and British politicians have been reminding us that 
the soldiers' activities "do not compare with Saddam Hussein's 
systematic tortures and executions". Hussein is now the moral compass 
of the west.

http://www.warblogging.com/archives/000842.php#000842
Douglas Feith, President Bush's Undersecretary of Defense for Policy 
— and number three man at the Pentagon — reporetdly summed up 
Protocol One of the Geneva Conventions of 1977 as "law in the service 
of terrorism".

http://www.prisonexp.org/
In 2003 U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners held at Abu Ghraib, 20 
miles west of Baghdad. The prisoners were stripped, made to wear bags 
over their heads, and sexually humiliated while the guards laughed 
and took photographs. How is this abuse similar to or different from 
what took place in the Stanford Prison Experiment?

http://www.tentaka.com/
Usually pictures like the ones we saw from Abu Ghraib could be find 
on websites like this one - The American Male Slave Market; does the 
DoD recruit its military intelligence interrogators from the pool of 
customers of sites like that?

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/politics/11PREX.html?th
A new poll showed that most people thought that Mr. Rumsfeld should 
not lose his job over the issue. Asked whether he should resign, two-
thirds of 1,030 people questioned from Thursday through Sunday by the 
University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey said 
Mr. Rumsfeld should not resign.
By a percentage of 47 to 31, people responding to the poll said they 
believed that the soldiers implicated in the abuse had acted on their 
own and not under orders. But 52 percent said the Pentagon had tried 
to cover up the matter, while 32 percent said the Pentagon had acted 
properly. The poll had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 
percentage points.

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ivo