Physicians for Human Rights Report On U.S. Abuses
Thanks to commenter Penny Wit, this afternoon I’m reading the Physicians for Human Rights report alleging/documenting torture and abuse by U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. I’ll refrain from commenting until I’ve finished at least the Executive Summary, but here’s the links: executive summary and complete report.
*Update* OKay, I’ve finished the executive summary. I’m not sure if I need to read the entirety of the rest of the report, though I’ve scanned it. I find the report credible, although I find that the preface by General Taguba seems to contain a few non-sequiturs. I also would endorse most but not quite all of the report’s recommendations. For example, the report recommends an absolute ban on waterboarding, while admitting that no one they evaluated had been waterboarded, and what we do know about the rare use of that procedure is not really consistent with anything I have found in that report. If anything, it only strengthens my own feeling that waterboarding, used under the proper professional and highly limited circumstances, is vastly superior to anything reported by these physicians, for it is nowhere near as harmful and has, unlike anything reported here, been proven to work in limited circumstances to save lives without hurting people.
The report also leaves several important questions, such as which of these activities was authorized and which was as a result of negligence and incompetence in either field or executive command. Such questions would probably be beyond the scope of the physicians’ task here, which was to document mistreatment. This they have done quite ably. The report should be read by just about anyone with an interest in this subject, particularly in any command capacity; like the abuses at Abu Ghraib which are well known, much here is inexcusable.
(Thanks to commenter Penny Wit for the link to the report and summary.)
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Assuming these reports are accurate — since even pennywit admits the group has an anti-Bush agenda, and this war has been replete with phony scandals and phony abuse reported by anti-Bush groups — then I have great confidence that the abuses will be investigated, tried and punished by the same people who discovered, reported, investigated, and tried the perpetrators at Abu Ghraib. I have confidence in the US Army.
Because remember… Before Andrew Sullivan was disappointed in the President’s gay marriage position, and went insane… Months before Seymour Hersch published his pictures from Abu Ghraib… Andrew Sullivan (pre-BDS) approvingly linked to a piece (from the Wall Street Journal, I believe) wherein they reported an Army press release which announced their discovery and investigation of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Andrew (correctly, at the time) pointed out that this was proof that the Army wasn’t tolerating abuse and would clean up their messes. This was not some "scoop" about some "coverup" that was "discovered" by Mr. Hersh. The Army investigators did their job, and the guilty were punished.
I have every confidence that if these abuses as reported are true, the Army will do the same here. And I have every confidence that their critics will accuse them of a coverup regardless.
Long on claims, short on proof.
What do you want for proof besides testimony and medical examinations by competent physicians?
I have little doubt the stories are mostly true. There will always be prison abuses, and early on especially it’s pretty clear that those in charge of the prisons in places like Iraq and Afghanistan were not trained professional prison guards and the standards were not what they should have been. I have little doubt some of our people went way overboard in a climate in which that was tacitly accepted. The real question is how prevalent, and, who knew and when?
These things happen in every war. It’s a question of how to minimize it, and how to punish the irresponsible.
"What do you want for proof besides testimony and medical examinations by competent physicians?"
Oh, I’ll settle for the standards that are at least supposed to be applied in normal court cases.
Just testimony and medical examinations by ‘competent physicians’ do not, after all, have exactly the best records of accurate determination when it comes to, say, rape and child abuse cases.
Particularly in family court.
"I have little doubt the stories are mostly true."
And as soon as I read that contact information for some of the ‘victims’ was supplied to PHR by the legal firms representing said persons in cases against responsible parties in the usa, my estimate of the credibility index of the whole report dropped significantly.
"These things happen in every war."
Yes, but then these things also happen regardless of whether the people involved are in war zones or not.
Just as people lie about things like this to their perceived advantage regardless of whether they’re in war zones or not. Did usa troops commit atrocities, let alone just ‘illegal acts’ during the viet nam war? Yes, apparently so.
But did both foreign and native collectivists and their useful idiots ALSO lie about atrocities that usa troops did not commit, falsely accusing them? Yeah, apparently so on that as well.
So, as I said — long on claims, short on proof. They’ve admitted to an anti-Bush bias (albeit, admittedly, by hearsay). They’re getting at least some of their case studies sourced by legal offices representing said persons in cases against usa entities. And this has been in no small part a propaganda war since before we liberated iraq. To name just three leading indicators of low reliability.
Hell, this report wouldn’t even meet my standards for serving as just reference material, let alone actual citability, as a men’s issues resource.
Long on claims. . .but short on proof; ayep, that pretty much says it all.
Proof is a result of competent independent analysis and investigation. Of course a single source isn’t proof. But it can be enough to merit an investigation. One is called for here.
And I’d say the legal cases in process are sufficiently badgering that merit and message servicing that call, and if defendents are found guilty, then we have sufficient second-party confirmation to validate much more serious investigation.
But folks should keep in mind that I find all of this whoopee-o-hoopla about State-authorized or even just State-complicit gah! torture! to be either depressingly ignorant or revoltingly hypocritical, and both ways to be taken about as seriously as a dog with necksticals in a cheap-ass halloween bee costume.
What with the more than one million federally and personally gender discriminatory child abusive sexual mutilations done per year in this country; perhaps 6.5 million worldwide. And maybe, at most, just a few thousand people worldwide seriously trying to do anything about it.
So knowing what I do, I don’t take all this fulmination about the possible torture of possibly innocent adults all that seriously. Because not only am I informed, but I have a well-adjusted sense of proportion, and over a million baby girls in the usa having their clitoral hoods and inner labia cut off, and a inch-wide ring of their frontmost inner vaginal skin stripped out, with the resulting raw edges being crushed back together again, annually, while their male peers are protected at the federal level from even significantly less harmful cutting kinda edges out ‘gah! torture!’ in the great rational scheme of things.
You cannot hold people in a war zone to the same standards you do in the civilian courts. Nor can you hold people in nations like Iraq and especially Afghanistan to the same standards you would expect in the United States. Spend five minutes thinking on it and most of the multiple reasons should be obvious.
The physicians here may have a political agenda, but they are associated with a credible group that has done investigations of similar human rights abuses all over the world. They cannot be accused of having a specifically anti-American or anti-Bush agenda that I can see. The report is precise and clinical. Its conclusions are supported by the general that the U.S. military assigned to write the report on the Abu Ghraib abuses. "Long on claims, short on proof" is a rather weak response.
There are flaws other than what I’ve already mentioned, though. Another troubling issue is that they’ve lumped together people from Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Afghanistan together. But we already know all about Abu Ghraib; the general in charge of the prison was demoted to non-General rank and reassigned to a desk job. Those in the field directly responsible were indicted, and some are currently in jail. I seem to recall that some of the victims even got apologies and reparations. Thus, unless there is something new, the report weakens its own case by including victims of those abuses, at least if the purpose is to suggest that such abuses are widespread throughout the entire U.S. military (which seems to be the suggestion).
But let’s not just dismiss reports like this please. We’re Americans, we’re better than that.
The problem is that you don’t just have this report. Other items in evidence include:
a) Memos in which administration officials attempted to define torture as narrowly as possible, perhaps even to the point of redefining "torture."
b) Reports that JAG Corps members from all four services raised concerns regarding the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques."
c) Complaints of irregularities in the Guantanamo tribunal process, particularly from the defense attorneys assigned to represent detainees.
d) The case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-Canadian dual citizen whom the United States sent to Syria … and who was, in turn, tortured in Syrian prisons.
Again and again, we see evidence — mostly circumstantial — that this nation seriously mistreated the prisoners in its care, perhaps (dare I say probably?) to the point of out and out torture.
As an American citizen, I believe there needs to be an accounting of those actions. As part of that accounting the American government must disclose these techniques and the extent of their use. Quite frankly, I think the American government should disclose to the maximum extent possible, short of breaching national security. And note that "national security" and "national embarrassment" are two entirely different animals.
Before the so-called "torture memos," I could have said without hesitation that my nation does not abuse or torture prisoners in the ordinary course of waging armed conflict.
I can no longer make that claim with full confidence.
–|PW|–
First off, we were using extraordinary rendition well before 9/11. We’ve been doing it for decades. It’s nothing new. It’s an ugly side of this sort of work, and possibly it should not be done anymore, but it’s just not something new that was come up by this administration. I mention that in referral to the Syrian-Canadian dude. We’ve even got reliable documentation on Al Gore recommending its use while he was Vice President.
I’m also not particularly moved by memos which try to lay out rules for what is and is not torture, in a climate where relaxing and redefining old standards was called for. In fact we not only have known about this for a long time, we knew it was happening when it happened. This, too, is not new, and was not controversial at the time.
Complaints and concerns raised about same by some in the military legal groups would be expected and normal when there was any redefinition, in any direction. Tighten the standards and you might punish innocent people doing the interrogating; loosen them and you might hurt detainees inappropriately. Such concerns are going to be raised with *any* change in policy of this nature, in any direction, and therefore there is nothing all by itself that is significant about concerns being raised. Likely they were anticipated even before they were released.
Not a damned thing wrong with memos laying out re-evaluations of interrogation techniques, either.
Therefore, from where I sit, the only thing significant here is documentation of abuse that just about everyone would agree is abuse, and therefore it is a question of how prevalent it was, and what the root cause of it was, and what’s being done to fix it and repair the damage. None of that is out of line so far as I can see.
"You cannot hold people in a war zone to the same standards you do in the civilian courts."
And when I attempt to do that, your point will be relevant.
But since I haven’t, it isn’t.
What I have pointed out is that the same level of evidentiary standards being cited by PHR routinely results in gross injustices in civilian courts, and this — whether you like it or not — is a down check on the credibility of their claims.
On top of which, that’s a soppingly poor counterargument because it can just as easily, if not more so, be turned around and used against its initiator; if it’s so, then likewise one cannot hold the State and its agents in a warfare context to the same standards one does in the civilian sphere (say, policing), either — in the opposite sense of granting them greater latitude.
"Nor can you hold people in nations like Iraq and especially Afghanistan to the same standards you would expect in the United States."
Actually, Dean, yes, I can.
"The physicians here may have a political agenda, but they are associated with a credible group that has done investigations of similar human rights abuses all over the world."
Try to imagine how little that impresses me, as an intactivist.
And Dean, I didn’t ‘just dismiss’ it; I critically assessed it, and found it unimpressive. And that’s categorically not an indicator of insufficient quality as a usa Citizen on my part.
The fact that you resort to such a misrepresentation just might say something about yours, though.
And hey, man; if you don’t like the taste, don’t add it to the soup.
I note also that my points about subjects of this report being sourced to its authors by legal representation for said person, and the propaganda element in this war, have both gone unaddressed. In light of the latter of which, I provide the following:
Since the late 1990s, the NGO practice of dragging the military into court on allegations of human rights violations has destroyed the careers of some of the country’s finest officers, even though most of these men were found innocent after years of proceedings. "Judicial warfare" turned out to be especially effective because under legislation pushed by Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, "credible" charges against officers put at risk U.S. military aid unless the accused was removed. The NGOs knew that they only had to point fingers to get rid of an effective leader and demoralize the ranks.
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