Listen to Tony Lagouranis, author of Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator’s Dark Journey Through Iraq, describe what he witnessed and did in Iraq.
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One of the most disturbing things abut Lagouranis’ book is that over and over again he expresses concern — and makes a convincing case — that many of the people picked up and exposed to our "enhanced interrogation techniques were merely petty criminals at best, or at worst completely innocent of any crime or violence.
It’s not surprising. Lagouranis writes of entire families who were clearly innocent of anything resembling terrorist activity, but were sent on to Abu Ghraib because the report filed when they were picked up stated that they were insurgents, had connections to insurgents, etc. We know, thanks to the Red Cross that as many as 70 percent of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib were wrongly detained. Even the general who was in charge of the prison (and took part of the fall for the administrative officials who opened the door to the acts that took place there) said most of the prisoners shouldn’t have been there. We know from official documents that children as young as 11-years-old were held at Abu Ghraib. Colin Powell’s former chief of staff said that most of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were innocent men picked by U.S. troops who were unable to discern enemies from innocent civilians.
Many of those released from Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib apparently went from "the worst of the worst" to having "no further intelligence value," because the military hasn’t got enough evidence to even pass muster with a military tribunal that has a much lower requirement for evidence than a U.S. court of law. This lines up with Lagouranis’ stories of Iraqis being shipped off to Abu Ghraib for extended stays, because of cultural incompetence on the part of U.S. troops and/or corruption on the part of Iraqi official and police,etc.
The images from Abu Ghraib, and the images we’ve yet to see serve to remind us that the acts depicted on these pictures and those we have yet to see are what inflamed anti-American sentiment. (Not the images themselves, though they add to the impact of reports, etc.) From what I’ve read from Lagouranis and others (including the red cross) a disturbingly large percentage of those detained in Afghanistan and Iraq were utterly innocent of anything remotely resembling terrorism, attacks against Americans, or insurgent activity.
Some were picked up because they happened to be nearby when an IED went off, because the road ran past their farms and they happened to be working. Some were picked up because they happened to live within sight of someone else who had a cache of weapons buried on their property. Some were picked up because they had a distant relative who was suspected of being part of the insurgency. Some were picked up because they had the same last name as a suspected insurgent, and the soldiers who picked them up didn’t know anything about Iraqi naming customs.
Some were picked up because we flew over an impoverished country that had been at war off and on for the last few decades, and dropped flyers offering a bounty on anyone who belonged to Al Qaeda. Most people were picked up by Afghani forces, not American, and our soldiers often had little more to go on than the word of those who brought a detainee in on charges that might have been cooked up by a covetous neighbor or corrupt official.
Once in, there was no justice system to determine guilt or innocence. There was only interrogation, with the goal of a confession. And, maybe, actionable intelligence — though that was in short supply.
The acts we are seeing and not seeing in these photos were done to a great many more people than we know, and a great many of them were very likely innocent of anything greater than petty crime, if they were guilty of anything at all.
Lagouranis writes of grandfathers, fathers, sons, teenage boys picked up in scenarios like the one Mark Danner described, from a Red Cross report.
I thought of Salih and his impatience as I paged through the reports of General Taguba and the Red Cross, for they treat not just of “abuses” or “atrocities” but the entire American “liberation” of Iraq and how it has gone wrong; they are dispatches from the scene of a political disaster. Salih came strongly to mind as I read one of the less lurid sections of the Red Cross report, entitled “Treatment During Arrest,” in which the anonymous authors tell how Iraqis they’d interviewed described “a fairly consistent pattern… of brutality by members of the [Coalition Forces] arresting them”:
Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property. They arrested suspects, tying their hands in the back with flexi-cuffs, hooding them, and taking them away. Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people…pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles.
Lagouranis writes of one 70-year-old man arrested because he owned a small roadside restaurant where some nameless, faceless accuser — perhaps seeking a bounty, of the sort that failed to turn up any terrorists — said that insurgents ate there. And the old man said that if insurgents did eat there, and given the number of travelers who passed through some probably did, he didn’t know them from other customers. He just sold food at the roadside.
He could have been an asset to U.S. forces, Lagournis writes, but the word of an anonymous and perhaps payed-off informant was all the U.S. needed to hold him.
Akram was forthcoming and easygoing, and could have been a source if we’d gone about this the right way — that is, if we’d gone to him and asked him questions or asked him to watch out for particular people, instead of arresting him and interrogating him repeatedly. At least five times Wayne and I went through the same questions with Akram, and soon it dawned on this seventy-year-old man that we weren’t going to let him go. I finally confirmed, two weeks after his arrest that he was going to be sent to Abu Ghraib. For the first time, he looked like he was about to cry as he stated what was now obvious: "So, I’m going to die in an American prison."
There are others, like the man whose entire family was severely beaten and arrested in an even that could serve as an illustration of the term "SNAFU" — when the military raided what top brass believed to be a terrorist training camp, but turned out to be the new location of the Iraq Ministry of Oil. Yet, despite most of the men arrested being on the Ministry payroll as guards, despite the tons of Oil Ministry paperwork that was collected as evidence, and despite an irate call from the Oil Ministry demanding to know where its guard detail was, this man was held.because of an elderly Egyptian houseguest and a scope one of his sons found and brought home as a curiosity.
Here was a man who said he was attacked in his village for working with Americans, who’d probably fought insurgents too, and who’d managed to raise intelligent, well-mannered sons despite his humble means. And, according to Lagouranis, because of one mistake that the U.S. military seemed unwilling to admit in the face of a mountain of evidence, we sent him to Abu Ghraib.
Some of them, many of them, will go home. Back to families that were already desperately poor, and that haven’t had a means of support since the only adult male — probably at the peak of his earning power — was taken away.
How many have we detained for an extended period who were the main family breadwinners?
In addition to the emotional strain, many families are suffering economic hardship, as the detainee may also be the main family breadwinner.
…According to his family, Rahmad Tulla’s brother was once a farmer and fought against the Soviet troops. He was detained by the Taliban just eight months before they fell from power. His family reports the U.S. authorities arrested him in Kunduz in October 2002 and held him in Bagram before transferring him to Guantanamo in February 2003. Rahmad explains: "When my brother was detained by the coalition forces, the family had no news from him or about where he was being kept. After three months I heard that he had been detained, thanks to a Red Cross Message he sent me."
When the detainee is the breadwinner, it is up to his relatives to support the family. Rahmad Tulla reports that "The situation of the family is getting worse, because we don’t have anyone to support us and find food, and I’m also responsible for my family. Najimullah is the breadwinner now, in place of his father. The eldest son is having to feed the family."
The detainee’s first wife, Mah-Bibi, has is responsible ten daughters and a son to look after. "I have only one son and he is very young. He cannot feed all the children by himself. I lost one of my daughters because she was sick. She died because I had no money to buy medicine."
We did this to innocent people. Even if we caught some terrorists in the wide net we cast, we caught a number of innocent people who had the misfortune to be within reach of an occupation and detention system that couldn’t differentiate between them and its real enemies before they were caught, and that was unwilling to let them go afterwards.
In the meantime, some of them were subjected to our "enhanced interrogation" techniques. That’s the problem with making torture permissible for "the worst of the worst." It will not be applied to them exclusively. Once you open the can, you don’t tell the worms where to go and where not to go. They spread out. They go everywhere, just like the Bush administration’s favorite interrogation techniques, including:
- Use of stress positions
- Isolating a prisoner for up to 30 days
- Sensory deprivation
- Forced nudity
- Forced grooming (i.e. head-shaving)
- Use of detainees phobias (i.e. dogs)
- Face slaps
- Forced exercise
- Sleep deprivation
- Environmental manipulation (i.e. exposure to temperature adjustment, unpleasant smells)
- Exposure to cold water/weather
- Threatened transfer to countries that practice torture
- Threats of imminent death to detainee or family members
- Waterboarding
We did much of this to innocent people.
Most of them have not been compensated, nor have most received so much as an apology for their wrongful detention.
To date, the U.S. government hasn’t given any former detainee financial compensation or apologized for wrongfully imprisoning him, shipping him around the world and holding him without legal recourse.
The 38 former Guantanamo detainees who’ve been found to be no longer enemy combatants by tribunal hearings — the closest the military has come to admitting that it detained some innocent men — were flown out of Cuba with nothing but the clothes on their backs and assorted items such as copies of the Quran and shampoo bottles that the U.S. military issued to them.
"It’s particularly deplorable that none of the 38 NLECs have been compensated, since the U.S. has officially recognized that they weren’t ’enemy combatants,’ even under the broad U.S. definition," said Joanne Mariner, the terrorism and counterterrorism program director at Human Rights Watch.
Ian Seiderman, a senior legal adviser for Amnesty International, agreed.
"The fact that (compensation) hasn’t happened at all, even in a small number of cases, shows that this administration is more concerned with avoiding scrutiny and accountability than it is the rule of law," said Seiderman, who previously served as a legal adviser to the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists and the assistant to the special rapporteur on torture for the United Nations.
And most of them will get no justice.
Iraq was a mess from the start or it was planned Chaos. There were never enough troops as required under the Powell doctrine. Vice Royal Bremer agreed to disband the Iraqi Army, which from all accounts a few million dollars in pay would have kept the peace. And then created an insurgency by having prisons like Abu Ghraib.
While I agree with the spirit of your comments, I must take issue with a couple of details.
There is no right way to do something that is fundamentally wrong.
And for what it is worth, I do not believe, as some do, that it was “planned chaos”. I believe it was a mess from the start, and got steadily worse and worse because the Americans simply had no clue what to do once Iraqis did not react to bombs and brutality with flowers and candies as the Americans stupidly expected them to.
I agree with you but I would add another aggravating factor. The decision to allow elections had the effect of giving political power to the Shi’ites. Democracy is nice, but any though that the Sunnis would see this as a good idea was ridiculous.
Yes, well, there are numerous layers of bitter irony there, isn’t there, starting with the fact that they claimed to have invaded in order to bring democracy. Garner (of whom I was never a fan, though Bremer was much worse) was actually organizing local elections, but as soon as he got the boot and Bremer came in it became clear that they had no intention of allowing Iraqis any choice at all in their local leaders, let alone their national ones (Bremer actually appointed a non-Arab-descended non-Arabic-speaking Dane as mayor of Basra, and a Sunni known for being very corrupt as mayor of Najaf). So much for the claims of Democracy as a goal.
But really, in the end Sistani backed them into a corner and gave them no choice but to hold elections, and then Sistani issued a fatwa that pretty much guaranteed the result. Thus the occupying power empowered the most extreme, divisive elements among Shi`as and Sunnis.
But virtually everything the Americans did from day one was guaranteed to ensure sectarian division and conflict. I personally believe their actions were undertaken out of complete ignorance of Iraqi society and social and political history, not out of intention to create major sectarian conflict. From the very beginning and in every context they made an issue of people’s sectarian identity, which most Iraqis found quite bizarre. And then, of course, there was the way they set up their make-believe Iraqi government based solely on religious and ethnic identities.
I know this flies in the face of conventional mythology about Iraq, but Iraqi politics and political conflicts were previously based on ideology, not identity, and at a social level sectarian and ethnic identity were not issues. If someone asked whether you were Sunni or Shi`a (or whatever else) it was considered very bizarre, and inappropriate.
well, we always have a bit a disagreement over this last point of yours. I think you’re right that in places like Baghdad it wasn’t much of an issue what sect you belonged to. But even there you had the giant Shi’ite slum of Saddam City. The fact that Sistani was able to exercise so much power once Saddam was gone is proof-positive that there was much subterranean Shi’a solidarity. That Shi’ites overwhelming voted for his slate of candidates showed that there was a desire to prevail as a sect. Americans exacerbated that feeling but they didn’t create it.
After all, there was a Shi’a uprising in 1991.
1. The nature and history of the so-called “giant Shi’ite slum of Saddam City” has been mischaracterized and misunderstood by Americans, as have most things about Iraq. While it is true that the majority of the residents of Saddam City, originally Madinat Al Thawra (Revolution City), have always been Shi`a, it was not, as it has been characterized, some sort of Shi’ite ghetto built by Saddam Hussein.
First, it was not built by Saddam Hussein as some American sources claim, but by `Abd Al Karim Qassem. Second, there were, up until recently at least, Christians, Sunnis, Kurds, and others living and doing business there as well as Shi`as. It was also considered a “hotbed” of the Communist party, which was the most diverse political party in Iraq, even more diverse than the Ba`th party.
The reason the population is predominantly Shi`a goes back to the origins of that suburb, and relates also to certain aspects of Middle Eastern society. Madinat Al Thawra was one of several urban developments built by Abdel Karim Qassem to solve a serious housing shortage for poor and lower-middle-class Iraqis who in the ’50’s were migrating to the city from rural areas in large numbers. Most of those who originally moved into the homes in Al Thawra were Shi`as.
In the Middle East traditionally families do not tend to move around as they do in the U.S., meaning that neighborhoods are very stable. When children grow up and marry ideally they will live in the family home, which if possible will be expanded to accommodate the enlarged family. Even when they do not live in the same house, families tend to cluster in the same neighborhoods. For these reasons, the composition of a neighborhood does not tend to change much over time.
I remember Al Thawra when it was still a fairly new development. When Saddam took power he changed the name to Saddam City. As time went on, as the population expanded, and especially as Iraq’s economy began to go downhill in the ’80’s, and then was devastated by the destruction of the so-called “Gulf” war, and the sanctions in the ’90’s, Al Thawra deteriorated from a nice, new development into an overcrowded slum.
Another fact that is almost never mentioned is that there were Sunnis among the insurgents, and there were many others who were prepared to fight had the insurgency reached their areas of the country.
It is also true that Shi`a opposition groups whose goal was to turn Iraq from a secular into an Islamic state saw the insurgency as an opportunity to seize power and achieve their goal.
There is no way to have a full, nuanced discussion of this issue here, of course. Every one of the aspects you mentioned is by itself much more multi-layered than you presented it here, and very few Americans have a really accurate, let alone complete understanding. I have just tried to present some of the other aspects and layers.
Thank you for some very interesting history.
I hadn’t really considered who built Saddam City (now Sadr City) because I didn’t really see that as crucial to understanding it. Obviously, I was less interested in its history than in its state when we found it upon invasion. My understanding is that it was a rather large area of the city on the east side which saw much neglect from the government. It was poor and it was Shi’ite, and it was a hotbed of opposition to the regime. My understanding is that Saddam withheld basic funding for things like decent sewage systems and garbage removal and other public services. I’ve seen the same in Philly, where Mayor Street was loath to remove snow in Italian sections of the city that did not vote for him.
My point in raising the issue of Saddam City wasn’t to suggest that Shi’ites had been forced to live there. My point was that despite Baghdad’s reputation for ecumenicalism, there did exist a sizable, and largely segregated slum that was almost entirely Shi’a. You might have said the same thing about Catholics in Boston at mid-century in this country.
To put this another way, it is my general feeling that most Baghdadis (especially of Sunni background) did not feel much sectarian animus prior to the U.S. invasion. And they tend to have a somewhat romanticized view of sectarian harmony in Iraq that I think is belied by what happened once the lid was lifted off by the invasion.
By no means do I mean to suggest that the Americans had an accurate opinion of affairs in Iraq. But I think their error was in part caused by this romanticized view they were being fed by cosmopolitan Sunni Iraqis.
On the one hand, the Shi’a were considerably less happy to see us that we had been led to believe they would be. On the other hand, the Shi’a were considerably less inclined to think as Iraqis than as Shi’a. I don’t think we knew who Sistani was before we invaded. I bet most Sunni Baghdadis hadn’t dedicated much thought to him either.
As with any oppressed minority group, the majority felt they knew how they felt when they really didn’t. They thought they were more resigned to their second-class citizenship than they really were. They were blind to much of their suffering.
So, you get a lot of talk from Sunnis about how there never was all this sectarian animosity before the invasion. Well, that’s true, It wasn’t as out in the open. You had a lot of intermarriage and polite people didn’t discuss such things in places like Baghdad.
But the Shi’a felt deeply wronged and they respected their religious leaders in ways that remained obscured in polite society.
The Americans made all of this worse in many ways and I would never dispute that or begrudge you your sadness over what was lost in good feeling between the Sunnis and Shi’a because of the invasion.
But, that good-feeling was a bit of a fantasy. Iraq was a country built on the tyranny of a minority. American didn’t create that. They just failed to understand it. I think the Sunnis of Baghdad failed to understand it, too.
I think that understanding the history of Al Thawra/ Saddam/Sadr City IS important to a real understanding. For example, if a person believes the nonsense that it was built by Saddam (or anyone else for that matter) as a Shi’a ghetto, or even a Shi`a district that puts entirely the wrong frame around it. It was built to provide decent housing for poor and lower middle class Iraqis many of whom were living in absolutely appalling conditions due to a severe lack of housing. As it happened, and by coincidence, most of the original inhabitants were rural migrants from predominantly Shi`a parts of the country, thus it became a predominantly Shi`a area.
Yes, Saddam City was a “hotbed of opposition to the regime”. In fact, as I alluded to earlier, it has a history of being a hotbed of opposition, as it was a center of Communism in its early years, and therefore a hotbed of opposition to the first, short-lived Ba`thist regime as well as the regimes of Abd Al Rahman and later his brother Abd Al Salam `Aref, and the Ba’thist regime that followed their rule. (By the way, Jews were very prominent in the Iraqi Communist party, which is another rather interesting subject.)
And yes, it was neglected by a succession of regimes, including, and even especially that of Saddam, as “hotbeds of opposition” tended to be. I have never seen any convincing evidence that Saddam’s regime neglected it more because it was poor and the population was predominantly Shi`a, than because it was a center of opposition. There were also quite a few predominantly Sunni areas in the country that were neglected and/or periodically punished for their opposition to the regime, Falluja being one of them.
“By no means do I mean to suggest that the Americans had an accurate opinion of affairs in Iraq. But I think their error was in part caused by this romanticized view they were being fed by cosmopolitan Sunni Iraqis.“
You seem to be suggesting that the Americans’ error was to assume harmony between Sunnis and Shi`as in Iraq, when in fact it was the exact adverse of that. The Americans entered Iraq carrying with them the assumption that Iraq could be neatly divided into three mutually exclusive, historically incompatible parts, Sunnis, Shi`as, and Kurds. They assumed that there was no such thing as an Iraqi identity, only ethno-sectarian identity. Thus, more often than not the very first, and often the only question they would ask an Iraqi was whether he was Sunni or Shi`a. This was quite baffling to many Iraqis, particularly those who were neither.
“the Shi’a were considerably less happy to see us that we had been led to believe they would be.“
It was the Shi`a who ultimately forced the British out of Iraq. It should have been obvious to the Americans that the Shi`a would not accept American domination any more gladly.
“the Shi’a were considerably less inclined to think as Iraqis than as Shi’a.“
On what specifically do you base this interesting assumption?
“that good-feeling was a bit of a fantasy.“
What is your basis for this assumption?
I agree with you that understanding the history of Saddam City is important to understanding the place today.
As for your two questions, my evidence is what actually happened once Saddam was removed from power and the Shi’a had the opportunity to use their superior numbers to win power.
You have built quite a large, complex edifice on a very thin, extremely simplistic foundation. That makes the edifice you have built very shaky indeed.
One thing I found interesting in your response was your remark about Falluja being a place known for its opposition to Saddam and your assertion that it suffered neglect and periodic punishment as a result. I think that would be the subject for a very interesting diary if you ever have the time to write one. I would certainly welcome it.
My response to you was a bit terse. I think you deserve a better answer.
I think that the Shi’a co-existed in Iraq because they had never had real power in Arab lands. They developed philosophies and tactics to reflect that reality. Part of that philosophy was resignation and part of it was integration. But it disguised real aspirations that existed below the surface. When the Americans came in, they did exacerbate the existing tensions, but Sistani was the real obstacle. He was able to successfully dictate to the Americans because once he was free to exercise his power, he did so. American was confronted with focused Shi’a power and responded to it. They didn’t create it. The source of the power was the degree to which the Shi’a (including formerly integrated Shi’a) were willing to follow Sistani’s leadership. There were the lower classes that followed Moqtada al-Sadr, but they weren’t the real problem. It was Sistani’s clout that acted as an effective veto on anything other than real elections.
So, the thing that really drove the move to total sectarian confrontation was America’s inability to defy Sistani. And what I am saying is that that dynamic was there all along but it was hidden below the surface by the iron-hand of Saddam Hussein. I’m not saying that the Shi’a were secretly longing to wage a war to the death with the Sunnis. I’m saying that they were resigned to their fate, and that led them to accommodate. It was artificial.
Likewise, the Sunnis, because of their privileged position, were not cognizant of all the ill-feeling from the Shi’a and took their integration for granted. But there were not willing to live with matters reversed. They might let their daughter marry a Shi’ite, but they wouldn’t consent to governed by one.
It’s a complex subject. I just think the status quo in Baghdad prior to the invasion was less harmonious than most people thought. It has kept together with duct tape and string wire. Once the edifice was challenged, the lie was exposed.
Thanks for this clarification of your thinking. I will try to address it in at least some detail, but not now.
Let me add a couple of things to my previous comment.
I said that Iraqi politics and political conflicts were based on ideology, far more than identity. This is even the case to a significant extent with Shi`a opposition groups such as SCIRI and Da`wa, whose goals had less to do with Shi`a domination than the overthrow of the secular regime and its replacement with an Islamic state. Da`wa in particular was interested in working together with like-minded Sunni groups toward the goal of an Islamic Iraq that presumably would include both Sunnis and Shi`as.
In the months following the invasion there were numerous efforts on the part of Sunnis and Shi`as to join together in opposition to the occupation. There were joint meetings in mosques, joint Friday services, and many Sunnis made the walk to Karbala for the first Ashura celebration. Although I have said I believe the Americans did not intend to bring about a sectarian conflict, they did take steps to put a stop to joint Sunni/Shi`a opposition efforts, and were unfortunately largely successful.
That pretty much sums it up.
And once it’s done, there aren’t many easy ways to get it all cleaned up.
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It is a “rash” U.S. military establishment the advanced world fears most: reckless, trigger-happy, and prone to unilateralism. An inevitable military Leviathan, on the other hand, is what the global system needs most: decisive in its power projection, precise in its targeted effects, and thorough in its multilateralism. So while we will strike with amazing speed, and coordinate our operations with eye toward rapidly dominating any enemy we take on, our strategic choices must be made with great care. Living in an interconnected world, America must understand that almost any time it intervenes militarily overseas, it sets off a series of horizontal scenarios both good and bad.
IU wasn’t aware of the Carlisle Barracks PA until I googled for war doctrine and the “principle of chaos”. Just glancing over the titles makes some interesting reading.
We already knew that Bush Sr and Jr are members of Skulls and Bones who profess the theory of “constructive chaos” and have high regard for secrecy.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."“the acts depicted on these pictures and those we have yet to see are what inflamed anti-American sentiment.“
There was plenty of anti-American sentiment before news of these acts began to reach Iraqis. People tend to develop negative sentiments against those who bomb their homes, invade their countries, cut off their water and electricity supplies, shoot their loved ones and neighbors, and swagger around treating people like shit. The acts depicted in the pictures just added fuel to a fire that was already burning quite brightly.