Not only does the Bush administration DO EVIL, it DOES EVIL INCOMPETENTLY--a course of action in which, as Mark Kleiman quotes Michael Walzer, there can be neither honor nor profit.
Mark A. R. Kleiman: Videotapes? Please, not videotapes: The Observer reports that there is a unit called the Extreme Reaction Force at Guantanamo, whose mission is dealing with instances of prisoner recalcitrance. One Guantanamo alumnus reports having been treated rather badly (though not by Abu Ghraib standards) for what he says was no more than resisting having his cell searched for the third time in one day:
They pepper-sprayed me in the face, and I started vomiting. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed. They tied me up like a beast and then they were kneeling on me, kicking and punching. Finally they dragged me out of the cell in chains, into the rec[reation] yard, and shaved my beard, my hair, my eyebrows.
No, that's not the bad news. The bad news is that it's all in a videotape archive, as part of SOP:
Every time the ERFs were deployed, a sixth team member recorded on digital video everything that happened. Lieutenant Colonel Leon Sumpter, the Guantanamo Joint Task Force spokesman, confirmed this last night, saying all ERF actions were filmed so they could be 'reviewed' by senior officers. All the tapes are kept in an archive there, he said.
Ordering that everything be videotaped is a good way to ensure that nothing too horrible is going on. But given the description (admittedly not a neutral one) of what was routine, I doubt those tapes are going make comfortable viewing. Am I the only one who thinks the interrogators and their superiors were just a little bit divided from reality? Put the moral question aside for the moment: how dumb did you have to be to think you could actually get with this crap in the long run? And why wasn't Col. Sumpter under orders to refuse all questions from the press?
As Michael Walzer once said, "There is neither honor nor profit from doing evil badly." I'm with Kevin Drum: this could get really ugly. We need to put the grownups back in charge, and we need to do it soon.
UPDATE: Add another to the list of incompetent doers-of-evil: Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita, who "vigorously denied the allegations that Mr. Cambone directed a covert program to encourage the coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners. 'It's pure, unadulterated fantasy,' Mr. Di Rita said in a telephone interview. 'We don't discuss covert programs, but nothing in any covert program would have led anyone to sanction activity like what was seen on those videos.'" What videos is he talking about?
Posted by DeLong at May 16, 2004 06:36 PM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postIf the operation is as black-bag as Sy Hersh says it is, a Pentagon flack would know nothing about it.
Posted by: edward opton on May 16, 2004 08:03 PMThe article says that the prisoner resisted a search of cell. That's a stupid thing to do in any prison. He's a prisoner. He's obviously not entitled to any privacy in his cell.
It's wrong to beat to prisoners for the purpose of interrogation, but I don't see anything wrong with overpowering a prisoner who is physically resisting a search of his cell. The guards went too far when they shoved his head in the toilet and shaved his face, but pepper spray and a light beating seem reasonable.
Posted by: Xavier on May 16, 2004 08:19 PMJ. Bradford,
I have taken your advice. I just sent a donation to the Navy and Marine Corps Relief Society.
Keep up the good work, my Green Brothers!
Posted by: Rodney G. Graves on May 16, 2004 08:29 PMDid you see Mr. Di Rita's letter to the Washington Post today?
"Nevertheless, The Post's continued editorializing on narrow definitions of international laws and whether our soldiers understand them puts The Post in the same company as those involved in this despicable behavior in terms of apparent disregard for basic human dignity."
Froth, froth, froth. But not direct denial of the facts, either.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Posted by: phil on May 16, 2004 08:47 PM"J. Bradford,
"I have taken your advice. I just sent a donation to the Navy and Marine Corps Relief Society.
"Keep up the good work, my Green Brothers!"
Speaking of the immature...
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on May 16, 2004 08:58 PMAt first, I thought allright, it's like when a bunch of kids get in a car and play mailbox baseball with a camera on. But then there was the discussion of whether the images were used to coerce the detainee into compliance, which doesn't jive well with the mailbox baseball scenario (but does in a mailbox ransom scenario).
Reconsidering, maybe its like a PI who snaps photos of a man cheating on his wife, then bribes the dude.
Whatever, now that the interrogation programs are blown somewhat wide open, good behavior is to be expected and the film archives may reach the prosecutors. What was an ace up the sleeve of the interrogation system becomes a source of clues into allegations of it's own misconduct.
Posted by: forgetting on May 16, 2004 09:25 PMMoomaw,
And a check for the Bush/Cheney 2004 Campaign will now follow tomorrow.
Thanks for the inspiration.
As I noted below, Graves is clearly another of those people who regards himself as a wit but is, alas, only half right. (Unless he's an Al Qaida sleeper agent, in which case sending a check to keep Bush and Rumsfeld in power is the best strategic move possible.)
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on May 16, 2004 09:33 PMHe must have been talking about the Abu Ghraib videos showing various sexual acts.
Posted by: Brian Boru on May 16, 2004 09:46 PMCould be. His first comment suggests that he gets a kick out of that sort of thing. Unfortunately, so does the Islamic Fascist movement. Particularly when it's done as idiotically and indiscriminately as Rummy apparently did it.
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on May 16, 2004 10:55 PMOh. Sorry about that, Brian. I thought you were noting that Graves seems to be inspired by this sort of thing.
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on May 16, 2004 10:56 PMWhere is our Solzhenitzyn? We have our own Gulag, now. Remember when practices like this made them the Evil Empire? If the jackboot fits...
Posted by: tjallen on May 17, 2004 03:58 AMWhen the soldiers said things like, we made them stoop for hours, or we made them masturbate, or we piled them up in a pyramid, etc, it was always left unsaid *how* they made them do these things. Now it is clearer, they beat the hell out of them if they did not do as told. Now, which is the torture - the things they were told to do, or beating the hell out of them if they didn't "volunarily comply" ???
Posted by: tjallen on May 17, 2004 04:03 AMAh, yes: Republican grownups.
Scrolling through the list of Republican senators (http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm?OrderBy=party&Sort=ASC), I came up with a list of 15 that either now or in the past have acted like grownups. I'll admit that there are a number of them that are only names to me, there may be more grownups than that on the GOP side of the aisle in the U.S. Senate. Feel free to modify my list:
McCain, Chafee, Collins, Snowe, Domenici, Lugar, Hagel, Graham, Dole, Roberts, Warner, Voinovich, Alexander, Coleman, Specter.
You'd need another 11 to have a majority of grownups in the Senate GOP delegation.
It looks to me that the proportion of GOP grownups in the House is much smaller than in the Senate. I haven't looked at governorships.
Posted by: RT on May 17, 2004 07:16 AMAs far as Guantanamo goes, I'm not sure they had to be all that _stupid_ to take videos, just in the spirit of the times. Remember, these are guys WAY outside the everyday experience of mainstream America. They're military interrogators who, after September 11, regard themselves as having the mandate of heaven to do whatever they decide to do to act against terrorism. They probably couldn't quite conceive that the American public would care enough about the torture allegations of someone released from Guantanamo to actually demand that their secret video archive be opened. It's not stupidity or a lack of "grownups" going on there at all. Just good old fashioned abuse of power by guys who have been given carte blanche and believe they are fighting absolute evil by any means necessary.
As I understand, in many cases it was policy to make videos. Quality control, training purposes,and to intimidate new inmates.
I keep harping on this, but in the first batch of photos there was a picture of a man who had been beaten to death. No one talks about that one. But forced simulation of gay oral sex -- Mmmmm......
We're in the full Weekly World News tabloid sexual kink mode here. Monica's BJ, Paris Hilton's twat, Richard Gere's gerbil -- that's how you get the attention of the American body politic.
I'm not kidding. In Afghanistan there was a story about 3000 enemy (presumably all Taliban) crammed into cargo containers, machine-gunned, and left in the hot sun to die. No kink, no buzz.
Don't tell those elitist French about this. They'd claim that this justifies their worst sneers about America. Plenty of Frenchmen are indifferent to or approving of murderous hard-ball tactics, but I doubt that there are any who are unbothered by murder but upset by kinkiness.
Posted by: Zizka on May 17, 2004 09:56 AMXavier:
The Guardian article didn't say the prisoner resisted a cell search,it just says he didn't agree to a cell search.Which,according to the prisoner,was the third one that day.
If true,that makes a big difference.
Posted by: Jussi Hämäläinen on May 17, 2004 09:56 AMhttp://pep.typepad.com/public_enquiry_project/2004/05/prof_brad_delon.html
Posted by: Adrian Spidle on May 17, 2004 11:47 AMThey never said "adults are in charge", the correct quote should have been "a dolt is in charge".
Posted by: Stirling Newberry on May 17, 2004 02:24 PMThis constitutes the latest in a series of non-existence proofs. There ARE no "Republican Grownups." There are, indeed, *some* Republicans who have acted *like* grownups at one time or another. Not the same thing. Teenagers act like grownups from time to time. The senators cited are Republican Teenagers. There are no Republican Grownups.
Except, of course, Abe Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. And they're like.... dead.
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