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VE HAFF WAYS OF MAKING YOU TALK
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Last week I wrote about the proposed new county jail out here which is
scheduled to rise in all its beauty from the swamps of South Suffolk Co. in the near
future. It turns out to have been an opportune subject. Jails are kind of
in the news right now. It seems that some funny things have been going on in
the ones we’ve been running in Iraq. Torture, maybe murder, assaults,
mistreatment, the whole nine yards in fact.
I could write here that this has caused a great alteration in our local plans
and that torture chambers, dungeons, sweatboxes and the like have been ruled
out in favor of non-injurious sliding ponds, seesaws and such, but this wouldn
’t be true, or funny for that matter. There is no doubt though, that people
inspecting the plans and proposals for the new jail will be looking out for
any suggestion that facilities are being provided for extra-curricular
activities of the Iraq kind.
What strikes one about the whole Iraqi imbroglio is the stupidity of the
thing. The people involved, from generals or above down to privates in the
prisons seem to have had no conception of the difference between a war fought sixty
years ago under the protection of press censorship and one fought today in a
fishbowl with every move under observation. It’s a shame no correspondents
were embedded with the detainment troops as they were with the assault troops
last year. With the correspondents along the soldiers’ behavior was perfect and
when it wasn’t the reporters had learned enough about their difficulties to
write with understanding about it. As a result there were no scandals in the
conduct of the campaign. With embedding there would have been none in the
prisons either.
The transgressors in the jails did their own brand of reporting. They took
pictures of the hazing they inflicted on the prisoners. Pictures, would you
believe. They were obviously in the same class as the kind of people who send
nude pictures of themselves and their lovers through the mails. They’re just
dense, that’s all. The rest of us will now pay the price for their
exhibitionism.
“Dense” is the right word to describe their appreciation of the
possibilities of exposure that were inherent in the presence of thousands of reporters
from all over the world looking high and low for a new angle, a new read, a new
approach to telling the story of the war. The abusers couldn’t make the
connection. War news was something you saw on television, involving other people,
not you. You were too humble, too obscure for anyone to take an interest in
what you were doing.
The jailers’ self-appraisal was right on target except for the conclusion
that no one would ever check on them. The media today is ubiquitous; it goes
everywhere, into every hole and corner where some precious dirt can be found.
People better insulated than the soldiers have found this out, when they learned
that their corporation books and income statements were being investigated by
reporters whose acquaintance with finance had previously been confined to
negotiating for coffee money with the office shylock.
All this makes it sound as if I were concerned about the PR aspect of the
Iraqi events and no other. Not so, I know there’s a moral question here and a
tactical one too. The U.S. is presenting a miserable image to the world, and
today image is often more important than reality, but if were a false image we
shouldn’t care. They say, what do they say?, let them say, that should be our
attitude. But it’s not an attitude that can be maintained when we’re flooded
with pictures of naked men crawling on the floor before their American
guards. That’s not us, and we shouldn’t allow anyone to think otherwise.
We should think about what happened to the prisoners, though. Military
intelligence apparently thought the best way to handle them was to “soften them up”
through abuse, so as to get information out of them. In a country full of
lawyers no one seemed to remember that that kind of information is not
admissible in court for the simple reason that it can’t be trusted. For the same
reason it’s just as unacceptable outside of a court. So much for the reliability
of evidence obtained under torture.
Naturally the kind of people who thought nothing of ignoring the Eighth
Amendment to the Constitution -- cruel and unusual punishments -- could hardly
be expected to worry much about the Geneva Convention on the treatment of
prisoners of war, although the United States had always made it known that it
subscribed to the Convention and had applied it fully in previous wars.
Observance of the Convention was not always the most convenient way for us to
act, but it had its rewards as well as its inconveniences. The most
important one was the reciprocity we got from Germany in WW II in the treatment of our
prisoners. Only 4% of the Americans captured by them failed to survive in
captivity. As for the Germans interned here, most of them said that it was the
best time of their lives. They still come back here for weepy reunions with
their jailors.
Such results aren’t obtainable with the Iraqis of course. The Geneva
Convention is a closed book to them. Our obligations to prisoners aren’t based on
reciprocity, however but on Christianity, basically, so whatever they do to
prisoners has nothing to do with us. We won’t play a game of tit for tat with
them.
Is this sentimentality? I don’t think so. I think the best way of “
softening up” prisoners might be the way of fair treatment and we might be surprised
that their surprise at this could lead to a revision of their attitudes
toward us. We have to do it in any case. Torture and deprivation aren’t for us.
We didn’t use it our other wars and we still managed to get the information we
needed to carry on the war. I don’t suppose anyone remembers a movie called “
Decision Before Dawn”. It was a factual story of World War II about
anti-Nazi German prisoners who volunteered to help our army against theirs before
Hitler succeeded in destroying what was left of Germany.
They didn’t join us through fear and intimidation but because they thought we
were more right about things than their own leadership. The picture was done
in Germany immediately after the war. A lot of the action took place in the
ruins left by the raids of our bombers. The image of these ruins provides all
the comment that is needed on America’s two ways of waging war -- ruthless
when required, but never believing that an enemy cannot become a friend at
last. We should continue that way.
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