Central America and beyond: ruminations, speculations & provocations

Following up on yesterday's entry, it's worth noting that, in the New York section of the New York Times today, there's an article today suggesting that the Iraqi photos also torment the estimated 400,000 survivors of foreign torture living in the United States, both by the fact that the country which provided them safe haven might also engage in such practices, as well by the photos themselves.

Another angle on this debate has to do with the media's responsibility vis-a-vis the use by terrorist organizations of gruesome images, like the recent beheading of Berg on video. Juan Cole's latest blog entry cites a thoughtful article by Matthew B. Stannard in the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday.

While focusing on the Berg murder, it also highlights the important debate about how the "American media have yet to come to grips with their strange relationship with terrorists, according to the experts. Several commended the careful thought and soul-searching at a number of publications and broadcast outlets that preceded their publicizing the video images and the Abu Ghraib photos."

The last part of the article elaborates on this issue:

But Brigitte Nacos, adjunct professor of political science at Columbia University in New York, said the media also needed to recognize that terrorists were using them to get their message across, to spread fear and to recruit members.

"Terrorism, as I see it, is communications," said Nacos. "Without the media communicating what they want to say, terrorism doesn't really make sense."

She said the media have the responsibility to report on such events in an informative way. But for her, the key question is how much is enough -- from no mention at all to the repetition of identical disturbing images that characterized coverage of Sept. 11, Abu Ghraib and now the death of Nick Berg.

"I'm not saying the traditional media ought not to report on this," she said. "My concern is ... once you have reported it, especially on television, it is played and replayed, and I think that magnifies the impact. I think that there has to be some restraint. I'm not talking about censorship ... but there probably is a limit where you say that's enough."

Opinion on where the media should draw that line varied among the experts.

Nacos commended the New Yorker magazine for illustrating its most recent article on the Abu Ghraib scandal with just one photo -- and not the most ghastly one it had available.

Cole, who writes the influential Web log "Informed Comment," said the benchmark should be the number of people affected by an individual terrorist act -- a formula that he said should have relegated the video story to two paragraphs well inside a daily newspaper.

"(Berg's slaying) was done in order to get on the front page of the New York Times, and the New York Times should resist that temptation," he said. "I think we should be very careful about giving a lot of space and a lot of attention to what is essentially a monstrous, horrendous publicity stunt."

But other experts said the American media had a responsibility to cover the video in a significant yet proportionate way -- even if that meant risking being used by the terrorists to further their agenda.

"It's a reality," Walsh said. "The kidnapping and murdering and bombings are the reality of what is happening on the ground in Iraq. To hide that would be the greater mistake."

No one seems to complain about the fact that the 909 state-sponsored executions that have taken place in the U.S. since 1976 have not been shown live on primetime television, just as the dead bodies of the executed have not graced the covers of newsmagazines and papers.

It’s a sad day—or a day when we should think about rewriting international humantarian law—when Donald Rumsfeld is the first person to point out publicly what constitutes a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

I hate to admit this, but Rummy is consistent on at least one point in this whole nasty scandal surrounding the pictures of Iraqi photos: for the U.S. government to show them publicly would be a violation. Last year, that was the U.S. complaint against video footage of Iraqi interrogation of GIs who’d been taken prisoner---although at least these guys had their clothes on.

According to a story from AP published in the Boston Globe, the International Committee of the Red Cross agrees:

GENEVA (AP) The international Red Cross agreed Thursday with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the Geneva Conventions on warfare forbid the U.S. government from distributing photographs showing Iraqi detainees being humiliated or abused.

"He has a good point," said Antonella Notari, spokeswoman of the International Committee of the Red Cross. "The dignity of the people who are detained has to be respected at all times."

The conventions, which spell out the internationally agreed rules on the treatment of detainees during warfare, ban exposing prisoners of war to "public curiosity."

I started musing about this earlier today, before I even realized that Rumsfeld had mentioned this, and wondered why the media and human rights groups have not picked up on this angle. The answer is probably because it was the circulation of these photos—and perhaps only that—which has led to increased scrutiny, and hopefully policy changes, over prisoner interrogation techniques in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Geneva Conventions, of course, only apply to the “parties to a conflict”, so the media cannot violate them, and so far I'm not sure the U.S. has officially released any photos. But if the intent of these norms is that it is unlawful to humiliate people under your control, then why is no one responsible for the continued humiliation of these prisoners throughout the world through continued proliferation of these images?

Do the principles of transparency and accountability trump the Geneva Conventions here?

This is a letter from a childhood friend (who I've known since I was seven years old), who eloquently expresses outrage at Sen. Inhofe's outrage at everyone else's outrage.

Dear Senator Inhofe,

I saw on TV where you claimed to be "outraged over the outrage" over the sadistic abuse of Iraqi prisoners, so I thought I would explain to you why so many Americans see the scandal differently from you.

Even if you don't hold religious beliefs that mistreating your fellow man is morally wrong and indefensible before God, and even if you don't see that cowardly cruelty against those unable to defend themselves is sick, there is still a simple, basic reason to treat our prisoners decently that even a child can understand. It's so the other side will be encouraged to do the same with our people whom they capture! Good old-fashioned self-interest, in other words. What else do you think motivated the nations of the world to get together and hammer out the Geneva Conventions? Soft-hearted altruism? A pie-in-the-sky idealistic dream? No. They were all just trying to protect their own guys.

Now, if any Americans are captured, they're screwed. It's possible that their captors will not torture them, but if they do, we as a nation no longer have any grounds to complain, not in the eyes of the rest of the world. The United States has just lost its moral high ground on this issue. Now do you get it?

Yours truly,

Paul Tullis
Ft. Worth, Texas

Veteran CIA operative and writer Bob Bauer talks to Salon this week about his experience with torture, saying that it was strictly forbidden during the time he served (1976-1998). He says 9/11 must have changed all that, and points to Guatemala as a good example of what happened to agents who even failed to report cases of torture:

Remember those two guys in Guatemala [CIA agents Terry Ward and Frederick Brugger]? They were running the Guatemalan colonel who was alleged to have been involved in the torture and death of the husband of an American woman, Jennifer Harbury. That's a key case that people have forgotten. Those guys weren't even involved. But they didn't report it quickly enough, and Sen. Bob Torricelli of New Jersey leaked it to the papers. Administratively they didn't report it, and these guys were forced to retire. That's how serious it was, torture. And the colonel wasn't even involved, as it turned out.

And what if Torricelli hadn't leaked this to the press?

Or, if the Pentagon hadn't leaked the photos from Iraq to the press?

Last year, our prez stated on United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture that "notorious human rights abusers, including, among others, Burma, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and Zimbabwe, have long sought to shield their abuses from the eyes of the world by staging elaborate deceptions and denying access to international human rights monitors."

The only thing keeping the U.S. from joining that illustrious list of countries is the existence of a few lone leakers.

I'm sure I've missed something somewhere, but there remains one thing that no Washington journalist has allowed themselves to speculate about, at least in print: who leaked the ICRC report?

I suspect it was someone at the State Department who wanted to stick it to their arch-rivals at the Pentagon. Dana Priest implicitly allowed for this possibility when she mentioned in her online chat at the Post website this week that, regarding the ICRC report, the "State Department got theirs through a back channel. So, yes, many people in the USG knew of their allegations."

Joshua Micah Marshall notes as well: "I've been hearing for days that the State Department at the highest levels (i.e., not a few lefty FSOs in the bureaucracy, but authorized at the highest levels) has been leaking like crazy against the civilian leadership of the Pentagon on this story."

By the way, I've still only noticed one reference to the unprecedented nature of the leak of this report, from the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website, of all places. In addition to a discussion of the reasons behind the ICRC's confidentiality, this story notes that this is "one of the only confidential ICRC documents to be made public since the Geneva-based agency was founded 145 years ago."

A report out today on the "handover of sovereignty" in Iraq, from the Wall Street Journal, is worth quoting at length:

In a series of edicts issued earlier this spring, Mr. Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority created new commissions that effectively take away virtually all of the powers once held by several ministries. The CPA also established an important new security-adviser position, which will be in charge of training and organizing Iraq's new army and paramilitary forces, and put in place a pair of watchdog institutions that will serve as checks on individual ministries and allow for continued U.S. oversight. Meanwhile, the CPA reiterated that coalition advisers will remain in virtually all remaining ministries after the handover.

In many cases, these U.S. and Iraqi proxies will serve multiyear terms and have significant authority to run criminal investigations, award contracts, direct troops and subpoena citizens. The new Iraqi government will have little control over its armed forces, lack the ability to make or change laws and be unable to make major decisions within specific ministries without tacit U.S. approval, say U.S. officials and others familiar with the plan.

The moves risk exacerbating the two biggest problems bedeviling the U.S. occupation: the reluctance of Iraqis to take responsibility for their own country and the tendency of many Iraqis to blame the country's woes on the U.S.

Nechirvan Barzani, who controls the western half of the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq, warns that the U.S. presence in the country will continue to spark criticism and violence until Iraqis really believe they run their own country. For his part, Mr. Abadi, the communications minister, says that installing a government that can't make important decisions essentially "freezes the country in place." He adds, "If it's a sovereign Iraqi government that can't change laws or make decisions, we haven't gained anything."

Frank Smyth has a column in the May 5th Newsday that notes the U.S. tendency to promote like-minded rulers in its adventures abroad. He writes:

How did we end up in such a fix in Iraq? We did what we have long done abroad: We sought out not the foreigners whom we still need to work with, but the exiles who were most like us.

He notes that in El Salvador the U.S. chose José Napoleón Duarte (who even went so far as to write his autobiography in English for U.S. consumption--and as far as I know, it's never been published in Spanish), and in Iraq increasingly discredited figures like Ahmed Chalabi.

A colleague read this story and commented:

At least we agree on the lessons learned about exile communities and their tendency to sell highly questionable versions of reality on the ground either because they have been gone so long they don't know or because they have their own vested interests. My own reflections have run more towards the bay of pigs ( another fine mess exiles led us into) than to Duarte, but the lesson is the same.

Of course, we could continue the comparison and discuss one of the biggest "yes" men in the hemisphere, outgoing President Paco Flores....

Comments to dlholiday@yahoo.com

There's a story in Sunday's Vertice about Santos Valentina, the 34-year-old mother of two children, who struggles to support her family. She was born without legs, and washes clothes for a few bucks a day. Her champa has no water or electricity, and she often goes hungry. More photographs and narrative can be found at the website of Vertice.

Compare your state's investment in the Iraq war with what would have been an equivalent investment in housing, education, or health, at this site.

Comments to dlholiday@yahoo.com

Has there ever been a time when a report from the ICRC has been leaked to the press in its entirety? I can't remember one, in the last 20 years or so of my professional life. And has the ICRC ever commented so publicly as they have on the Iraqi prison situation in recent days? I don't think so.

I think this is an unprecedented situation which has, by and large, escaped public notice.

Young Joseph Darby, a car mechanic from the 372nd Military Police Company who is responsible for bring to light the photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse, needs a job.

Newsday reported yesterday that, in nearby Cumberland, Md., where many of the 372nd members live, Darby is now a controversial figure. "Darby's going to be shunned," said Tanya Vargas, 29, a former weekend reservist with the 372nd. "He's going to be blackballed. His life is in jeopardy, because he's a snitch. I hope they have protection for him." The same Newsday piece interviews military police who'd served in Iraq, who claim that they'd warned superiors about problems going back to April 2003.

There's also a feature on Darby on Friday's All Things Considered, which notes that one Vietnam veteran from Cumberland said that, in Vietnam, if someone had snitched like that, he wouldn't have come home alive.

Depressing.