Arrogance, Indiscipline Come Down From the Top
Return with me to Abu Ghraib. You remember it. You may not want to, but you do.
The Iraqi prison was the epicenter of an international scandal in 2004 when it was revealed that U.S. soldiers were mistreating detainees, forcing them to stand in stress positions, sexually humiliating them, menacing them with dogs, denying them clothes, dragging them on leashes, threatening them with electrocution.
All of it was captured in photos that shocked the world. One of the most memorable showed then-21-year-old Army private Lynndie England, cigarette poking from a idiotic grin, index fingers cocked like guns as she pointed to the genitals of a naked Iraqi man.
Bloodless legalese
We stared at those images and asked how this could have happened, how American soldiers could have become so degraded and undisciplined, could have wandered so far afield from the moorings of simple, human decency. Many answers were proffered. Mob mentality. Dehumanizing conditions. Lack of oversight.
But as the years have passed, a truer answer has coalesced. Where did these young soldiers get the idea that the rules were suspended, that free rein was given, that they could do whatever they wanted to the men in their custody?
It came from the top.
The latest proof: a recently declassified 2003 memo from John Yoo, then a Justice Department lawyer. The memo, eventually rescinded by Justice, authorized torture as a means of interrogation, a finding that carried the force of law.
Much of the media coverage of the 81-page document has focused on the — and this word is unavoidably ironic — bloodless legalese in which Yoo contemplates the permissibility of putting a prisoner’s eyes out, slitting his tongue, scalding him with water, dosing him with mind-altering drugs, disfiguring him with acid.
But what is also appalling is Yoo’s contention — repeatedly restated in the memo — that in time of war the president enjoys virtually unfettered authority over, and is accountable to no one for, the treatment of prisoners.
Presidential authority
Legal scholars have accused Yoo of sloppy reasoning. Eugene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale and American universities, told the International Herald Tribune the document was a monument to the ”imperial presidency.” Yoo disagrees. He calls the memo a ”boilerplate” defense of presidential authority.
Your humble correspondent doesn’t know from legal scholarship. He does know this: Seven years ago when the nation was attacked and Americans wanted to pitch in, wanted to help, wanted to sacrifice, our leaders told us to go shopping. Prop the economy up, they said. Don’t worry about the war. Let us handle it. Go shopping.
And we did. Nor, scared as we were, eager for the illusion of security as we were, did we look too closely or examine too intently the things that were being done in our names. We became, many of us, expert at ignoring the screams from behind the curtain, discounting the growing mountain of evidence that things were not as we had been told, brushing off nagging questions about what we have become and how that does not square with what we are supposed to be.
We shopped, and did not fret overmuch about the price of our moral laxity.
Maybe that’s because the price is paid in tiny increments of our national honor yet somehow, never by those who most deserve to foot the bill. So that, seven years later, George W. Bush is still president of the United States, Donald Rumsfeld is working on his memoirs, John Yoo is a law professor at UC Berkeley.
But Lynndie England is a single mother, on parole and looking for work, living in a trailer with her folks.
–Leonard Pitts Jr.
© 2008 The Miami Herald
Whomever gets seated in the White House, the one thing that should be demanded by all of us who do indeed respect and honor our Constitution is that the next occupant prosecute all those involved in this travesty. No exceptions, no waffling, no excuses. If we don’t demand this as citizens then all of our outrage was for nothing. Let’s show the world that the United States of America mean what we say about the rule of law. Let’s send the whole lot of them to the Hague.
Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 11 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power “make rules concerning captures on land and water.” Yoo needs to check his eyeglass prescription. I guess it would be too much to ask Congress to protect its constitutional powers, though.
It’s too far a stretch to directly blame the thoughtless conduct of Lynndie England on some Justice Department memo.
Yes, there’s a chain of command, and yes there was a culture of kick-butt in mistreatment of prisoners and in interrogate-for-”intelligence” by any means possible.
But let’s not forget that Lynndie was “led” by a former
“corrections officer” (in private life) named Charles Graner who basically was having cruel fun with some prisoners in his custody and taking pictures for the heck of it. Lynndie was hardly a “trained interrogator.”
Putting a former jailer in a military uniform to make America proud is probably a dumb-cluck idea in the first place. (Certainly turned out that way in this instance, anyway, and I’ll bet Lynndie, now in retrospect, would be first to agree. Soldiers to jailers? Maybe. Jailers to soldiers? Not so much.)
Pitts sez: “The (Yoo) memo, eventually rescinded by Justice, authorized torture as a means of interrogation, a finding that carried the force of law.
I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the concept that a single schmoe in Justice (sic) can, by the act of scribbling a memo, establish “force of law.” My pocket Constitution must be abridged … that part seems to have been left out.
“Maybe that’s because the price is paid in tiny increments of our national honor yet somehow, never by those who most deserve to foot the bill. So that, seven years later, George W. Bush is still president of the United States, Donald Rumsfeld is working on his memoirs, John Yoo is a law professor at UC Berkeley.
But Lynndie England is a single mother, on parole and looking for work, living in a trailer with her folks.”
A powerful concluding sentence.
Do I hear ‘war crimes’ anywhere?
Probably not. Our heads are so far up our collective a_ _ _ s, that we fail to comprehend the enormity of our collective guilt in NOT taking action against this fascist regime.
Our government has been doing this and much worse in our name for at least 100 years. 911 was just the beginning of the blowback to come.
Sieg Heil, Herr Yoo. Die Vereinigte Staaten ist eine grosse Folterkammer. Arbeit macht frei. Heute der Rechtsstaat, morgen die Welt. Es lebt George Wanker Bush!
I wonder what kind of parents YOO had? These authoritarians definitely recognize each other and prize loyalty to their secret oaths over any remote concept of justice or humanitarian domestic or foreign policy. It’s as if they thought themselves immune to the law of karma, grown drunk on their temporal power and the illusion that no force can stop them as they leave a trail of carnage to their dubious “credit.”
Dear Leonard Pitts Jr.:
In your article returning us to Abu Ghraib part of your ending includes: “So that, seven years later, George W. Bush is still president of the United States…” - does this insinuate that Mr. Bush was re-elected, or, that he hasn’t been impeached (yet!). Yes, it’s good to remember even the horrid aspects of life, that’s why my current shout out for sanity includes:
9/11: Never Forget that Bush/Cheney used lies to manipulate The People’s anger, grief and sorrow over the attacks on the World Trade Center for political and personal gain - this is betrayal.
9/11: Never Forget that Bush/Cheney used the blood of the Troops and gold from The People’s treasury to help Halliburton move to Dubai - this is treason.
These bullet points are part of a letter that the Detroit Free Press is considering for publication - of course the letter also includes mention of impeachment, which for me is the most expedient way to change the course in Iraq; which was the Free Press’ editorial opinion sans impeachment (for now?).
While “we” were out shopping, we didn’t carry out a national conversation that could have spared much misery as well as upheld American ideals. It’s not too late. While they are both horrendous, which is worse: being attacked by a sworn enemy or betrayed by your President and Vice President?
Impeach Bush/Cheney - it’s not too late for a conversation (especially for a nation in dire need of healing) and it’s not to late to carry out justice and uphold the rule of law, as well as, return from the pursuit of fear to the pursuit of Happiness.
W “our man” in the White House is asaying, “Do as you told, and noone gone get hurt, ya’ll. Oh, and I ain’t gone do nothing that I can’t get away with!”
Yoo is just a bought whore, writing what they want him to.
But, still, Berkley has fallen a long way…
A war crimes trial is a necessity for restoring any hope this country has for working towards peace in the world.
I hope the architects of this illegal war and crimes which followed it find it impossible to travel outside the United States without the threat of being arrested for war crimes violations. The new President and Congress should take steps to repeal the Patriot Act and all the other assaults on the Constitutional rights of citizens and residents of the United States.
Puck twain, you said it.
IMPEACH Bush/ Cheney: TREASONOUS TRAITORS. NOW! What are we waiting for?? Martial law? No elections? Blackwater to come home? Detention camps for: “… where the poor do resist, how easy it is to label them outlaws, dacoits, criminals, Naxalites, terrorists.”?
While this came from the top, it also came from all levels. It is an institutional attitude instilled in all from one stripers to the four stars:
* We are the good guys, so what we do is good by definition.
* People outside the US military are unqualified to judge us, even on matters like law. After all, we have doctors, lawyers and ethicists, and even though those fields are not in our line of work, we know better.
* Because some of us die in carrying out our work, we are noble. The fact we kill is irrelevant, because that is our job.
* The sacrifice of one of us is more important than our sacrifice of 100 of them. We even consider it good to kill civilians and lose more of our own to recover the bodies of our precious dead.
* We are absolved of all responsibility for our actions so long as we were obeying orders, or can legitimately claim cowardice as a reason for killing the innocent.
* We serve our country by increasing terrorism worldwide. It is OK to increase the threat to the US from abroad, because we will be the first to die. Just like on 9/11.
* You have freedom because of us. The fact that freedom decreases when we go to war is not our fault. The fact that we killed large numbers of Native Americans, US citizens, to confine them to reservations is to be ignored. The fact we killed hundreds of US citizens at Pearl Harbor [1], and our commanders actively incited and aided the attacks so that the President could thwart the will of Congress and the people to get us into WW2, and subsequently sent hundreds of thousands of US citizens to concentration camps, is irrelevant. That fact that we broke in two so that many of us would kill US citizens in order to preserve the denial of freedom of US citizens is irrelevant.
[US civilians killed at Pearl Harbor were almost all killed by falling anti-aircraft ammunition.]