Iraq abuses: 'War is hell'

[Dennis G]

It has become painfully apparent that the recent spate of letters attacking the current administration are written by people who have a primarily negative and a single-minded vision of what they perceive to be the truth. Yes, the stories concerning the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners are disturbing to all Americans; and no, none of us condone it, but don't forget, war is hell and it was declared on this country on Sept. 11, 2001, and it would certainly be an injustice to those who have lost their lives that day if we just forgot about it and went about our cozy little lives.
It's a shame that we don't hear more about the good individual and group efforts that are going on over in Iraq, but that doesn't sell the news, now does it? This country has been through tougher times than this and our service men and women really need to hear more about how much we support their courageous efforts and focus on the bigger picture, which is creating a democracy in a region that was once littered with tyranny and death.
The worst thing we can do is sit around on our sofas and complain while our country is making every effort to make sure that 9/11 doesn't happen here again.
Lee Simmons

[Fargin]

But wasen't the war(ie. the hell part) declared won a year ago?

You can't free an opressed people and then tell them to accept a little bit abuse, because we're the good guys.

[2Sheds_Jackson]

Good topic - I'm also frustrated by the press' constant pushing of bad news. Of course "dog bites man" stories are never seen. You have to remember that the media is nothing more than a business, though they relish the image of being "above it all". The reality is that they'll push whatever sells more papers.

But I have a related question. Is what we want to do in Iraq even possible?

What I mean by that is; these folks have been kept "in line" for decades with brutal repression & violence. Now here we come in using little more than embarrassment & harsh language. How are we to maintain order using methods that are far "weaker" than the old ones?

Of course I'm not advocating Saddam's methods. But it is indisputable that they did maintain order in an inherently chaotic region that's overflowing with oil, fanaticism and weapons.

Do you folks think that the Iraqis will be willing to fight for their own freedom, or more Western type values (Democracy), or will they quickly fold - preferring instead the order provided by tyranny?

[5jumpchump]

Not to bust your bubble but this war started waaaaaaaaaaaaay waay way before 9/11 . It started in 93' when they bombed the WTC the first time .
. Then our embassies got hit killing over three hundred people in Africa . Then the Cole bombing killing 17 US soldiers . **** I don't have the time to write out every attack afterwards but 9/11 was the final straw . Now the gloves are off and the ass kicking has commenced . Kill'em all and let god sort'em out .

[Secret Squirrel]

It has become painfully apparent that the recent spate of letters attacking the current administration are written by people who have a primarily negative and a single-minded vision of what they perceive to be the truth. Yes, the stories concerning the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners are disturbing to all Americans; and no, none of us condone it, but don't forget, war is hell and it was declared on this country on Sept. 11, 2001, and it would certainly be an injustice to those who have lost their lives that day if we just forgot about it and went about our cozy little lives.
It's a shame that we don't hear more about the good individual and group efforts that are going on over in Iraq, but that doesn't sell the news, now does it? This country has been through tougher times than this and our service men and women really need to hear more about how much we support their courageous efforts and focus on the bigger picture, which is creating a democracy in a region that was once littered with tyranny and death.
The worst thing we can do is sit around on our sofas and complain while our country is making every effort to make sure that 9/11 doesn't happen here again.
Lee Simmons

I call bull****; that 911 argument is getting a lot of press lately...lawyers arguing that their clients abused prisoners because they were stopping another 911. Trying to justify this war to stop another 911. So trying to say "war was declared" on the U.S because of 911 its complete and utter bull****. Just more rhetoric to trying to justify a war. I think bush wants to leaving his mark on history, so he had to go finish daddy's work. This war would have happened with or without 911.

[usa320]

If 9-11 wasnt an act of war, then what in bull****ing god damn mother ****ing hell is?

tell me...what should we have done? Ignored the problem until a nuke wiped out a major American city...or let Saddam continue to rampage the middle east?

[Secret Squirrel]

If 9-11 wasnt an act of war, then what in bull****ing god damn mother f*** hell is?

tell me...what should we have done? Ignored the problem until a nuke wiped out a major American city...or let Saddam continue to rampage the middle east?

connecting Iraq to 911 is moronic. Do you have any idea what it takes, both material wise and technologically to create a nuke? So i guess by your logic North Korea is next to be invaded? I mean there are reports it sold enriched uranian.

[Tane Angle]

It has become painfully apparent that the recent spate of letters attacking the current administration are written by people who have a primarily negative and a single-minded vision of what they perceive to be the truth.
Where do Anthony Zinni's protests? Or **** Clarke's? Or Pete Schoomaker's? Or Shinseki's? Should I keep going? Should I even ask where my own concerns fit in here?

I'm so frustrated because good people are dying and I don't know that Iraq was worth it. Every SF desert warfare expert, every EOD techie, every CT operator who is sent to Iraq means that they are not in Afghanistan or elsewhere. Iraq is so frustrating because it seems like fighting terrorism is on the backburner. And in many respects, it has.

Have a good one, and just some thoughts...

[2Sheds_Jackson]

I found it really weird that following 9/11 a lot of people came out in favor of legalizing torture. Even Alan Dershowitz, who's about as far left as you can get, advocated torture as a means to prevent another terrorist attack.

So ask yourself - you've got a suspect in front of you who you believe has critical, time sensitive information that can prevent a catastrophic event. Say his pal just planted a nuke in downtown London.

Is it ethical to torture them to prevent the horrible carnage? Considering the scale of things, couldn't you say that it would be unethical to not make every effort to prevent the attack...including torture?

Here's an interesting back-and-forth from CNN with Dershowitz. See what you think.


Dershowitz: Torture could be justified
Tuesday, March 4, 2003 Posted: 0431 GMT (12:31 PM HKT)

Ken Roth and Alan Dershowitz

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Following the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the question has become whether the senior al Qaeda leader will reveal key information about the terrorist network. If he doesn't, should he be tortured to make him tell what he knows?

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer posed this question to noted author and Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz and Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch.

BLITZER: Alan Dershowitz, a lot of our viewers will be surprised to hear that you think there are right times for torture. Is this one of those moments?

DERSHOWITZ: I don't think so. This is not the ticking-bomb terrorist case, at least so far as we know. Of course, the difficult question is the chicken-egg question: We won't know if he is a ticking-bomb terrorist unless he provides us information, and he's not likely to provide information unless we use certain extreme measures.

My basic point, though, is we should never under any circumstances allow low-level people to administer torture. If torture is going to be administered as a last resort in the ticking-bomb case, to save enormous numbers of lives, it ought to be done openly, with accountability, with approval by the president of the United States or by a Supreme Court justice. I don't think we're in that situation in this case.

BLITZER: Well, how do you know ...

DERSHOWITZ: So we might be close.

BLITZER: Alan, how do you know he doesn't have that kind of ticking-bomb information right now, that there's some plot against New York or Washington that he was involved in and there's a time sensitivity? If you knew that, if you suspected that, you would say [to] get the president to authorize torture.

DERSHOWITZ: Well, we don't know, and that's why [we could use] a torture warrant, which puts a heavy burden on the government to demonstrate by factual evidence the necessity to administer this horrible, horrible technique of torture. I would talk about nonlethal torture, say, a sterilized needle underneath the nail, which would violate the Geneva Accords, but you know, countries all over the world violate the Geneva Accords. They do it secretly and hypothetically, the way the French did it in Algeria. If we ever came close to doing it, and we don't know whether this is such a case, I think we would want to do it with accountability and openly and not adopt the way of the hypocrite.

BLITZER: All right. Ken, under those kinds of rare, extreme circumstances, does Professor Dershowitz make a good point?

ROTH: He doesn't. The prohibition on torture is one of the basic, absolute prohibitions that exists in international law. It exists in time of peace as well as in time of war. It exists regardless of the severity of a security threat. And the only other comparable prohibition that I can think of is the prohibition on attacking innocent civilians in time of war or through terrorism. If you're going to have a torture warrant, why not create a terrorism warrant? Why not go in and allow terrorists to come forward and make their case for why terrorism should be allowed?

DERSHOWITZ: Well, in fact, we've done that. Of course, we've done that. We have bombed civilian targets during every single one of our wars. We did it in Dresden. We did it in Vietnam notwithstanding these rules. So you know, having laws on the books and breaking them systemically just creates disdain ... It's much better to have rules that we can actually live within. And absolute prohibitions, generally, are not the kind of rules that countries would live within.

I want to ask you a question. Don't you think if we ever had a ticking-bomb case, regardless of your views or mine, that the CIA would actually either torture themselves or subcontract the job to Jordan, the Philippines or Egypt, who are our favorite countries, to do the torturing for us?

ROTH: OK, there is no moral or legal difference between torturing yourself and subcontracting torture to somebody else. They're equally absolutely prohibited.

DERSHOWITZ: But we do it.

ROTH: In the case -- the fact that sometimes laws are violated does not mean you want to start legitimizing the violation by getting some judge to authorize it. Imagine, you're always thinking about the U.S. Supreme Court, but any rule you apply to the United States has to be applied around the world. Do you want Chinese judges authorizing torture of say, Muslim dissidents?

DERSHOWITZ: It wouldn't make any difference. They just torture anyway. It wouldn't make any difference. They torture now.

ROTH: Once you open the door to torture, once you start legitimizing it in any way, you have broken the absolute taboo. President Bush had it right in his State of the Union address when he was describing various forms of torture by Saddam Hussein and he said, "If this isn't evil, then evil has no meaning."

BLITZER: Well, let me interrupt, Ken. Let me ask you about a hypothetical case. Professor Dershowitz talks about it in one of his articles and one of his books. There's a terrorist attack. A lot of people have just been killed in New York. They capture one of the terrorists, who says, "Guess what, there's another bomb out there, it is going to kill a lot more, but I'm not telling you where it is."

ROTH: Yes, that's the ticking-bomb scenario, which everybody loves to put forward as an excuse for torture. Israel tried that. Under the guise of just looking at the narrow exception of where the ticking-bomb is there and you could save the poor schoolchildren whose bus was about to be exploded some place. They ended up torturing on the theory that -- well, it may not be the terrorist, but it's somebody who knows the terrorist or it's somebody who might have information leading to the terrorist.

They ended up torturing say 90 percent of the Palestinian security detainees they had until finally the Israeli supreme court had to say this kind of rare exception isn't working. It's an exception that's destroying the rule. We have to understand the United States sets a model for the rest of the world. And if the United States is going to authorize torture in any sense, you can imagine that there are many more unsavory regimes out there that are just dying for the chance to say, "Well, the U.S. is doing it, we're going to start doing it as well."

DERSHOWITZ: And I think that we're much, much better off admitting what we're doing or not doing it at all. I agree with you, it will much better if we never did it. But if we're going to do it and subcontract and find ways of circumventing, it's much better to do what Israel did. They were the only country in the world ever directly to confront the issue, and it led to a supreme court decision, as you say, outlawing torture, and yet Israel has been criticized all over the world for confronting the issue directly. Candor and accountability in a democracy is very important. Hypocrisy has no place.

ROTH: So let's learn the lesson from the Israelis, which is you can't open the door a little bit. If you try, you end up having torture left and right. The other alternative, rather than legitimizing with torture warrants, is to prohibit it and prosecute the offenders. And we have murder on the street every day. We don't ask for murder warrants.

BLITZER: Ken, let me just get back to that ticking time bomb scenario. You would -- you could morally justify letting this terrorist that you've captured remain silent and allow hundreds of people to die?

ROTH: Look, we just heard from the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. You just had him on your show, Wolf, who said the interrogators at Bagram Air Base or wherever Mohammed is, they don't need torture. They have other, legitimate ways of getting at the truth. They're listening in through various wiretaps and the like.

Torture is not needed. If you start opening the door, making a little exception here, a little exception there, you've basically sent the signal that the ends justify the means, and that's exactly what Osama bin Laden thinks. He has some vision of a just society. His ends justify the means of attacking the World Trade Center. If we're going to violate an equally basic prohibition on torture, we are reaffirming that false logic of terrorism. We are going to end up losing the war ...

[Mr Gently Benevolent]

If 9-11 wasnt an act of war, then what in bull****ing god damn mother f*** hell is?

tell me...what should we have done? Ignored the problem until a nuke wiped out a major American city...or let Saddam continue to rampage the middle east?
Yes 9/11 was an act of war but it was committed by an international and stateless terrorist group not Saddam, and you may not have noticed that Saddam had not been doing much rampaging since he was kicked out of Kuwait and was hit by punitive sanctions. Iraq was on its way to becoming one of the weaker military nations in the middle east.

[Royal]

Iraq is so frustrating because it seems like fighting terrorism is on the backburner. And in many respects, it has.

As usual, I can't really speak for the USofA, but CT work in the armed forces on this side of the pond is off the back burner, in the bin and on it's way to the landfill. It seems as though (thanks to President Blair) the various intelligence services are trying hard to catch us up...

The fact that the UK defence budget will be spent by mid June (the financial year ends next April) and we've already borrowed from reserves earmarked for future projects that were expected to over run (Eurofighter) and have come in on time hardly helps...

[martinexsquaddie]

but on the plus side my brother brought me back a cheap camelback :roll:
I'm so glad I left the TA in 96 6months stagging on does not appeal :(

[Trident-za]

Very interesting posts, Tane, Bacilluspolymyxa and Royal.

What percentage of available troops is being used in Iraq, and what percentage on the war on terror? What percentage of military budgets is being spent in Iraq, and what percentage on WOT?

Has the terror threat increased or decreased, as all this manpower and cash is spent? Terrorism is a very real danger, not sure that Iraq was... although Saddam was most definitely a bad guy.

BTW, DennisG...



This country has been through tougher times than this and our service men and women really need to hear more about how much we support their courageous efforts and focus on the bigger picture, which is creating a democracy in a region that was once littered with tyranny and death.


This I agree with, completely. However.... the question should be asked: are the coalition troops going about "business" the correct way to achieve the scenario that I've bolded? And if they aren't doing the right things to achieve this worthy goal, is it more "treasonous" to ignore these shortcomings or highlight them? Does it harm or help the troops on the ground to praise the politicians and military planners, even if they are screwing things up?

[moughoun]

It has become painfully apparent that the recent spate of letters attacking the current administration are written by people who have a primarily negative and a single-minded vision of what they perceive to be the truth.
Where do Anthony Zinni's protests? Or **** Clarke's? Or Pete Schoomaker's? Or Shinseki's? Should I keep going? Should I even ask where my own concerns fit in here?

I'm so frustrated because good people are dying and I don't know that Iraq was worth it. Every SF desert warfare expert, every EOD techie, every CT operator who is sent to Iraq means that they are not in Afghanistan or elsewhere. Iraq is so frustrating because it seems like fighting terrorism is on the backburner. And in many respects, it has.

Have a good one, and just some thoughts...

I couldn't agree more, Iraq was a luxury we couldn't afford at the moment, I'm not saying we shouldn't have dealth with Saddam but not now, there are what, at least 18,000 al`qaida operatives world wide that should have been the absolute first priority, those were and are the religious fanatic's who will stop at notthing to get their way

[Tane Angle]

Thanks bud.


Terrorism is a very real danger, not sure that Iraq was... although Saddam was most definitely a bad guy.
Excellently put. I hate to be a bit cold about this, but let's face a rather cold fact: American (or whatever nationality) civilians' lives have to take precedence over Iraqi civilian lives. The WOT has to have priority over any war in Iraq. Hussein did not represent a clear and present danger greater than that posed by AQO.

Well, forgive me for changing the question some, but it doesn't matter what percentage of US troops are being used in the "WOT" versus in Iraq. It does matter, however, what percentage of specific types of troops are being used in one or the other.

An 19-year old kid fresh out of high school who can't grow a decent beard and has no language ability outside English and perhaps a little high school Spanish or something can not-and can't expected to-do the same job, much less as well, as a 35-year old who can sport a good-sized beard with some grays in it (gray hairs can aid in gaining credibility among local folks), can speak the native language, be it Arabic or Farsi or Pashtu or Urdu or others.

I would probably not mind if we had more SF in Afghanistan and other areas, let's just say that.


Has the terror threat increased or decreased, as all this manpower and cash is spent?
Depends on who you ask. AQO is the AIDS of terrorist organizations. It has multiple strains with multiple operating methods. It can mutate readily and rapidly. It can move and spread with relative easy and speed. And like AIDS, it can be dormant for years before symptoms-such as an attack-appear.

The AQO of today is a different one from a year ago, and certainly different from 2001 or even farther back. For starters, the primary strain has shifted. Is this voluntary or not, we don't know. It's probably both purposeful and by accident. The ZQO(al-Zarqawi Organization) is probably one of the most active strains, if not the most active. It is most prominent in Iraq. It is believed to be responsible for kidnappings, bomb attacks (the UN attack, etc.), and other means of attacking. It may be so active simply because there are Americans and other Westerners who are sitting ducks now that they are in Iraq. But perhaps they would have hit US Embassies in the region if OIF had not begun and simply shifted targets once OIF began.

ZQO's activity has given other strains a chance to rest and recuperate. Imagine the tactics of the muzzle-loaded age: the troops standing fire, then reload while the kneeling soldiers fire, then switch again.

Also occurring is something that isn't necessarily new by any means: terrorism subcontracting. AQO often fosters and nurtures other terrorism groups, and then those other groups perform tasks for AQO. A particular danger with this is that that means they might not look Middle Eastern.

We do know that while we might have been able to get away with going into Afghanistan without terrorist recruitment going up too much, the fact that in the course of just over a year we invaded two predominantly Islamic nations makes it look like the militants' warning of "the Americans want to take over the Middle East" is right. Is it right? Of course not. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that it is now easier for people to believe that we are out to conquer.

I'm heading back to sleep, sorry, I'll try and write more later. Have a good one, and just some thoughts...

[Trident-za]

Thanks Tane Angle.

Informative post. I see your point on the "specific types of troops". From reading Royal's post it seems that the WOT has taken a bit of a back seat recently, as the SOF guys are being sent mostly to Iraq. As you say, more guys in Afghanistan would be good. Quite worrying, I think.

A related question: the general concern seems to be Iraq "using up" troops that should in Afghanistan. How true is these days that Afghanistan is the place to be in terms of the WOT? Are the various islamic terrorist groups not starting to use other countries ? I don't know the answer, just curious really... but it seems to me that the "bad guys" would have spread themselves out a lot. The first few months in Afghanistan must have taught them something! This would also be major cause for concern : if they break up into an effective "cell system" all over the planet instead of grouping conveniently for the US air force, how the heck do we deal with that? They don't need to be bunched up in groups of a hundred or more to be a threat...

I guess it's kind of difficult to say whether the terrorism threat has increased, or dimished. Some will point to the lack of another 911 type attack as evidence that the WOT is working well, but I don't really know whether this is correct way of looking at it.

I don't really know where the coalition forces are focusing their efforts, but it appears that the emphasis is on Iraq. Time will tell whether this was the wisest move, I guess....