On Advice of Counsel In discussing whether we should prosecute the people who ordered or committed torture, I’ve been drawing some artificial distinctions for clarity. I’ve contrasted the working torturers, the folks who slammed other folks into walls and poured water over their airways, with the Pentagon and Langley brass who merely ordained […]
“A Few Bad Apples” On October 19, 2003,[1] Specialist Sabrina Harman of the 372nd Military Police Company picked up a Sony Cybershot camera and began taking photographs of life on Tier 1A at Abu Ghraib prison. She documented naked prisoners being stacked like cordwood, prisoners being threatened by attack dogs, hooded prisoners, beaten […]
Various Circles of Hell Jack L. B. Gohn Because of the agonizingly slow leakage of information concerning the previous administration’s practices of internment and interrogation of Muslim men, it is only recently that the Central Intelligence Agency component has come into focus. When the Abu Ghraib photos were first leaked to […]
When the International Committee of the Red Cross reported in February 2004 on our various Iraqi detention centers, they noted that at all of them, there seemed to be a single playbook – the real playbook – of practices focusing on the sexual and religious humiliation of those detainees deemed “high value,” i.e. most likely to yield Actionable Intel.
But we had better be prepared for the consequences. Someone, somewhere, is going to try us, quite seriously, for war crimes. And somewhere else, someone is going to commit war crimes against our soldiers because we fail to recognize their own combatants as POWs. And it won’t be pretty.