Chalmers Johnson - Nemesis - The Last Days of the American Republic

At Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, some American soldiers had become so inured to the torture of Iraqi inmates that they made a screen saver of naked Iraqi captives stacked in a “pyramid” with their tormentors looking on and laughing in the background. 30By contrast, on January 13, 2004, Sergeant Joseph M. Darby of the army’s 372nd Military Police Company turned over a computer disk of similar photos from Abu Ghraib of American soldiers torturing Iraqis to the army’s Criminal Investigations Division. He said that the photos “violated everything that I personally believed in and everything that I had been taught about the rules of war.” 31Sergeant Darby had not stopped thinking.

No Pentagon civilian or American officer above the rank of lieutenant colonel has so far been prosecuted for the policies that led to Abu Ghraib and other acts of torture and murder in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, another proof that, as a consequence of our half century of devotion to war, we unintentionally abandoned our republican checks on the activities of public officials and elevated the military to a position that places it, in actual practice, beyond the law. In so doing, what we have created is a large corps of desk murderers in our executive branch and the highest ranks of our armed forces. These people have replaced their ability to think and judge with “cliches, stock phrases, and adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct.” For example, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shrugged off the defilement and looting of ancient monuments and museums in Baghdad as the American occupation of that country began by saying, “Stuff happens,” and then joking that he did not think there were that many ancient vases in Iraq. 32

It is, of course, natural for political and military leaders to try to put favorable interpretations on their policies. In the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, this has meant making statements that consist of little more than flat contradictions of evidence or specious reinterpretations of law. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, for example, has tried to legalize the Bush administration’s decisions to torture prisoners of war by arguing that a “new paradigm renders obsolete [the Geneva Conventions’] strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.” 33But the allegedly new paradigm is apparent only to Gonzales, and in any case he lacks the authority to nullify a ratified treaty.

Richard Myers, a four-star air force general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared categorically to Fox News, “One thing we don’t do is we don’t torture,” as if that disposed of the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison. 34In speaking to our European allies about extensive evidence that the CIA was operating secret prisons and torturing the inmates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “With respect to detainees, the United States Government complies with its Constitution, its laws, and its treaty obligations. Acts of physical or mental torture are expressly prohibited. The United States Government does not authorize or condone torture of detainees. Torture, and conspiracy to commit torture, are crimes under U.S. law, wherever they may occur in the world.” She mentioned that there had been cases of the “unlawful treatment” of prisoners, but added that “the horrible mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib that sickened us all ... arose under the different legal framework that applies to armed conflict in Iraq.” 35She failed to explain what the nature of this different legal framework actually is or how this squares with a ban on torture “wherever [it] may occur in the world “

Commenting on the unauthorized bombing of civilian villages in Afghanistan, former secretary of state Colin Powell said on German TV, “We spent a huge amount of money and we are putting our young men and women on the line, every day, to put in place a form of government that was decided upon by the Afghan people. And we are helping them to rebuild and reconstruct their society. That pattern is the American pattern. We’re very proud of it. It’s been repeated many times over, and it will be repeated again in Iraq.” 36

As Arendt suggests, it is precisely when such absurdities and flights from reality replace clear thinking that evil enters the picture. What follows are but three illustrations of the consequences of the failure of our political and military leadership to think: the systematic killing of unarmed civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq; the creation of a global network of both known and secret prisons around the world in which our troops or intelligence agents routinely torture the inmates; and the way the military’s attitudes at the time of its 2003 assault on Baghdad led to the destruction and desecration of some of the world’s oldest known human artifacts.

During World War II in East Asia, the Imperial Japanese Army contrived one of the worst euphemisms ever used to mask criminal acts— namely, “comfort women” (ianfu) to refer to the women and girls abducted in occupied countries and sent to the front lines to serve as prostitutes for Japanese officers and soldiers. 37This phrase will probably haunt Japan until the end of time. A comparable term invented by the United States military is “collateral damage,” meaning its killing of civilians and the destruction of private property while allegedly pursuing one or another of its unilaterally declared acts of “liberation.”

“Broadly defined,” says a U.S. Air Force training manual, “collateral damage is unintentional damage or incidental damage affecting facilities, equipment, or personnel occurring as a result of military actions directed against targeted enemy forces or facilities. Such damage can occur to friendly, neutral, and even enemy forces.” 38This military euphemism has been substituted for plainspoken words that might induce guilt in airmen when they bomb and strafe defenseless communities or in soldiers when they kick down doors of private homes, rush in pointing assault rifles at women and children, and sometimes rob residents under cover of searching for enemies or contraband. The military also certainly hoped that its adoption of such a neutral, inoffensive expression for ones that might offend or suggest unpleasantness would strengthen the resolve of its soldiers and perhaps prevent them from being held accountable for war crimes.

“Collateral damage” is nowhere recognized, or even mentioned, in humanitarian international law. In fact, intentional attacks of any sort on civilians are prohibited under “Common Article 3,” which applies to all four Geneva Conventions. The United States has signed and ratified the Geneva Conventions (although it never ratified two supplemental protocols of 1977 that spelled out the international rules of war in greater detail). Common Article 3 prohibits “at any time and in any place whatsoever” violence, including murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture, and outrages to human dignity against protected persons—that is, “persons taking no active part in hostilities,” such as civilians, the wounded, and prisoners of war. “Such persons are, in all circumstances, entitled to respect for their honor and religion, and must be protected against insults and public curiosity. No physical or moral coercion shall be exercised to obtain information from them or third parties. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.” 39

Among the gravest contemporary instances of “collateral damage” were the sanctions enforced against Iraq between 1991 and 2003 and the slaughter of Afghan and Iraqi civilians in the wars waged by the United States after 9/11. On May 11, 1996, the CBS television program 60 Minutes made famous one of the more notorious statistics in the history of Iraqi-American relations. In an interview with then secretary of state Madeleine Albright, correspondent Lesley Stahl said, “We have heard that a half million children have died as a result of the sanctions [in Iraq]. That’s more than died in Hiroshima.” Then Stahl asked, “Is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.” Osama bin Laden cited just this statistic as one of the reasons al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. on 9/11. In her 2003 memoir, Madam Secretary, Albright amended her comment this way: “I must have been crazy; I should have answered the question by reframing it and pointing out the inherent flaw in the premise behind it. Saddam Hussein could have prevented any child from suffering simply by meeting his obligations.” 40Her clarification, however, was even more disingenuous than her earlier indifference to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. As a former ambassador to the United Nations, she was certainly fully informed about the sanctions program and its impact.