Graner guilty in Iraq prisoner abuse case

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The trial of Graner's superiors will be commencing shortly...his immediate superiors at least...

As far as the civilians who currently control the military...no, they will not face trial...

I'm sorry if perhaps I am somewhat naive, but I do not think that if the top brass and civilian overseers knew the extent of the brutality it would have been allowed to continue. They set guidelines such as uncomfortable positions and sleep deprivation...not punching a guy in the temple till he was unconcious or even punching period...

Their mistake was in thinking that you could just release a small dose of sadism without releasing the entire abyss of human evil...

As useful as that small dose of sadism may have been in garnering intelligence, you have to recognize that it damages the torturer as well as the torturee...this kind of brutality is the result...

Good intentions...

 

Speaks volumes.
Even with strict rules for humane treatment of prisoners there are bound to be abuses.
They (the superiors) went so far to pave the way for more, thereby ensuring these disgusting 'incidences'.

It is generally known how people react to a situation in which others are depraved of rights and at their mercy. To think that those of the military in charge of treatment of prisoners were ignorant of this phenomenon which is known to all of us...
Personally I absolutely refuse to believe that for a single moment.
Even if Graner was lying when he said he has received orders to torture prisoners - the implications of this are all too clear. Not that I am surprised after Guantanamo and all the other outrages we got to enjoy.

 

That's already torture and illegal.

 

Well, the police in a lot of countries basically do the same thing when they want to force a confession out of a suspect, so it's not an uncommon thing.

 

Nonetheless, it's illegal and therefore using it as a method of forcing confession is a crime. Forcing confession already is. Therefore, policemen who do that are criminals. And their place is in gaol

 

Listen Chev, I realize your lack of mortal terror insures your ability to remain morally superior, however, for those facing death at the hands of a lot of these monsters...

If a guy has to sit a little funny for a day or so to get him to tell what his murdering friends are doing...

If a guy is not allowed to sleep for a couple days until his mental resolve is weakened to the point that he is willing to talk about what his murdering friends are doing...

I think any one of us, in the position of facing death at his friends hands, would be absolutely fine with those two methods.

But like I said earlier...this stuff leads to other brutality...

So you just have to insure that it does not occur...

Maybe troop rotations or more oversite...

 

Late-Night Thinker

The quaint naivity here at work suggests that everyone brough to prison by US troops is guilty. Far from it.

People were picked up by US troops because they had to make an arrest and no one else was there - the target of an arrest raid may have been long gone but there was still the neighbour or bystander or relative who maybe, maybe not, knew something - so take him instead - that has happened again and again in Iraq.

Face it, the US imprisoned quite a lot of the wrong folks in Iraq, according to one US intel officer some 85+ % of the Abu Gharib prisoners had nothing to do with the insurgency at all.
But details shmetails, with the treatment they get they are guaranteed insurgents-to-be anyway, so what's the difference ... let GOD sort'em out!

I think you'd think different immediately if you'd be picked up mistakenly and one Mr. Graner comes along and plays the softening-up-game with you.

People who know nothing tend to provoke their torturers to go to greater lengths as usual to break them - as they don't talk (about what anyway?) they seem especially tough and that's a challenge ...
But I'm confident you'll cheerfully make this sacrifice because what has to be done has to get done, right? It's really easy to say that when someone else bleeds and screams in pain while you try to escape to the foolish illusion only the bad guys get whacked. Everything's swell!

... good fun in your brave new world where only those are tortured who are guilty anyway

Besides, ever heared about a program named Copper Green?

[ January 17, 2005, 22:54: Message edited by: Ragusa ]

 

Listen, Late-Night Thinker. How do you call it when the enemies of the US deprive the POWs of sleep or force them into uncomfortable positions?

Let alone plain old beating and sexual humiliation.

 

Oh come on BTA. Wether you bloody somones knees by beating him with a stick or by forcing him to knee on a pointed metal bar and let gravity do it's work - it's the same thing. It is artificial to make a difference, it's sophistry.

You impose pain as much by actively beating as by enforcing painful positions (as in shackling a prisoner so he has to sit/ stand/ cower that way) were fatigue, strain and gravity will produce the same result.

It's the intent to hurt and to coerce that counts.

[ January 18, 2005, 23:23: Message edited by: Ragusa ]

 

Uncomfortable positions and sleep deprivation are not equivalent to torture. Sorry, but they just aren't. Don't get me wrong, I am sure it is not fun...but torture? Come now...

The sexual humiliation stuff does bother me however...

But I must give the guys being shot at the benefit of the doubt...

I know you are going to say this is the cause of all the horrors of war (with historical references)...but still...people who face death on a daily basis will have a slightly different perspective on this stuff than you and I...

We fight orcs in computer games...if we mess up or treat them without suspicion...well, we reload...

Real soldiers die...

Some slack seems appropriate.

When one of the soldiers clearly crosses the line, they will be punished.

 

Well, the Cambridge Dictionary says:

Depriving someone of sleep is cruel, causes pain and risks permanent damage. The same goes for uncomfortable positions. Individual ilnesses in captives may render them even more vulnerable to permanent damage resulting from those (think spine ilnesses and uncomfortable positions).

The idea behind those two not being torture is that there is no person directly inflicting pain on you. But the sensation doesn't differ from one caused by direct violence. Also notice that the captive doesn't really feel morally compelled to obey "don't sleep" or "stay like this for three days" kind of orders and physical violence is needed and used to make him comply.

And what doubt is there? There is evidence of their sexually humiliating the prisoners up to the point of forcing them into involuntary cooperation, which is also known as the crime of rape.

In my not so very humble opinion, there is no justification whatsoever for rape or any other kind of non-consensual sexual activity.

I agree so far as "normal" violence goes, but not when non-consensual sexual behaviour comes into play.

We hack them into pieces, granted. But we don't rape, don't pile naked bodies, don't deprive them of sleep, don't force them into uncomfortable positions.

[ January 19, 2005, 12:31: Message edited by: Taluntain ]

 

This is not the only place I have seen this but I just wonder what kind of perception people across the pond have of torture? Do you need to use the iron maiden or stretch bench for it to be torture? Slice of pieces of skin? Well, that is not only messy but also inefficient for information gathering purposes. When you truly want to break a man, and not leave any marks for those pesky pinko commies in amnesty, the red cross and other silly human rights organisations, you keep him awake for days, even months, you play him extremely stressful and loud noise incessantly until you have to restrain the person from knocking himself unconscious by banging his head into the wall, you force him to stand up for days and days. And this, apparently isnt torture among many people. A slippery slope I have ever seen, you start on the bottom and claim that there is plenty of place left to slide before you hit it.

 

I'm very much with Chevalier's point of view.

I think the point is that in the US there seems to be the perception that this torture without thumbscrews is legitimate if it saves the lives of US troops.

The point is that it probably doesn't.

The people picked up in Iraq and thrown to jail, when they are not innocent, are at best foot soldiers who are kept in the dark on about everything important - just because they might be caught terror groups are smart enough to limit the details of an attack to only those who will carry it out. If one member of the group is arrested or is missing, they will abort the attack anyway.

The same would apply to a guy caught right after planting a bomb somewhere - in the week until abusive treatment would have softened him up for interrogation the bomb would have blown up already. Ticking time bombs are only in movies.

Intelligence can likely be produced as well, if not much better, with good detective work, something the military is notoriously poor at.

Isn't it amazing that, despite torture in Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and somewhere else, the US still can't break the insurgency in Iraq, but that it is instead growing? Considering that, the quality of the intel gained by torture can't be all THAT good in the end ...
Or is that just because the US aren't tough enough ? Well, *I* don't think that's the reason.

Torture also further adds to the risk US troops see themselves exposed to when they fall in enemy hands. It's about reciprocity.

The uncomfortable positions and sleep deprivation stuff sure *was* torture when dealt to US pilots by the vietnamese ...

I think people are prettying up the picture by relativating and belittling, to feel better. The US can't seriously be a country that tortures - WE are the *good* guys, aren't we?

Well, maybe not always.

Except for that, torture is simply a barbarious practice, it is wrong.

 

An uncomfortable position will inflict extreme pain after a very short while if one isnt allowed to move.
To deprave someone of sleep will cause him not knowing what is left or right.
Both, pain and loss of orientation, will get a confession out of every person, no matter whether they know/did something or not. They will admit anything just to get a relieve of suffering. "Have you joined the resistance?" - "Yes." "Has your neighbour killed our troops?" - "Yes, whatever you say."
Isnt that why torture is such an unreliable tool? Why the US utterly fails to get control over Iraq? And why more and more people turn against them? Inside and outside of Iraq.

Not to speak of what it reveals about the true nature of a nation and its society that is using such techniques. Its sense of human rights. How telling. How absurd that it claims to spread human rights.

Now, what I find to be really alarming is that ordinary people actually start defending torture, disguising it in an euphemistical fashion as "sitting funny", "students do that to themselves, so what do you want?". And how its all just a means to an end.
If that view is far spread in the US then its even farther away from a nation I can ever hope to have a measure of respect for again. Hearing of past attrocities (Vietnam) is one thing. Seing it happen again in the present - now that looks more like a trend to me.
Sad, how the US makes it so easy for its enemies... and so difficult for its friends. Isnt it?

 

Yes and as has been stated do sleep deprivation and other "soft" kinds of torture cause intense suffering, if it didnt I doubt it would ever be used.

 

That's a good one. You have tested, haven't you. I slept only 3 hours last night - and you're right: I don't feel torturted. Those sissies in prison should pull themselves together! If I can manage a night without sleep, they can do as well, can't they. And I have a job, in addition. They, on the other hand, have plenty of free time. Sitting idly around, recovering from lack of sleep while dozing the day away in slightly uncomfortable positions - come to think of it I'd like to be in their place. Free food, on top of it! Take me down to the paradise prison, nanananahh!

I'm sure we can define our way around this inconvenient "severe pain" business as well. Hah, I just remembered: I broke my leg once in my youth. To my astonishment, the pain I felt was bearable. "Mild", you could say. I figure breaking the legs of the POWs to exert some "coercion" is alright then. After all, it causes only mild pain, nothing severe, heh.

To anticipate your reply, BTA: Yes, you are merely pointing to some definition made not by you but by the UN. C'mon now. I feel capable of defining what is torture and what is not. Call it coercion if you like. If my definitions - and those of many here - are more restrictive than those of the UN, then I'm not living in as homely (:snigger a world as I imagined. It doesn't mean I have to change my way of thinking of sleep deprivation as torture. Don't hide behind the words of others.

 

Yeah. Been there done that. There are kinds of physical exercise which rely on keeping one position for a couple of minutes and they already cause pain. Even standing up for a couple of hours is too much for most people. So what if you come up with a complicated and unnatural position and force the captive to maintain it for days...

Agreed as well. Most of us has probably done two or three days out of necessity. But circumstances are not quite the same if you're a captive in a military prison - especially if you're a civilian held in a military prison after a war with no charge whatsoever being brought against you. The organism quite obviously can't hold as much as in normal circumstances. And, well, it's not like sleep deprivation lasts two or three days. It typically drags on and on for even weeks. For police uses, one or two days at the police station with no sleep can make a law-abiding citizen sign a crime confession. It's been done in commie countries a lot, for example.

Yes, in inquisition times, people would confess to being fathered by the devil so that you would leave them alone (i.e. finally execute them instead of continuing the interrogation).

Ah, one more thing. I doubt that many of us would believe forced confession to be of any worth. But, logically, if confession is unreliable, how reliable is any other information extracted from the tortured captive?

Another thing is, what if you torture him for days or weeks and in the end it shows that he doesn't know anything - exactly as he told you in the beginning? You tell him to get his clothes on (pun intended) and go home? And your conscience is clear because you serve a great cause etc etc?

What else is forcing someone into "disorientation/confusion, irritability etc" than suffering? And you can't really hold a claim that after a week or so it isn't severe.

"Beating with a metal stick" doesn't include "pain" in the very definition.

"Forcing a practicing Muslim to simulate homosexual intercourse" doesn't include "pain" or "suffering" anywhere.

See the logic?

So does the name change the state of being torture or not? Sorry, I don't buy that. And you can also rename "beating with a metal stick" and "forcing to simulate homosexual intercourse" so that those include "pain" and "suffering".

Not so fast, please. The fact that there's no person or device delivering the pain or suffering continously doesn't mean the pain doesn't exist and persist.

The Nazi came up with a couple of such ideas that, according to your logic, wouldn't be called torture. For example, forbidding prisoners to relieve nature. The practice has been popular in a certain type of facilities ever since. There's no device connected to anyone's body. And there's no armed thug doing anything to you. So still not torture?

Heck, this way even keeping prisoners hungry or thirsty or cold or heating them into nasty temperatures couldn't be considered torture.