From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Mon May 17 2004 - 09:25:58 MDT
[Jonathan Davis]
Yes the Abu Ghraib abusers came from poor backgrounds, but then again virtually all non-ranking soldiers are drawn from the domestic poor. This is why blacks and Hispanics are so over-represented in those ranks.
[rhinoceros]
This seems factually correct, but the connective "This is why" leaves you wondering. This is what Naomi Klein attempted to explain:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=55305142
<begin quote>
Free trade has turned the U.S. labour market into an hourglass: plenty of jobs at the bottom, a fair bit at the top, but very little in the middle. At the same time, getting from the bottom to the top has become increasingly difficult, with tuition at state colleges up by more than 50 per cent since 1990.
And that’s where the U.S. military comes in: the army has positioned itself as the bridge across America’s growing class chasm: money for tuition in exchange for military service. Call it the NAFTA draft.
It worked for Lynndie England, the most infamous of the Abu Ghraib accused. She joined the 372 Military Police Company to pay for college, hoping to replace her job at the chicken processing plant with a career in meteorology. Her colleague Sabrina Harman told the Washington Post, “I knew nothing at all about the military except that they would pay for college. So I signed up.”
<end quote>
[Jonathan Davis]
The contempt shown world wide for these wrongdoers was coloured by a familiar bigotry. Not only did these people commit these wrongs but worse, they "hillbillies", "backwoodsmen" or "trailer trash". America's white rural poor are the only group one can attack with impunity and let loose the full broadside of bigotry and group hatred. Even the gentlemanly Boris Johnson could not check himself.
Lynndie England is in many ways exemplary. Born to extreme poverty, she worked and planned her way out of poverty. She could have been a perfect American Dream candidate.
[rhinoceros]
Naomi Klein addressed this too. It is the Bush administration, not her, who put all the blame on Lynndie England and those detained, the "deviant monsters".
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=5530ºŸ
<begin quote>
The poverty of the soldiers at the center of the prison scandal has been used both as evidence of their innocence, and to compound their guilt. On the one hand, Sgt. First Class Paul Shaffer explains that at Abu Ghraib, “you’re a person who works at McDonald’s one day; the next day you’re standing in front of hundreds of prisoners, and half are saying they’re sick and half are saying they’re hungry.” And Gary Myers, the lawyer defending several of the soldiers, asked The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, “Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own?”
On the other side, the British Sun tabloid has dubbed Lynndie England the “Trailer trash torturer,” while Boris Johnson wrote in the Telegraph that Americans were being shamed by “smirking jezebels from the Appalachians.”
The truth is that the poverty of the soldiers involved in prison torture makes them neither more guilty, nor less. But the more we learn about them, the clearer it becomes that the lack of good jobs and social equality in the U.S. is precisely what brought them to Iraq in the first place. Despite his attempts to use the economy to distract attention from Iraq, and his efforts to isolate the soldiers as un-American deviants, these are the children George Bush left behind, fleeing dead-end McJobs, abusive prisons, unaffordable education, and closed factories.
<snip>
Donald Rumsfeld? "Doing a superb job," according to the optimist-in-chief. The mission in Iraq? "We're making progress, you bet," Bush told reporters one year after his disastrous "Mission Accomplished" speech. And the U.S. job market, which has driven so many into poverty? "Yes, America Can!"
We don’t yet know who taught these young soldiers how to effectively torture their prisoners. But we do know who taught them how to stay happy go lucky in the face of tremendous suffering --that lesson came straight from the top.
<end quote>
[rhinoceros]
This final paragraph brings to mind the "Stanford prison experiment" which, although criticised by many as not scientifically rigorous, gives us good clues about how affirmation can easily make a torturer. There is also the newer "BBC prison experiment" which brings up a caveat:
Why not everyone is a torturer
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3700209.stm)
That said, no psychological study can absolve an ordinary person from their personal responsibility; society mainly cares for the effects on our daily lives.
[Jonathan Davis]
Need she be imprisoned and heavily punished? I do not think that would be just. Catch the people who might have murdered prisoners. Catch the people who might have tortured them.
But the people who frightened and humiliated them - people like Lynndie England - their wrongs in my mind and not even crimes. This is the reality of war and interrogation. I suspect that England and company were directed by Military Intelligence and that these interrogation methods were successful.
[rhinoceros]
Personal responsibility is an integral part of our Western values, and these deviations are illegal for a reason which already became apparent: They are already being paid in blood.
[Jonathan Davis]
If it were discovered that these interrogations saved US lives, would that make a difference? Given a choice would you accept this: One of your soldiers lives saved for 10 of the enemy humiliated?
[rhinoceros]
Sure, by stacking "suspects" into prisons, humiliating them and interrogating them without pressing any specific charges is going to get you *some* information, statistically. (Imagine this in the USA, say, during a war on drugs.) The price for this has become apparent even to Bush administration: More lives put in danger in response. As I said, it is illegal for a reason.
[Jonathan Davis]
I think we ought to stop the hypocritical finger pointing at these miscreants and face up the messy task of fighting enemies that not only do not share our values or restraint but actively use them against us.
It is time to adapt and that adaptation might mean that the gentlemanly rules of engagement and prisoner care developed by and for civilised people be not apply when facing enemies that scorn those rules.
[rhinoceros]
What "hypocritical finger pointing?" I thought those exactly were the values that were supposed to be promoted. "Fighting enemies that don't share our values?" Can you point out any specific values which the occupation troops are currently offering for sharing? And after all, who decides who my enemy is?
This is also a good place to point out that (a) Saddam has already been capture and (b) Al-Sadr with his mahdi army used to be a sworn enemy of his -- Saddam murdered his father. Now Al-Sadr is fighting against the occupation troops and I don't see any civil war in Iraq. Why are the troops there now? Why would I want to fight and defeat anyone in their home because of a shady Lebanese serial killer who is trying to cash-in the anger of the abused? -- and he may too.
[Jonathan Davis]
An enemy whose Commander in Chief personally apologises for the wrongdoings of a tiny number of renegade soldiers sets the upper standard. An enemy that beheads captives, ransoms body parts or flies whole plane loads of its prisoners into buildings, sets the opposite, lowest standard.
[rhinoceros]
So, they became renegade wrongdoers again? I thought you said they were exemplary. And who is "the enemy" who beheads captives? Not the serial killer I just mentioned? Is "the enemy" a tentacle coming out of the Brown Blob comprising the Middle East? This may sound snide, but remember that it is neither Al-Zarqawi nor Saddam who is kept in Baghdad prison. It's Iraqis with kin and neighbors who have not been accused of anything. You may want to turn back and look for those western values again.
All that said, I have talked with Jonathan in IRC several times and I have noticed that he is actually a sweet and polite person, much unlike myself. I would bet good money that if he was a guard in that Baghdad prison he would stop dead on his tracks as soon as a prisoner talked back to him in human speech. I expect that eventually he will integrate all the personal stories which drive him into a coherent whole.
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