Troops, torture and the politics of ambiguity

[dArKeR]

A former interrogator believes the images of abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison are just the beginning of worse

By Michael Manning

Wednesday, May 19, 2004,Page 9

Each new revelation of physical abuse, maltreatment and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by American and British soldiers shocks international public opinion, leaving officials to scramble desperately to contain the damage. US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warns that more documentary evidence of wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib prison lies in store, evidently in the pre-emptive hope that the outrages stopped there.

As a former US military intelligence interrogator, I am convinced that the images from Abu Ghraib are just the beginning. The wanton cruelty there is all too clearly symptomatic of a systemic failure.

But what system failed? Was it a failure of discipline and training -- the result of sending inexperienced and unworldly reservists into poor conditions, abruptly extending their deployments, and then leaving them understaffed in the face of a growing influx of captured insurgents? Or did the pattern of abuse amount to so many orders from superiors to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation?

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/05/19/2003156142

[bemildred]

1. "But what system failed?"

A fish rots from the head.

You send an inadequate force to do an impossible job and then
apply enormous pressure on them to make reality conform to the
delusions of the leadership, then of course you get failures.

We have failures of discipline, failures of command, and military
failures, and no reason to think the situation will ever get
any better. So now we have a failure of nerve at the top. They
are like the monkey with his hand in the gourd wrapped around the
rice ball, he can't let go and he can't pull his hand out unless
he let's go, and the hunter is coming to catch him ...

[Miss Authoritiva]

2. 800 x 600 pixels of unambiguity

"In the end, the politics of ambiguity may fail Rumsfeld; all those high-resolution photographs from Abu Ghraib are anything but ambiguous."

Remember, in his recent Congressional testimony, the greatest anger Rumsfeld expressed was not about the abuse/torture but about the photo CDs and the internet. Makes sense, of course. But the high-resolution photographs will not be the end of Rumsfeld, unless there are actually pictures of him standing over the naked bodies of prisoners.

Sadly, the technology cuts both ways: the pictures exist, but Rumsfeld is not in the pictures.