25 April 2009
 
Truth to Power

(Truth, in a way)

Apparently we are going to be treated to another batch of pictures depicting the abuse of prisoners in the two war zones. The ACLU sued for release of the pics under the Freedom of Information Act- FOIA- so here they come, ready or not.
 
The ACLU claims that the release demonstrates the widespread nature of mistreatment, and will have the sort of graphic impact needed to ensure policies are changed.
 
I did not hear that they have asked for the pictures collected to document the results of the suicide bombings; the carnage would be too disturbing, I assume, and might contextualize the cause-and-effect of the nightmare of mayhem.
 
I’m sure there are privacy issues, too, since the lives of those involved with the infamous Abu Ghraib photo albums have been thoroughly destroyed.
 
Specialist Lynndie England became the poster girl for the scandal, holding a naked Iraqi prisoner on leash like a dog.
 
When the dust settled on the little soldier, she was found guilty of one count of conspiracy to maltreat prisoners, four counts of maltreatment and one count of committing an indecent act. She is still in the Miramar Brig, as far as I can tell, just about half-way done with her 36 month sentence.
 
That is part of the calculus of injustice in this. Apart from a few soldiers in the West Virginia National Guard Military Police, no one has been formally punished for what went on.
 
In this latest round of legal proceedings, the judge of the Second Circuit of the US Court of appeals upheld an initial finding that “the public interest involved in release of the pictures outweighed a vague, speculative fear of danger to the American military or violation of the detainees’ privacy.”
 
I’m glad that no one got pictures of us being hosed down, naked, at Warner Springs, shivering in the chill of morning. Or of my pal emerging from the fire pond at Brunswick, Maine, in the dead of winter. We must have looked unhappy, and dejected. Like someone had stolen our dignity and self respect and was capable of doing anything to us.
 
I am not a fan of the doctrine of equivalency. At the heart of things, I knew, almost for sure, that the chill and shivering and misery in the little box was going to end in a matter of hours. Or maybe days. The uncertainty was what gnawed at us, and that factor, times a thousand, is what makes what happened to some of the detainees pretty harsh.
 
There was a point to it, though, and it was about learning something. In our case, it was about the Code of Conduct, and the consequences of telling the truth to power.
 
They taught us that we were never supposed to surrender- trust me, we got that point pretty quickly- and that we were supposed to escape, if the opportunity presented itself.
 
But there was something more to it. Human nature being what it is, there will always be those who will sell out their buddies for creature comfort in hard times. It did not happen often in World War II, and to my knowledge, no Americans or Brits or Australians became propaganda tools as Japanese or Nazi sympathizers.
 
Tokyo Rose, Lord Haw-Haw and the other broadcasters were something quite different, and none of them soldiers. The Brits hanged his Lordship, by the way, when they got the chance after the war.
 
Something very troubling had begun to happen during the Korean War. American prisoners were saying some of the most extraordinary things, and a handful of them even refused repatriation when the Armistice came.
 
Examination of the phenomenon was conducted publicly and privately. The public reaction that still resonates today is the book-and-movie The Manchurian Candidate. An American solider is brainwashed into an automaton of the Communists, programmed to be a sleeper agent capable of being activated on demand.
 
A serious internal discussion began as well within military circles. Soldiers were not equipped with even rudimentary skills for resistance. They had a Code of Conduct that permitted disclosure of only limited amounts of information to their captors. Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, the capturing forces were entitled only to The Big Three were permitted: Name, Rank, and serial number.
 
Truth and power were in a sort of balance. The Convention provided a sort of gentleperson’s agreement between nation states that further interrogation would not be conducted. Naturally, there were brutal exceptions to policy. But a framework existed in which captive and captor were permitted to operate, truth and power in equilibrium.
 
In the hot conflicts that embraced the edges of Cold War, there were no gentlepersons and sometimes no nation states. Surrogates operated in the shadows of Liberation. As non-signators to the Convention- say, the Pathet Lao or the Viet Cong, could hardly be expected to comply like civilized people.
 
John Wayne could deal with the ambiguity, in the movies, anyway, glaring down his enemies and toughing it out. There were no realistic options provided beyond the Big Three, and that was a problem.
 
The dirty little secret is that everyone can be made to talk and there are no John Waynes. Once you broke, once you were beyond what your country said you could do, you were on your own. That is a very lonely place.
 
That is not to say that there are no heroes. The American pilots who resisted their Vietnamese captors did things that are unimaginable in their courage. Suspended by ropes, arms dislocated, emaciated, they resisted in each interrogation. If they gave up information, it was only by making their captors work hard for it, starting at zero each time.
 
The US Military could not rationally expect its people to all have the guts of men like Jim Stockdale or Bud Day. John Wayne could have learned a lot from them. And so a training regime was established to give a taste for what it might be like, to provide ordinary mortals with the skills to deal with an enemy who had no compunctions at all about getting what he wanted.
 
It might not be information at all. It might be cooperation in exchange for food, or for making the pain stop.
 
That was the point of SERE training. The military carefully crafted a training curriculum that was remarkably effective in only three weeks.
 
The initial classroom week provided the framework for understanding what was expected, and the grim reality of what being captured might hold. The week in the field was to make you hungry, maybe for the first time in a well-fed life. The last week- in the bag- was to show you just how fragile the notion of our self really is, and how important it is to have something to cling to that is simple and true in the face of raw power.
 
The problem with all this is not that harsh interrogation does not work. That is nonsense. SERE training is all about demonstrating that everyone will talk. The point that what is said is not necessarily true is quite accurate. Sometimes people say things they think the captor would like to hear. Sometimes they will tell the truth.
 
But the sad truth at the end of the day is that everyone will talk. I remember one session in the small hours night in a small room that was unexpectedly warm, the light of a single bulb unexpectedly bright, and the voice of the interrogator smooth and silky. The fingers of fatigue caressed the edges of my brain.
 
I think I told the man I was from Chicago, once the Big Three were far behind.  But I am pretty confident that with another week or so, he would have discovered I was actually from Detroit.
 
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com