The Iceman Cometh

Army Spc. Sabrina Hartman, 372nd MP Co.,
poses with the body of Iraqi detainee Manadel al-Jamadi

There isn't a more profitable undertaking
for any country than to declare war
on the United States and to be defeated.
--The Mouse That Roared (1959)

To hell with the truth!
As the history of the world proves,
the truth has no bearing on anything
--The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O'Neill
________________

Ranger Observation of the Day:
Terrorism Counteraction is Social Security
provided to the world, sans enrollment cost.
The entitlement is funded by the American taxpayer,
borne upon the backs of American servicemen.
It is socialism on a grand scale,
but nobody calls it what it is
_________________

Several recent media events coalesce in Ranger's mind. Justice is not an easy commodity to find these days.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the 9-11-01 attacks, is on trial but not in a federal court, and evidence of his torture has been ruled inadmissible. It was a destined to be a failed exercise out of the chute.

Why the subterfuge? The defendant knows he was tortured and we know it, so why pretend otherwise? KSM is a criminal and by no stretch a soldier, and he should have been tried as one.

More procedural exemptions when reptilian attorney John Yoo, George W. Bush's best boy, was exonerated by the 4th Federal Circuit court from being held responsible for Jose Padilla's torture complaints because "torture was not defined at the time." When President Obama said this is "a time for reflection, not retribution," he swept away with a statement any hope for justice against the purveyors of torture.

The photo at the top shows a gleeful U.S. service member posing with Manadel al-Jamadi ("The Iceman"), an Abu Ghraib suspect surely killed as a result of this indefinable thing once known as torture. Torture must be like pornography as defined by Justice Potter Stewart: You can't define it, but you know it when you see it. So even if torture remains undefined, homicide does not, and the Iceman was a homicide. Yet Yoo is off the hook for homicide, too.

But Obama also biased the trial of George Zimmerman when he inappropriately said that Trayvon Martin "could have been my son." Why didn't Obama say that Zimmerman could have been his son, for surely we can imagine an upstanding Obama scion being a neighborhood watchman and finding himself in that terrible situation from the other side, too.

And why isn't Yoo charged exactly the same as is George Zimmerman? Did not Yoo's ruling contribute directly to an unknown number of deaths like that of the iceman? Ah, but Yoo is in the privileged strata of humans, doing the dirty work of politicians everywhere. John Yoo screwed the pooch and he will never account for his crime. He is merely consigned to a life in hippy Berkeley, doing penance teaching legal ethics before the privileged offspring of liberals, his own kind of hell.

Odd days when an alleged child pornographer makes it onto the 10 Most Wanted List and will serve more time in jail than the torturers and murderers who walk amongst us. Zimmerman is losing his witnesses due to darkness and poor eyesight; it is a metaphor for the times. The reality is probably closer to the suggestion of an early NPR report -- intimidation. The witnesses live in Zimmerman's complex; angry people will find them, so they are taking the Schultz way out: I saw NOTHING, this after originally claiming the opposite.

So this is what passes for justice today: Lies, hypocrisy, intimidation, power and privilege, with a healthy dose of bigotry and paranoia. If Zimmerman is not convicted, will we be as quiescent as when Yoo was exonerated? As when O.J. was acquitted of killing his white wife, Nicole Brown?

La Cosa Nostra

MG (retd.) Taguba

Major General Stanley:

I am the very model of a modern Major General,
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical;

I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.

All:

In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
He is the very model of a modern Major General.

--Pirates of Penzance, Gilbert and Sullivan

___________

Major General Taguba, who led the investigation in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, was the model Major General. But he was blacklisted and forced to retired for his rigorous investigation and for allowing the "systemic and illegal abuse" to come to the light of public inspection.

The New Yorker's recent interview with Major General (retd.) Taguba presents a damning vision of the Army's project writ large ("The General's Report: How Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal, became one of its Victims.")

Ranger seldom gets to discuss real heroes in this era of illegitimate U.S. military and government actions. Today we'll give a gloss the actions of MG (retd.) Anthony Taguba, as presented by another hero in the press, Seymour Hersh.

Describing his first dismissive and mocking reception by Rumsfeld et. al., Taguba said now, three years on, "I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting."

At that meeting, someone asked for clarification on the finer point of whether the treatment was more correctly abuse, or torture. Taguba recalled, “I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, ‘That’s not abuse. That’s torture.’ There was quiet.”

"Taguba said that he saw 'a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.' The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it."

Further, Taguba said Rumsfeld's sworn denials of knowledge of the abuse had no credibility.

“The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects—‘We’re here to protect the nation from terrorism’—is an oxymoron,” Taguba said. “He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.”

However, Taguba was limited in the scope of his investigations. He had to stay within the realm of the MP's at the prison who were actually on record as having committed the atrocities.

“From what I knew, troops just don’t take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups. . .These M.P. troops were not that creative,” he said. “Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.”

When Gen. Abazaid, head of Centcom, warned Taguba that he would be investigated, he said that was the first time in 32 years of Army service that he" thought [he] was in the Mafia.”

In the course of his investigations, he came to discover that Lt. Gen. Sanchez, the Army commander in Iraq, was also aware of the abuses. “Sanchez knew exactly what was going on,” Taguba said.

He also learned the Pentagon had ordered Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander at Guantánamo, to Iraq to survey the prison system there and to find ways to improve the flow of intelligence.

"The core of Miller’s recommendations, as summarized in the Taguba report, was that the military police at Abu Ghraib should become part of the interrogation process: they should work closely with interrogators and intelligence officers in “setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees.

"Taguba concluded that Miller’s approach was not consistent with Army doctrine, which gave military police the overriding mission of making sure that the prisons were secure and orderly. His report cited testimony that interrogators and other intelligence personnel were encouraging the abuse of detainees."

"If they had spoken, Taguba said, he would have reminded Miller that at Abu Ghraib, unlike at Guantánamo, very few prisoners were affiliated with any terrorist group. Taguba had seen classified documents revealing that there were only 'one or two' suspected Al Qaeda prisoners at Abu Ghraib."

Taguba's biggest beef was that the investigatory trail was never allowed to lead higher than the MP's stationed at Abu Ghraib, when it was obvious that the orders came from elsewhere.

“There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff”—the explicit images—“was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this.”

Also, task force teams under Joint Special Operations Command task force teams were running amuck.

"A recently retired C.I.A. officer, who served more than fifteen years in the clandestine service, told [Hersh] 'It was surrealistic what these guys were doing.' “They were running around the world without clearing their operations with the ambassador or the chief of station.”

J.S.O.C.’s special status undermined military discipline.

Both Hersh and Taguba are the sort of Americans required if the U.S. is to win a war on terror. Morality and truth are the basis of effective action. Without these foundations, U.S. efforts are doomed to failure. The article ended on this poignant statement from Taguba:

“From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, and selfless service,” Taguba said. “And yet when we get to the senior-officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

Heartbreaking. Taguba's words echo my own, and should reflect those of any thinking American.

Torture Porn

____________

Fresh-scrubbed New York Sun columnist Lenore Skenazy objects in a recent Advertising Age piece to what she dubs ''torture porn,'' where the protagonist gets raped, brutalized and killed (It's Torture! It's Porn! What's Not to Like?)

She accuses the producers of these films of ''abusing women and making a profit off of it.''

Well, unless these are actual, bona fide snuff films, then this is only a show, albeit, a gory show. The actresses are profiting as well as the moviemakers. Skenazy's is little more than the age-old moral question over the propriety of the objectification of a human being.

Such transactions are probably just a quid pro quo--the actress trades a service in exchange for a price. It could be argued that to disallow this traffic is an undue barrier to a woman's free trade of her own goods and services.

But it is Skenazy's confusion of the movies with real life which is most troubling:

''If we start accepting this kind of movie as just 'extreme' horror, the baseline will change. What once seemed out of line will become mainstream.''

''Do we want torture to become mainstream, too? Are we eager for sexual predator reality shows?''

Ummm. . .it's called 'Abu Ghraib,' and probably many other unnamed yet equally unsavory gulags. And it has already come to a prison near you. There is no more hideous dominatrix than the troll Lynndie England.

Her beau, Mr. Graner, certainly qualifies as more gag-inducing than the producer of any Hollywood piece of celluloid trash. And these winners performed on the payroll of the U.S. Army.

''If that's the world you want to live in, all you have to do is sit tight. It's coming. But if you'd like a different future, you've got to act.''

I would agree in her challenge to act, but first you've got to decide what to act upon.

Do such naive Puritanical views still color the American outlook? That if we can only muzzle Larry Flynt, all will be well again? Yes, Lenore, I want a different future. But what passes for entertainment in the cinema is the least of my concerns.

Torture porn has played out daily for five years now under the rubric of this administration, and that is the torturous pornography that hurts me, as well as the real-life protagonists who must sustain it.

--by Lisa and Jim