Military abuse starts at the top

Lynndie England grew up in Fort Ashby, W. Va., as the daughter
of a railway worker before joining the U.S. Army and being deployed
to Iraq. In South Africa’s Sunday Times, a Fort Ashby
resident described the mentality in her hometown ““ “To
the country boys here, if you’re a different nationality, a
different race, you’re sub-human. That’s the way girls
like Lynndie are raised.”

With this mindset, Pfc. England embarked on her military mission
and soon attained international fame as one of the torturers of Abu
Ghraib.

“Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different
from shooting a turkey. Every season here you’re hunting
something. Over there, they’re hunting Iraqis,” the
Fort Ashby local continued.

Roughly one year after the horrifying pictures of Abu Ghraib
were first disseminated by the media, causing worldwide outrage,
22-year-old England’s case is being handled in a military
court in Fort Hood, Texas.

Last Wednesday, a judge rejected England’s guilty plea.
The case may have to be completely reinvestigated. England might be
charged with fewer violations, since Spc. Charles Graner, the
ringleader of the abuse, has testified that he essentially ordered
the woman to humiliate the prisoners.

So one way or another, England will soon be brought to justice
and the nation will finally be able to close this horrible chapter
of the war in Iraq and move on, right?

Wrong. The actions that have been taken to ensure there
won’t be a second Abu Ghraib fall far short of what’s
needed.

First of all, the investigations mostly circled around soldiers
like England, who were responsible for the actual abuse. But the
military is structured from the top down. With reports of beatings,
sexual abuse and torture on the table, it is likely there were
orders from superiors that sanctioned at least some of this harsh
prisoner treatment.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq at the time
of the Abu Ghraib scandal, definitely supported a tough stance
toward the prisoners. The Kern-Fay-Jones report, an army
investigation of the abuse scandal, concluded that Sanchez approved
the use of severe interrogation practices that indirectly led to
some of the abuses.

Although the White House itself never officially endorsed these
interrogation practices, there seemed to have been a general
consensus. According to Newsweek, former White House counsel
Alberto Gonzales ““ now serving as attorney general ““
released a memo in January 2002 that urged the administration to
deal with the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay without regard to the
Geneva Convention.

This memo was allegedly later used by the Department of Defense
to justify its aggressive attitude toward interrogations in
Iraq.

The current trials seem like just another case of an
organization that protects high-ranking officials by sacrificing
expendable people in the lower ranks. Four of the five top Army
officers responsible for prison policies and operations in Iraq
were cleared of any accusations. And the one officer who got
reprimanded claims that all blame for the failures of her superiors
is being heaped on her.

The guilt chain leads all the way up to Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld. After all, he is the top U.S. defense official, and he
officially acknowledged that he bears responsibility for the
scandal. But in politics, those words aren’t worth the paper
they’re written on.

The U.S. government should have approached this whole affair
with much more resolve. It’s a shame that after a year of
investigations, only the foot soldiers are being punished, while
the big shots are virtually unscathed.

It’s a commonly held argument that in the “War on
Terror,” you cannot stick to human rights conventions,
because your opponent won’t either. I understand the tendency
to throw all considerations out the window when faced with
videotaped beheadings and car bombs, but the United States should
not let the Sept. 11 terrorists destroy its standards of military
justice.

The administration needs to send a clear signal that prisoner
abuse is wrong and will not be tolerated. Otherwise, the U.S.
military is little better than the terrorists it’s trying to
fight. A clearly defined policy concerning the treatment of
prisoners would go a long way to ensure that there will never be
another lawless zone like Abu Ghraib, where torture becomes
amusement.

By quietly tolerating violence toward prisoners, the military
has fostered a cruel culture within its ranks.

A New York Times column described the experiences of soldier
Aidan Delgado while he was in Abu Ghraib. Delgado remembers that
GIs would take sickening pictures while they fooled around with
dead detainees. “These pictures were circulated like
trophies,” he said.

Strong leadership is needed to keep these cruel tendencies in
check. The government tries to portray people like England as
“bad apples.” But bad apples tend to thrive on an
already infected tree. If the Army continues to tolerate prisoner
abuse, it is only a question of when the next scandal will
happen.

Starre is a third-year English student. E-mail him at
astarre@media.ucla.edu.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *