I am shocked and horrified by the decapitation of Nicholas Berg in Iraq, but not for the chest-puffing reasons the folks at Fox News are. U.S. military proxies held Berg without charges for an extended period of time and there are too many questions about when he was released and who he might have been released to. I’m not one for conspiracy theories but there are real questions as to how Berg ended up in front of those anonymous, hooded butchers. Whatever the answers, the U.S. military is involved in his detention, as is the FBI (who made him miss a plane that was supposed to take him out of Iraq last month), as is the U.S. government back home who didn’t cooperate with his family to get him out of there.
My major piece on this is over on the main Nonviolence.org site: “US military proxies held Berg before decaptiation; who were his executioners?”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000340.php
I’m sure to get even more hate mail than usual for this but I’ll also be watching the mainstream media coverage. I only know of many of these details because Berg was local and Channel 10 News gave background to Berg’s detention. Here’s my prediction from past experience: this story will be too hot for the mainstream media to question for a few days and then it will only be to report that there are some nutcases asking questions. Only after a few days of this kind of second-hand question will the national media drop the fascade and start asking the questions themselves. It should be a fun week ahead.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ iraq
Exporting Prison Abuse to the World?
May 8, 2004
An article on “abuse of prisoners in the U.S.”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08PRIS.html?hp in the _NY Times_ shows that Lane McCotter, the man who oversaw the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in iraq, was forced to resign a U.S. prison post “after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.” It was Attorney General John Ashcroft who hand-picked the officials who went to iraq.
As an American I’m ashamed but not terribly surprised to see what happened in the U.S.-run prisons in iraq. Militaries are institutions designed to command with force and only civilian oversight will ultimately keep any military insitution free from this sort of abuse. The “Red Cross had warned of prisoner mistreatment”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=3&u=/ap/20040508/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_prisoner_abuse but was largely ignored. Abu Ghraib is in the news in part because of a leaked Pentagon report, yet it’s only after CBS News aired the pictures and the New Yorker quoted parts of the reports and turned it into a scandal that President Bush or Defense Secretary Rumsfeld admitted to the problems and gave their half-hearted apologies.
_This is not to say all soldiers are abusive or all prison guards are abusive_. Most soldiers and most guards are good, decent people, serving out of call to duty and (often) because of economic necessities. But when the system is privatized and kept secret, we allow for corruption that put even the good people in positions where they are pressured to do wrong.
It is precisely because the Pentagon instinctively keeps reports like the one on the abuse conditions inside the Abu Ghraib prison secret that conditions are allowed to get this bad. That prison, along with the one at Guantanamo Bay remain largely off-limits to international law. It was probably only a few Americans that gave the orders for the abuse but it was many more who followed and many many more – all of us in one way or another – who have gave the go-ahead with our inattention to issues of justice in prisons.
iraqi Prisoner Abuse and the Simulacra of Leadership
May 4, 2004
The Gutless Pacifist talks about the abuse of iraqi prisoners and asks How high up does it go?
bq. There are many troubling political issues coming out of both the reports of abuse in iraq and earlier reports of abuse at Guantanamo Bay (which are looking increasingly accurate). But what is even more troubling to me is the larger moral issue that each of us who are Americans may be in part responsible for these atrocities. For it is we who have allowed a culture of death and violence to develop.
Meanwhile, a report on the abuses by “Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba”:http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4894033/ is chilling in its detailing of physical and psychologial torture reportedly taking place at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad.
Joshua Micah Marshall’s “Talking Points Memo”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_05_02.php#002909 is keeping close tabs on developments and reactions in Washington, including the President’s:
bq. The disasters now facing the country in iraq — some in slow motion, others by quick violence — aren’t just happening on the president’s watch. They are happening in a real sense, really in the deepest sense, because of him — because of his attention to the simulacra of leadership rather than the real thing, which is more difficult and demanding, both personally and morally.
Don’t miss Marshall’s thoughtful comparison of “President Bush to a bad C.E.O.”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_05_02.php#002906.
The other essential reading on all this is Seymour Hersh’s “New Yorker article on the torture at Abu Ghraib”:http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/.
Conscientious Objection, After You’re In
April 30, 2004
Here’s a website of “Jeremy Hinzman, a U.S. Army soldier who became a a conscientious objector”:http://www.jeremyhinzman.net/faq.html in the course of his service. His applications denied, he moved to Canada and is seeking political asylum there.
I find I can understand the issues all too well. In only a slightly-parallel universe, I’d be in iraq myself instead of publishing Nonviolence.org. My father, a veteran who fought in the South Pacific in World War II, really wanted me to join the U.S. Navy and attend the Naval Academy at Annapolis. For quite some time, I seriously considered it. I am attracted to the idea of service and duty and putting in hard work for something I believe in.
Hinzman’s story is getting a lot of mainstream coverage, I suspect because the “escape to Canada” angle has so many Vietnam-era echoes that resonate with that generation. I wish Hinzman would flesh out his website story though. His Frequently Asked Questions leaves out some important details that could really make the story – why did he join the Army in the first place, what were some of the experiences that led him to rethink his duty, etc. I’d recommend Jeff Paterson’s “Gulf War Refusenik”:http://jeff.paterson.net/ site, which includes lots of stories including his own:
bq. “What am I going to do with my life?” has always been huge question of youth, and today in the wake of the horror and tragedy of New York September 11th this question has increased importance for millions of young people. No one who has seen the images will ever forget… If I hadn’t spent those four years in the Marine Corps, I might be inclined to fall into line now. Most of the time my unit trained to fight a war against peasants who dared to struggle against “American interests” in their homelands-specifically Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala… Faced with this reality, I began the process of becoming un-American-meaning that the interests of the people of the world began to weigh heavier than my self-interest. I realized that the world did not need or want another U.S. troop…
There are bound to be more stories all the time of service-people who find a different reality when they land on foreign shores. How many will rethink their relationship to the U.S. military. How many will follow Paterson’s example of becoming “un-American”?
The Passion of Uncomfortable Orthodoxies: Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ”
February 24, 2004
Mel Gibson’s movie _The Passion of Christ_ is a challenge for many modern Quakers. Most of the rich metaphors of co-mingled joy and suffering of the early Friends have been dumbed-down to feel-good cliches. Can the debate on this movie help us return to that uncomfortable place where we can acknowledge the complexities of being fervently religious in a world haunted by past sins and still in need of conviction and comfort?
Horses on a Trot?
December 8, 2003
Almost a month ago I question a “newly-launched campaign of phone tax resistance”:http://www.hanguponwar.org in a post called “Beating Dead Horses”:www.nonviolence.org/articles/000194.php.
Robert Randall, a dear friend who I haven’t seen in far too long, wrote in last night explaining how the new campaign came about and some of its goals.
bq. Hi, Martin.
I’m all for coming up with new tactics, and I think a lot of people have
been doing just that. This doesn’t mean, though, that we have to leave old
tactics behind if they can serve us. Nor should we assume that old tactics
are not new tactics for some.
Interestingly, at its Nov. 2002 meeting, the National War Tax Resistance
Coordinating Committee did in fact decide to shelve a “Hang Up On the SOA”
flyer because the ease of telephone tax resistance was no longer there: with
the plethora of new phone companies and the unwillingness of the FCC to
apply its old rulings on the AT&T tariff to other companies, we felt that it
would be inaccurate to promote phone tax refusal as an easy, low-risk form
of removing support for war.
Now, though, we have the possibility, through a large phone tax
redirection campaign and the Internet, to learn and gather together the
how-to-do-it information on all these different phone services. It may take
time, but it is far from impossible. In the process, a lot of educating can
be done, both of the public and of phone company employees. ease of doing
it can rise and risk can be lowered.
What I like about the Hang Up On War campaign (www.hanguponwar.org) is
that it did not originate with a war tax organization. It comes from the
iraq peace Pledge, made up of a number of peace groups, old and new. NWTRCC is available to service the campaign, but the fact that “mainline” peace
groups are promoting wtr is something which, as you are aware, those of us
who are long-time war tax converters have long desired. While support for
this campaign was not unanimous at our recent NWTRCC meeting in Chicago, I,
for one, felt it a great opportunity to get people started toward less
symbolic, real war tax redirection.
True, the federal excise tax on phone service is no more directly
linked to war than the federal income tax, but it is also no less. One
strategy which I favor is to provide as many avenues of ingress to resisting
war as possible. This is one. We can certainly come up with others, and
with better ones, but I see no benefit in disparaging what some are doing
for peace. For many people, phone tax resistance is a new tactic and a big
step. Let’s applaud what I see as a step forward, into any kind of
resistance, for groups which have often stopped short of such things, and
work with them to keep moving ever forward. I trust you will be suggesting
to where that might be.
peace and hope,
Robert Randall
The empty promise of supporting the troops
November 14, 2003
More on the “myth that is ‘Private Jessica’ ”:www.guardian.co.uk/iraq/Story/0,2763,1081207,00.html, a media creation born of propaganda and racism. I feel sad for the real Jessica Lynch caught up in all this. elsewhere Paul Krugman point out how the Bush Administration isn’t “supporting the troops”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/opinion/11KRUG.html, “But I also suspect that a government of, by and for the economic elite is having trouble overcoming its basic lack of empathy with the working-class men and women who make up our armed forces.”
Blueprint for a Mess, the planning behind the U.S. occupation
November 3, 2003
For those asleep for the past two years, the _New York Times Magazine_ has a long article by David Rieff, “Blueprint for a Mess”:www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02iraq.html, that looks at ongoing problems with the U.S. occupation of iraq:
bq. Historically, it is rare that a warm welcome is extended to an occupying military force for very long, unless, that is, the postwar goes very smoothly. And in iraq, the postwar occupation has not gone smoothly.
The article looks at the ideological roots of the post-war plan of occupation. A number of key decisions were made in the Pentagon’s war room with little input from the State Department. Much of the planning revolved around Ahmad Chalabi, the two-bit, self-proclaimed iraqi opposition party leader during the last decade of Saddam Hussein’s reign. Chalabi spent most of the 90s in London and Washington, where he became the darling of the Republican policy hawks who were also sidelined from political power. Together Chalabi and Washington figures like Donald Rumsfeld spent the 90s hatching up war plans if they ever took power again. Unfortunately Rumsfeld’s plans didn’t have the widespread support of the U.S. diplomatic and military establishment and Chalabi has had virtually no support inside iraq. But the conversations and decisions between the token iraqi opposition and the out-of-power Republican hawks has driven the occupation:
bq. The lack of security and order on the ground in iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Rieff is pessimistic but he backs up his claims. The article is long but it’s a must-read. The postwar occupations of iraq and Afghanistan will almost certainly be the defining foreign policy issue of this generation, and pacifists must look beyond ideology and rhetoric to understand what’s happening in iraq.