Psyche, Science, and Society

The exhaustion of the soldiers

Soldiers in Iraq are suffering exhaustion on a daily basis, the Guardian reports:

The Americans he commands, like the other men at Sullivan - a combat outpost in Zafraniya, south east Baghdad - hit their cots when they get in from operations. But even when they wake up there is something tired and groggy about them. They are on duty for five days at a time and off for two days. When they get back to the forward operating base, they do their laundry and sleep and count the days until they will get home. It is an exhaustion that accumulates over the patrols and the rotations, over the multiple deployments, until it all joins up, wiping out any memory of leave or time at home. Until life is nothing but Iraq.

Hanna and his men are not alone in being tired most of the time. A whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad’s international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust.

Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men by untenable ideas - bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda - these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. ‘The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,’ says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the ’surge’ in Baghdad began.

They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another of the public affairs team adds bitterly: ‘We should just be allowed to tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people are worn out. So that their families know back home. But it’s like we’ve become no more than numbers now.’

This exhaustion has implications for the troops, and for the Iraqis. The troops will suffer the short- and long-term consequences: divorces, illness, mental illness, botyh in Iraq and long after they return. The Iraqis, however, will suffer the consequences of poor decision-making by the troops: quicker firing at roadblocks, less accurate aim, more rage during home searches, overwhelming firepower called in quicker, and a general increase in the daily brutality of occupation.

US decision-makers, of course, care about neither consequence. For them the US troops, primarily working class, matter no more than do the Iraqis they attempt to control. Their all just pawns in a game of control and of image. To these decision-makers, looking strong is more important than any number of lives.

Add comment August 12th, 2007

Giuliani on “Freedom”

From a 1994  Giuliani speech:

“Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.”

[h/t Daily Kos.]

Add comment August 12th, 2007

Many at Guantanamo not even acused of anti-US “terrorism”

The Boston Globe today brings word that many of those held at Guantanamo Concentration Camp are not even accused of anti-US “terrorism”, but are simply Afghans, possibly corrupt ones, who got in the way of US plans to control the country post-Taliban:

When US special forces wanted to defeat the Taliban, they befriended Abdullah Mujahid, the police chief of this mountainous province. They visited his home with a gift of chocolates, and gave money and equipment to his fighters.

Mujahid met frequently with US troops, and even arrested and handed over a suspect the US military sent to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But as the threat of the Taliban receded, US forces sought to replace Mujahid — an illiterate leader who had been accused of corruption — with a professionally trained police chief. Soon, Mujahid was accused of being responsible for an attack on US forces. He was sent to Guantanamo Bay, where he languishes not far from the man he arrested.

The fall of Mujahid offers a rare glimpse into the trials of postwar Afghanistan, where US special forces struggled to rein in the warlords they once wooed.

But it also reveals the extent to which the military is using the Guantanamo Bay detention center for a starkly different purpose than the one outlined by President Bush: to keep the worst terrorism suspects behind bars.

A Globe investigation found that the military has used Guantanamo Bay not just for terrorists “picked up on the battlefield” — as Bush has repeatedly asserted — but also for uncooperative or unruly tribal chieftains, many of whom had been key supporters of the US-led invasion.

The use of Guantanamo Bay for purposes other than fighting international terrorism could have legal significance, because Bush has tried to justify creating a place where detainees can be held without normal legal protections on the grounds that the prisoners are enemy combatants who might launch a terrorist attack if they are released.

Despite Bush’s assertions, at least 52 detainees who had been held at Guantanamo Bay were not accused of ties to the Taliban or Al Qaeda, according to publicly released military records detailing the accusations against nearly 500 prisoners. At least a dozen were once officials in the post-Taliban government, arrested in their homes or offices during a broader US campaign to rein in warlords.

Mujahid was one. The former head of the United Nations office in Gardez, Thomas Ruttig, said he urged the Afghan government to remove Mujahid from his post because he was seen as an uneducated, disruptive, and corrupt figure. But Ruttig said he expected Mujahid to be fired or tried for corruption in Afghanistan, not held indefinitely in Cuba without a trial.

“I never dreamed he would be sent to Guantanamo,” Ruttig said in a recent interview in Kabul.

John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch researcher, helped write a 2003 report that accused Mujahid and his inner circle of allowing their fighters to set up illegal checkpoints to take money from truck drivers. But he, too, said Mujahid should not have been sent to Guantanamo Bay.

“Guantanamo is not even vaguely the appropriate place for him,” he said, adding that the administration shouldn’t use its power to hold accused terrorists at Guantanamo to solve political or criminal problems in Afghanistan.

The distinction between Guantanamo and a regular military or civilian prison is significant because Guantanamo detainees are stripped of most of their rights, and can be held on unspecified charges without being given a chance to mount a normal legal defense.

For a year after Mujahid’s arrest in July 2003, the military refused to release any information about why he was arrested. But in 2004, after a Supreme Court ruling forced the government to reveal why people were being held, the military accused Mujahid of “being responsible for” an attack in which a US soldier was killed, though UN and Afghan officials say Mujahid was not in Gardez at the time.

Then, in 2005, the military accused him of being a senior leader of a militant group operating in India-held Kashmir. But Pakistani news accounts suggest that another man by the same name who died last fall was a senior leader of that group.

Now, even the military has stopped saying that Mujahid belongs in Guantanamo Bay. In February, Pentagon officials informed his lawyers that he was among a group of at least 12 detainees who had been cleared to return to Afghanistan, either for release or further detention.

Pentagon spokesman Jeffrey Gordon declined to discuss the accusations against Mujahid, but said the decision to clear him for transfer does not “change the fact that he still poses a threat to the United States.”

Presumably many of those held pose “a threat to the United States” beacuse they resent being imprisoned without charges or trial for years on end. And the potential that they might describe their treatment at US hands certainly makes them a danger to the government that subjected them to abuse for those long years.

Evidently, Mujahid’s major “crime” was refusing to cooperate in hiding torture and murder by US special forces:

Relations between Mujahid and the special forces deteriorated further in March 2003. US soldiers in Gardez had severely beaten a group of Afghan prisoners during an interrogation, and one of them had died, according to several former Afghan police and a report by the Afghan attorney general’s office, which investigated the case.

The second Commander Mike ordered that the seven living prisoners be transferred to Mujahid’s jail, according to the attorney general’s report and Raz Mohammad Dalili, the Afghan governor at the time who helped make the arrangements for the transfers.

At a joint security meeting, Commander Mike threatened to kill Mujahid if he released the prisoners, according to the Crimes of War Project, a Washington human rights group that investigated the alleged abuse.

The Americans who dropped off the prisoners spoke briefly to Mujahid in his office behind a closed door and then drove away, said Mehboob Ahmad, Mujahid’s personal driver.

Some of the prisoners were unconscious, and their bodies had turned black and blue, Ahmad said. Mujahid ordered that they be given medical treatment and mattresses, Ahmad said.

“Mujahid was upset. We all were,” he said. “I think anyone who would have seen them in that condition would be upset.”

Mujahid described the prisoners’ injuries to Afghan military prosecutors, who later wrote a report recommending that the American soldiers be punished. In January of this year, two special forces soldiers received administrative punishments in connection with the prisoners’ treatment. Major James Gregory, a spokesman, said at the time that the special forces command “takes all allegations of abuse seriously.”

Weeks after the prisoners were dropped off at Mujahid’s jail, the Afghan government decided to remove Mujahid from his post. Dalili, the governor, said in a recent interview in Kabul that the second Commander Mike helped persuade him — and Afghanistan’s central government — to replace Mujahid with a professionally trained police chief.

And the American abusers still run rampant across Afghanistan:

But a few things have not changed, according to the people of Gardez: Americans who use only their first names still broker deals, make arrests, and detain people across the restive countrywide.

The insurgency they are fighting rages on.

Add comment August 12th, 2007

Another Guantanamo prisoner, Omar Deghayes, speaks of his torture

Thanks to the Guardian, we have yet another account of a Guantanamo detainee who alleges torture at US hands:

Guantánamo man’s family release ‘torture’ dossier

by Vikram Dodd
A British resident held by the US as an alleged terrorist has claimed his captors repeatedly tortured him, subjecting him to beatings, sexual abuse and threats of execution.

Omar Deghayes, 37, is one of five British residents who the United Kingdom government last week asked the US to release from Guantanámo Bay, after years of refusing to help them because they were not UK citizens.

Yesterday the family of Mr Deghayes decided to release a detailed dossier of alleged torture which the former law student dictated to a lawyer who visited him in the Cuban internment camp.

He is a Libyan national whose family fled to the UK after their trade unionist father was murdered by the Gadafy regime in 1980.

Mr Deghayes was captured in Pakistan - his family claim by bounty hunters - after the US attacked Afghanistan. They say he had gone there to start a business exporting dried fruit to a leading supermarket.

In the dossier, he claims to have seen US guards kill people, witnessed prisoners being partially drowned, and saw the Qur’an thrown into a toilet by a US guard.

The new claims come after earlier Guardian reports of Mr Deghayes’s ill treatment, including allegations that he was left blinded in one eye after a soldier plunged his finger into it, and claims that he had human excrement smeared on his face.

Mr Deghayes grew up in Brighton and studied law at Wolverhampton University and then studied in Huddersfield. His family say he is not a terrorist and opposed violence.

The US says al-Qaida tells its operatives to allege ill treatment, though parts of Mr Deghayes’ account are consistent with those from former detainees.

The dossier contains far more allegations and detail than previously made public. Mr Deghayes says “sexual abuse did occur”, but says he can not bear to relive the details until he is released: “It is very distressing and sad to go through and remember again.”

He says he was threatened with being sent back to Libya where his family fear he would be killed.

He was first arrested in Lahore, Pakistan, in late 2001-early 2002, then taken to Bagram in Afghanistan, before being sent to Guantánamo Bay.

The allegations challenge President George Bush’s repeated claims that the US does not use torture.

He says that in Lahore prison he was subjected to electric shocks: “The more I scream they will laugh and do it again … my screams all in vain.”

He says that in Pakistan he was handed over to the Americans who hooded him and placed him on plane in a torture position.

“Two soldiers locked their arms into mine and lifted me off the ground. All my [weight] borne by my arms which were shackled behind my back.

“I was thrown in the plane. There were many others in the torture position.”

After he was moved to Bagram in Afghanistan, he says he saw electric shocks used on other detainees and here he also saw death threats, with guards pointing their rifles at the Muslim men.

He says he also witnessed a prisoner shot dead after he had gone to the aid of an inmate who was being beaten and kicked by the guards: “The American said he tried to take the gun.”

Another inmate was beaten to death: “One by the name of Abdaulmalik, Moroccan and Italian, was beaten until I heard no sound of him after the screaming.

“There was afterwards panic in prison and the guards running about in fear saying to each other the Arab has died. I have not seen this young man again.”

Another inmate, Mr Deghayes claims, was beaten until blood dripped on the cell floor and he was left “paralysed and mentally damaged”.

In Bagram he says he was chained in a cage “with hands stretched above [my] head …causing suffocation”.

In Bagram he says he went without food for 45 days and was subjected to water torture: “They hold me naked in the night, freezing cold, and throw buckets of water and fill the bucket and throw [it] again. I shiver and shake badly and try to sit down to gain warmth. They kick and punch and say stand up until I fall to the ground in weakness.”

While moving from Bagram to Guantánamo, he says he was so ill he suffered hallucinations that he was back in the UK and travelling on a train, after beatings and 45 days without food.

In Guantánamo Mr Deghayes says he was beaten on his first day. Special teams which tackle allegedly disruptive prisoners repeatedly beat him up, he claims.

Prisoners were also given mystery injections. He says an FBI interrogator called Craig said he would face execution, and that he would not get a proper trial.

He says: “Many times one FBI interrogator by the name of Craig said, ‘Omar, it is nothing like the law you studied in the UK. There will never be a proper court and lawyers etc, it would be only a military tribunal to determine your future and your life. Your best choice is to cooperate with me.”

He says he was subjected to taunts insulting his religion and during his first year in Guantánamo a Qur’an was thrown in a toilet, causing a riot among inmates. As a punishment his head and beard were shaved.

In Guantánamo, he says, “they would pretend to search and want to put their hands on people’s genitalia”.

His brother, Abubaker Deghayes, 39, said: “I cannot believe how the Americans can do this to him, and astonished how he could survive this.”

Mr Deghayes’s mother, Zohra Zewawi, said she feared for her son’s mental health if he ever is released.

“I worry that something has happened to his mind.

“He is being tortured. I read his diary. When he gets out I fear he will not be normal Omar. I’m sure he will have changed.”

It should be noted that military interrogators intentionally said they were from the FBI in order that the FBI would be blamed for the military’s abuses. So we should take the reference to the FBI with a grain of salt.

We also should note the “mystery injections.” Virtually every prisoner who has had the opportunity to communicate has referred to these mysterious drug injections. One of the great mysteries at Guantanamo concerns what drugs were/are being injected, why they are being injected, and by whom. These injections raise the question as to whether the US government is continuing its long-standing policy of seeking truth serums and other behavior control drugs. One wishes that Congress would look into this important question.

Add comment August 12th, 2007