Eight US Criminals

May 24th, 2004

Senator James Inhofe is a Republican from Oklahoma and a member of the Armed Services Committee. As such he was on display when General Antonio Teguba and others testified on the matter of the torture of Iraqi prisoners. Most, if not all, of the other committee members applauded General Teguba’s report which indicated that American soldiers had committed incredible, inhuman and disgusting treatment of Iraqi prisoners in their charge. General Teguba did not speculate beyond his actual knowledge as how high up the responsibility for that treatment went and this column is not about that. What it is about is a matter of attitude.

In the six minutes allotted to Senator Inhofe by the committee rules, he began by reading a statement in which he maintained that because the Iraqi resistance had committed atrocities against American troops, contractors and others, the action of those involved in the torture of Iraqi prisons was somehow not so bad. He, and one or two other Republican senators, criticized the media for not publishing pictures of Iraqi atrocities at the same time as they published photographs of American torture as if one justified the other. He also defended the torture by some of our troops as an attempt of gain information which save American lives.

In a further fillip on this kind of thing, Rumsfeld and others in the administration have taken to blaming the media for the scandal because CBS and practically every media outlet in the world published the pictures. Rumsfeld reports he has stopped reading the newspapers. Since the president admits to never reading them, it is hard to imagine the reliability of the information the administration gets. No doubt it is from the same sources that reported WMD in Iraq and somehow forgot to report complaints from the International Red Cross about the treatment of prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senator Inhofe further maintained that prisoners subject to torture in cell blocks A and B of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison were not in there for traffic tickets but were murders and other bad guys who were guilty of spilling American blood. This statement seems to contradict Ambassador Brenner and a host of other authorities who maintain that 90% of the people held in the prison were guilty of no crimes whatever, including traffic tickets. The coalition, in fact, seems to be falling all over itself to release most Iraqi prisoners from our Iraqi jails as quickly as possible.

The general defense of torture by Inhofe and others of his ilk is that we need the information to save American lives. The trouble with this defense is that it flies in the face of exactly the kind of behavior that the Geneva convention was established to prevent. Combatants who capture enemy prisoners are always interested in the information they might supply and rightly could argue that those prisoners might be compelled to provide information that would help to prevent the deaths of their soldiers or civilians.

Even in World War II, the “civilized” Nazis rarely if ever violated the Geneva Convention, at least as far as western troops were concerned. It was certainly not a matter of scruples. The Nazis had no problem destroying six million Jews not to mention millions of other people deemed in need of extermination. Rather they adopted the policy of compliance because they were concerned that failure to do so would result in similar treatment of their own troops. And, to the best of my knowledge, German troops captured by US forces were in general very well treated indeed although the provocation to do otherwise was great.

Perhaps we were not concerned enough in Iraq about the fate of coalition prisoners who fell into Iraqi hands, although the evidence that we should be concerned is rampant. Obviously the balance of torture does no one any good. Torture by our side spurs torture by the other side. To voice disgust with our handling of the prisoners our troops tortured is not to condone tortures or beheadings or other outrages by elements in Iraq. And just as we argue that the US troops who did these things do not reflect the attitudes of almost all of our troops and our population, so the Iraqis are entitled to the same consideration. Indeed this is the official administration line: the mass of Iraqis, it says, are not involved in the uprising and do not condone the terrible acts perpetrated in the name of Islam.

More important is the notion that in Iraq we are “the good guys.” That we fought this war----as it is now said----not because of the threat of WMD or ties to terrorists, but to “free Iraq” from the tyranny of Saddam and to enable the Iraqi people to live in peace, security and democracy. Demonstrating our concern for the Iraqi people by excusing the torture of some of their citizens is a strategy maintained only by idiots.

When the wind came sweeping down the plain in Oklahoma, it must have caused Inhofe to be hit on the head and lose his moral compass. If there are only seven criminals responsible for the torture in Iraq as the administration would have us believe, add Inhofe’s name to the list. The shame is that you can’t court marshal a senator.