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<font size=3>The Painful Lessons of Abu Ghraib<br>
by <b>Nicholas Turse<br>
</b>The Doctrine of Atrocity<br>
U.S. against "them"a tradition of institutionalized
brutality<br>
May 11th, 2004 10:00 AM <br><br>
<br><br>
"Kill one man, terrorize a thousand," reads a sign on the wall
of the U.S. Marines' sniper school at Camp Pendleton in California. While
the marines work their mayhem with M-40A3 bolt-action sniper rifles, most
recently in Fallujah, a different kind of terror has been doled out in
Iraq by the U.S. Army at Abu Ghraib prison, where, according to an army
probe first reported by Seymour Hersh of <i>The New Yorker</i>,
"sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" were the order
of the day between October and December of 2003. One of the many
questions arising from the Abu Ghraib scandal is how widespread is the
brutality and inhumane treatment of Iraqis. <br><br>
Just last month, the <i>Toledo Blade</i> won a Pulitzer Prize for
exposing a series of brutal war crimes committed by American troops
during the Vietnam War. It took more than 35 years for the horrors
committed by a "Tiger Force" unit to be fully exposed, but the
<i>Blade</i> got more ink in the national press and TV for winning the
Pulitzer than the stories themselves got when they were published last
fall. The paper detailed the army's four-and-a-half-year investigation,
starting in 1971, of a seven-month string of atrocities by an elite,
volunteer, 45-man Tiger Force unit of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne
Division that included the alleged torture of prisoners, rapes of
civilian women, mutilations of bodies, and the killing of anywhere from
nine to well over 100 unarmed civilians. The army's inquiry concluded
that 18 U.S. soldiers committed crimes including murder and assault.
However, not one of the soldiers, even those still on active duty at the
time of the investigation, was ever court-martialed. Moreover, as the
paper noted, six soldiers were allowed to resign from military service
during the criminal investigations specifically to avoid prosecution. The
secretary of defense at the time that decision was made, in the mid '70s,
was Donald Rumsfeld. <br><br>
But even the <i>Blade</i>'s powerful stories didn't put the Tiger Force
atrocities in context; the paper portrayed them largely as an isolated
killing spree carried out by rogue troops. The Tiger Force atrocities
were not the mere result of rogue G.I.'s but instead stem from what
historian Christian Appy has termed a "doctrine of atrocity"an
institutionalized brutality built upon official U.S. dicta relating to
body counts, free-fire zones, search-and-destroy tactics, and strategies
of attrition, as well as unofficial tenets such as "shoot anything
that moves," intoned during the Tiger Force atrocities and in
countless other tales of brutality. <br><br>
While the U.S. military has never been alone in the commission of
atrocities, in Iraq or elsewhere, the illegal acts of others serve as no
excuse for an American disregard for the laws of war. We are only now,
more than three decades after the fact, beginning to grasp the true scope
of American war crimes in Vietnam. Will it take us that long to know to
what extent the doctrine of atrocity is being applied in Iraq? <br><br>
In Vietnam, the doctrine of atrocity was built not only on official U.S.
policies but also on such macabre principles as the "mere gook
rule," which cast all Vietnamese as subhuman, and its attendant
dictum: "If it's dead and Vietnamese, it's VC." These standard
operating procedures led to many acts of mistreatment and killing of
noncombatants by U.S. troops that, while illegal under the laws of war,
were tacitly encouraged, unofficially condoned, and rarely punished in a
severe manner. <br><br>
Appy, a former Harvard and MIT professor most recently known for his 2003
book, <i>Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides</i>,
explained the "doctrine" in his 1993 history of American combat
troops in Vietnam, <i>Working-Class War</i>. "American military
policy," he wrote, "did not . . . make atrocities by individual
soldiers inevitable, but it certainly made it inevitable that American
forces as a whole would kill many civilians." Thus, a history of
brutal behavior, official and unofficial doctrines that encourage a
patent disregard for human life and well-being, as well as a persistent
failure to publicly recognize prior misdeeds and effectively deal with
them has fostered an environment of tacit approval of atrocities in the
military. <br><br>
The <i>Toledo Blade</i> articles, some of the best reporting on a Vietnam
War crime during or since that war, tell only a small part of the story.
As a historian writing a dissertation at Columbia University on U.S. war
crimes and atrocities during the Vietnam War, I have been immersed in
just the sort of archival materials the <i>Blade</i> used to flesh out
one series of incidents. My research into U.S. military records has
revealed that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of analogous
violations of the laws of war. <br><br>
The <i>Blade</i> said the Tiger Force's seven months of brutality was
"the longest series of atrocities in the Vietnam War."
Unfortunately, this was not true. According to formerly classified army
documents, for instance, a military investigation disclosed that from at
least March 1968 through October 1969, "Vietnamese [civilian]
detainees were subjected to maltreatment" by no fewer than 21
separate interrogators of the 172nd Military Intelligence Detachment. The
inquiry found that, in addition to using "electrical shock by means
of a field telephone," the MI personnel also struck detainees with
their fists, sticks, and boards, and employed water torture. The
documents indicate that no disciplinary actions were taken against anyone
implicated in that long-running series of atrocities. <br><br>
The declassified documents reveal that the Tiger Force atrocitiesand the
resulting lack of punishment, which amounted to tacit approvalwere
merely the tip of the iceberg. In September 1967, for instance, an
American sergeant killed two Vietnamese children, executing one at
point-blank range with a bullet to the head. Court-martialed in 1970, the
sergeant pleaded guilty to, and was found guilty of, unpremeditated
murder. According to military documents, "he was sentenced by the
court to no punishment." One of the most notorious incidents of the
Vietnam War was the My Lai massacre (another story first reported by
Seymour Hersh, in 1969). But the now declassified military documents
reveal that it was hardly an isolated incident. On February 4, 1968, for
example, just over a month before U.S. soldiers tortured and raped My Lai
villagers and killed hundreds of them, a soldier in the same province and
from the same division (Americal) gunned down three civilians as they
worked in a field. He later admitted to his commanding officer, men in
his unit, and others that he had done it, and he was charged with
premeditated murder. But the soldier requested a discharge, which was
granted by Americal's commanding general in lieu of a court-martial.
<br><br>
As the case of the 172nd MI unit demonstrates, U.S. troops in Vietnam not
only beat enemy prisoners and civilian detainees but also used a wide
variety of brutal methods, including a particular torture in which water
was forced down a person's throat until he or she passed out or
drownedwhat U.S. troops had called the "water cure" during
their battle against Filipinos in the early 20th century. One
particularly heinous method was known among U.S. soldiers in Vietnam as
"The Bell Telephone Hour," in which a hand-cranked military
field telephone was used to generate electrical shocks through wires to
hands, feet, nipples, and genitals. <br><br>
In Iraq, only when the stunning photographs, including one of a prisoner
who was apparently threatened with electrical torture, surfaced late last
month on network TV did the press take notice in a major way, but even
then, CBS News, at the behest of General Richard Myers, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, held the pictures back for two weeks and only
decided to release them when prodded by Hersh's <i>New Yorker</i>
article. <br><br>
The army itself described "wanton criminal abuses" at Abu
Ghraib prison, and there have been numerous other reports of brutality
since the invasion of Iraq, demonstrating that the doctrine of atrocity
is still functioning. <br><br>
During the Vietnam War, a U.S. officer infamously announced that a town
had to be destroyed in order to save it. Today, the same logic is used in
Iraq. "With a heavy dose of fear and violence . . . I think we can
convince these people that we are here to help them," U.S. battalion
commander Nathan Sassaman was quoted as saying in a <i>New York Times
</i>article in December 2003. The quote was buried deep in the article,
but recent reports indicate that Sassaman's tough talk may have been
backed up by wanton acts of terror. On April 5, <i>The Washington
Post</i> reported that Sassaman, a lieutenant colonel, was recently
punished for impeding an army investigation of the alleged killing of an
Iraqi detainee, adding that it "marked the second time in recent
months that a battalion commander in the Fourth Infantry Division has
been disciplined in connection with mistreatment of Iraqis."
<br><br>
Underlying attitudes apparently haven't changed either. Captain Todd
Brown, a company commander with the Fourth Infantry Division, told the
<i>Times </i>late last year, "You have to understand the Arab mind.
The only thing they understand is force. . . . " Nearly 40 years
earlier, in Vietnam, another U.S. captain told <i>The New Yorker</i>'s
Jonathan Schell, "Only the fear of force gets results. It's the
Asian mind." That thinking has long been evident in U.S. campaigns
against racial and ethnic "others," from the Indian Wars to the
Philippine-American War and occupation; the terrorizing of people in the
Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Haiti; on to more conventional wars
against the Japanese and Koreans; and perhaps most spectacularly in
Vietnam. And now in Iraqand not only at Abu Ghraib. Late last year, at
another detention center, it was reported that Lieutenant Colonel Allen
B. West allowed his soldiers to beat an Iraqi prisoner as a method of
interrogation. When the illegal thrashing failed to induce the prisoner
to talk, West threatened the man with death, forced his head into a
sandbox, and conducted a mock execution, firing a shot next to the
Iraqi's head. West confessed to the abuse, but he was not
court-martialed; instead, he was simply allowed to retire. <br><br>
Then, as now, U.S. officials defend their soldiers' actions. President
Richard Nixon, Rumsfeld's old boss, once pronounced that "throughout
the war in Vietnam, the United States has exercised a degree of restraint
unprecedented in the annals of war." Similarly, today's U.S.
military claims that its recent assault on Fallujah has been marked by a
"judicious use of force" by marines "trained to be precise
in their firepower" and that "95 percent of those killed were
legitimate targets." <br><br>
According to on-the-ground reports by journalists, aid workers, and
medical professionals, writes <i>The Guardian</i> (U.K.), U.S. troops in
Fallujah, supported by gunships and fighter-bombers, have opened fire on
ambulances, targeted civilians, and blasted homes into rubble. As a
result, it has been reported that over 350 women and children of the city
have died in the carnageincluding an elderly woman found to be clutching
a white flag, a six-year-old boy who was crushed under debris after a
U.S. missile strike on his home, and the little boy's mother, who was
shot to death while hanging laundry out to dry. <br><br>
<br>
<i>Nicholas Turse is a doctoral candidate at the Center for the History
and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University's Mailman School of
Public Health and a regular contributor to the Nation Institute's
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com">tomdispatch.com</a>.</i> <br><br>
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