Abu Ghraib Followup: Charges dropped

[Anaxagoras]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,,-7216920,00.html
The revelation that the Army threw out the conviction of the
only officer court-martialed in the Abu Ghraib scandal renewed outrage from human rights advocates who complained that not enough military and civilian leaders were held accountable for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

Those critics found an unlikely ally in the officer himself, Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, whose conviction on a minor charge of disobeying an order was dismissed this week, leaving him with only an administrative reprimand.

Jordan told The Associated Press on Thursday he believes many officers and enlisted soldiers did not face adequate scrutiny in the investigation that led to convictions against 11 soldiers, none with a rank higher than staff sergeant.

Based on the way this article is written, it looks like the charges were dropped a little while ago, but I completely missed that news item. Instead, I stumbled on this article where one of the few people that received any punishment at all is complaining that the probe was incomplete, and the real culprits are still at large.

[Lizard_King]

I just came across this piece of news (missed your post, and now the link is broken), and I can't believe how easily this has fallen out of the public eye. I mean, for christ's sake, I had to read mother jones (http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/03/the-final-act-of-abu-ghraib.html) to find an in depth story on it, and that's just fucked.

It's hard to believe that so much outrage could translate to so little action, and ultimately we are supposed to be content with the public shaming and negligible prison sentences of a few non rates. Who, after all, are being punished for taking pictures of their torture, not for following orders and abusing prisoners. I guess that makes since if no one at the top is going to go down for it.

[Aeon221]

I just came across this piece of news (missed your post, and now the link is broken), and I can't believe how easily this has fallen out of the public eye. I mean, for christ's sake, I had to read mother jones (http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/03/the-final-act-of-abu-ghraib.html) to find an in depth story on it, and that's just fucked.

It's hard to believe that so much outrage could translate to so little action, and ultimately we are supposed to be content with the public shaming and negligible prison sentences of a few non rates. Who, after all, are being punished for taking pictures of their torture, not for following orders and abusing prisoners. I guess that makes sense if no one at the top is going to go down for it.

A coverup of a horrible act perpetrated by the military where those responsible went unpunished?! That's never happened before! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre#Courts_martial)

[Lizard_King]

A coverup of a horrible act perpetrated by the military where those responsible went unpunished?! That's never happened before! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre#Courts_martial)

Really? Tell me more about this My Lai thing, I'd never heard of it. Besides, it all pales in the face of the Holocaust or Nanking, right?

And no, compared to My Lai, Abu Ghraib matters, as if yours wasn't among the most facile of dumbass comments available. You want to draw specific parallels that aren't obvious, by all means, but you're really carving out a niche as pointless military information link guy. Why don't you compare the Ping Pong dynasty's treatment of Tibetans and complete the circle?

In addition, this is a novel American experience because of the special role the executive branch had in creating an acceptable environment for torture above and beyond our mixed history on the subject.

[Aeon221]

I don't see the difference. The only difference being that this time people got mauled by dogs and molested instead of flat out massacred. Heck, that's almost a win! Maybe next war we'll just call them bad names, eh?

[extarbags]

A coverup of a horrible act perpetrated by the military where those responsible went unpunished?! That's never happened before! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre#Courts_martial)

Yeah, good point. This is old news not worth discussing, I guess. I mean, how bad can it be if it's not the worst thing we've ever done?

Besides, it all pales in the face of the Holocaust or Nanking, right?

No, stupid, those weren't done by America. They do, however, make anything Germany and Japan, respectively, do wrong a moot point not worthy of discussion.

[Jason McCullough]

There's a just strange article in the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/24/080324fa_fact_gourevitch/?yrail) on the soldier who took all the really famous photos from there. I can't decide whether to be sympathic or disgusted.

As for Gilligan, the Criminal Investigation Department determined that he was not, after all, who he had been suspected of being during his ordeal. “So all of that, and the poor guy was innocent,” Harman said. He remained on Tier 1A and soon became one of the M.P.s’ favorite prisoners. Gilligan was given the privileged status of a block worker, and was regularly let out of his cell to help with the cleaning. Megan Ambuhl called him “pretty decent,” and said she had a picture of him sharing a meal and a smoke with Charles Graner. Sabrina Harman said, “He was just a funny, funny guy. If you’re going to take someone home, I definitely would have taken him.”

Under the circumstances, Harman was baffled that the figure of Gilligan—hooded, caped, and wired on his box—had eventually become the icon of Abu Ghraib and possibly the most recognized emblem of the war on terror after the World Trade towers. The image had proliferated around the globe in uncountable reproductions and representations—in the press, but also on murals and placards, T-shirts and billboards, on mosque walls and in art galleries. Harman had even acquired a Gilligan tattoo on one arm, but she considered that a private souvenir. It was the public’s fascination with the photograph of Gilligan—of all the images from Abu Ghraib—that she couldn’t fathom. “There’s so many worse photos out there. I mean, nothing negative happened to him, really,” she said. “I think they thought he was being tortured, which he wasn’t.”

Harman was right: there were worse pictures than Gilligan. But, leaving aside that photographs of death and nudity, however newsworthy, don’t get much play in the press, the power of an image does not necessarily lie in what it depicts. A photograph of a mangled cadaver, or of a naked man trussed in torment, can shock and outrage, provoke protest and investigation, but it leaves little to the imagination. It may be rich in practical information, while being devoid of any broader meaning. To the extent that it represents any circumstances or conditions beyond itself, it does so generically. Such photographs are repellent, in large part because they have a terrible, reductive sameness. Except from a forensic point of view, they are unambiguous, and have the quality of pornography. They are what they show, nothing more. They communicate no vision and, shorn of context, they offer little, if anything, to think about, no occasion for wonder. They have no value as symbols.

Of course, the dominant symbol of Western civilization is the figure of a nearly naked man, tortured to death—or, more simply, the torture implement itself, the cross. But our pictures of the savage death of Jesus are the product of religious imagination and idealization. In reality, he must have been ghastly to behold. Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes?The image of Gilligan achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability—in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. It is an image of carnival weirdness: this upright body shrouded from head to foot; those wires; that pose; and the peaked hood that carries so many vague and ghoulish associations. The pose is obviously contrived and theatrical, a deliberate invention that appears to belong to some dark ritual, a primal scene of martyrdom. The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot—or do not want to—understand about how it came to this.

[Sebmojo]

I don't see the difference. The only difference being that this time people got mauled by dogs and molested instead of flat out massacred. Heck, that's almost a win! Maybe next war we'll just call them bad names, eh?

What the fuck are you talking about? That just comes across as a really witless and inane thing to say.

[AndrewM]

What the fuck are you talking about? That just comes across as a really witless and inane thing to say.

He was sarcastic, thus he automatically wins the argument.

[Aeon221]

What the fuck are you talking about? That just comes across as a really witless and inane thing to say.

Massacres -- heck, I'll go one farther and say "bad things" -- perpetuated by soldiers employed by this country never go punished and tend to rapidly disappear from the pages of major publications. Color me unsurprised that Abu Ghraib went unpunished and mostly unremarked.

If you look at the part of the wiki entry I linked, even officers indirectly involved in My Lai were surprised by how easily everyone got off. Again, same thing happens here.

As an outsider in the workings of the US Military, I dislike this seeming policy of covering up heinous crimes and forgiving soldiers for acts of incredible brutality simply because they were committed outside of this country on people who were citizens of nations incapable of defending them. I find it disgusting and disgraceful that it seems par for the course, and it sickens me to think that, once again, this will be the standard response. Since many of the soldiers that are now leading the military cut their teeth on Vietnam, I felt that bringing up My Lai, where the response was _exactly_ the same, was entirely applicable.

Not just because it was similarly vile, but because the military has a history of not engaging in robust self policing.

[jfletch]

It is par for the course because it was high level guys who instituted it and ordered it. That much should be obvious by now. The low level guys took the fall for it when the public heat was on, but a few of them (maybe the guys in between the low level and the high level) got off when the heat was off. The CIA has been using and teaching the exact same techniques used in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, Black Sites, whatever, for decades.

The high level guys then move on to the next job, convinced what they did was what they had to do to "keep America safe".

[bago]

You can't handle the truth!

(Followed by firing David Iglesias)


In 1986, he was one of the members of the legal team that was the inspiration for the film A Few Good Men, with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, a case involving the assaulting of a fellow Marine at their base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.