Friday, December 24, 2004
COMPARING CAPTIVE HOLDERS
The Belgravia Dispatch:
Few have asserted the "abuses" were as lighthearted -- or lightheaded -- as the above states. Most know there is a horrible war going on; this enemy is no joke. If anything, if you drop by here regularly, you already know that my major concern isn't that the "abuses" were "frat hazing" stuff or frivolous.
On the contrary, far from it. That any "abuse" is unworthy of us should go without saying. But since I must apparently say it, having done so -- again -- let me be clear that my overriding complaint remains that while so much was and is made of "women's underwear", simultaneously so little was and is made of both the utter scale of Saddamist atrocities (relative to the size of the Iraqi population, they would have probably impressed Stalin) and of heads being sliced off non-combatant captives.
I'm sorry if I am not "nuanced", but I do not consider the former "evil" as being on par with the latter two. Are we actually comparing those latter to dogs barking at captives? Or perhaps punching and kicking? Or perhaps standing on someone for some reason that is unclear? Or setting the A/C too low? Or a "well over" 100 degree room? And even if all true, NONE OF THOSE -- even all taken together -- is worse than shooting whole families and burying their remains in Saddamist versions of "Katyn", or Islamists slicing off the heads of still living captives. Where has rational perspective gone!? I mean, Good God!
Nor do I believe the "abuse" is a result of all-encompassing policy, mostly because there is -- as of yet -- no good evidence there is a plan to torture captives. Yes, we are told of the "cover-up". Inevitably. Cover-ups last in the U.S. all of 10 minutes, because few cover-ups are any good. Word always seeps out.
And word of what goes on is there for us to review. The President has to deal with it. So does the Secretary of Defense. There is no "hidden" here. Indeed, all things considered, if what we have been told really has happened and is supposed to shock us, as evidence of systematic, planned torture on a horrific scale, it is hard to believe we come across as particularly menacing to any al Qaeda captive who might be willing to blow himself up in his own cell . . . if he could only lay his hands on some explosives in order to do so.
Until it is proven that the "abuse" is either because of "a few bad apples" or because of policy, the only other possibility would appear to be that any "abuse" has been (and will likely be, again in the future) a result of what often happens in wartime. It is a sad reality that war means killing; and while capture often means survival, it may also mean not getting treated very nicely -- and worse. Such is especially likely to be one's fate if one is an imprisoned, irregular enemy, an enemy from whom the captor wants (and needs) information that might help kill or capture further of your irregular comrades still on the battlefield, and as a result save the lives of the captor's troops and civilians. So, unsurprisingly, sometimes, lines are crossed. (While we're on the subject. For most of history, "irregulars" -- or even regulars -- who were caught in the act of espionage or otherwise taken in action while NOT wearing a recognizable uniform, were often quickly swung from trees, or otherwise killed shortly after capture. So, in that respect, that the U.S. has not thought to do that, is something for which the Guantanamo bunch probably ought to be pretty damn thankful.)
First, Guantanamo, etc. are either our "gulag archipelago" -- which is essentially what is charged by those wailing the loudest about the "abuse" -- or they are not. And they are not, as most sane people do agree. Enough said.
Secondly, bringing in the Bosnian Serbs might be worthwhile for conjecture purposes (those being white, European fascists of more recent times than Nazis), but how the U.S. would have treated numbers of Serb captives in a long war is just that -- pure conjecture, since we did not face that situation. (It is also worth noting that several Americans captured by the Yugoslav army said they were beaten badly in captivity. But that's understandable; it must have been that sense of Yugoslav "racial superiority" at work. However, I will leave further conjecture to the end.)
Most troubling is the "mixture" within the cited post of the Japanese-American/Japanese legal resident domestic U.S. internment and related cultural issues with the treatment of captured enemy combatants. (Actions taken against Italians and Germans, whose treatment was, we are left to assume, not apparently "racially motivated", goes unmentioned as usual.)
Of more usefulness is confining the discussion regarding al Qaeda/Islamist treatment as detained irregular combatants to differing treatment that did or did not occur when it came to captured Japanese combatants v. captured German combatants.
More Germans than Japanese were captured by the U.S., mostly because Japanese often died rather than surrender. But those Japanese who did get captured were often pleased when they were:
. . . The group originally numbered thirty-nine, but four died during their long ordeal at sea, and one aboard Ballard. The remainder were flown to Pearl Harbor, thence to various prisoner of war camps on the mainland. None of the prisoners wanted to return to Japan, nor did they wish their government to be informed of their capture, preferring to be recorded as lost with their ship.Americans captured by the Japanese tended not to be quite so lucky:
Indeed, while our current elevated debate over the "better angels of our nature" rages on, it is so easy to forget that the overwhelming majority of Guantanamo and other Islamist captives appear likely to survive captivity and return home at some point -- and, the way things appear to be headed, probably get themselves a compensation judgement eventually. Such being the case, it would seem that given circumstances and the nature of this enemy, we are actually rather "angelic" already. (Similarly, it is worth recalling that despite the viciousness of the Japanese towards American prisoners, a much larger percentage of Japanese combatant POWs, even if roughly treated on occasion -- as were some Germans and Italians -- survived U.S. captivity, when compared to the percentage of U.S. captives who survived brutal Japanese captivity. More below.)
As in so much else when it comes to U.S. actions in war, too many seem to overlook that in war two tango. What about the enemy's treatment of American captives?
Well, be they civilian or military, if unfortunate enough to be taken captive by Islamists, Americans are quite likely to be summarily murdered. It would be much welcomed if we could manage at least to get to the point of being able to worry about THEIR treatment of AMERICANS in captivity, but the fact is that Americans are usually not allowed to live long enough for us to get to that point.
In the American war against the Germans from 1941-1945, the overwhelming majority of U.S. soldiers captured alive survived captivity. In contrast, in the war against the Japanese an appalling 37% of U.S. POWs are believed to have died in captivity. Why?
One argument as to why is that, against the British and the Americans, the German professional army fought, more or less -- depending on the situation, and especially on whether there were Waffen SS units involved -- under what had been "time-honored" rules of war and prisoner treatment.
But the Germans did not observe such "rules" when it came to captured Soviets. That was mostly because the Nazis believed they were "racially superior" to the Soviets; Hitler had demanded a "war of extermination" against those "racial inferiors". So, while captured British and Americans were for the most part treated reasonably and relatively humanely (but that does not mean they were at a "Holiday Inn", as any survivor of German imprisonment will tell you), captured Soviets were for the most part treated utterly brutally, and died in the millions at the hands of their German captors.
The Soviets returned the favor. Hundreds of thousands of captured German soldiers died behind Soviet wire. However, Soviet hatred of Germans was not overtly "racialist" along Hitlerian lines. Germans were killed primarily because of a visceral, almost pathological (and understandable) Soviet hatred for a German army that had invaded the Soviet motherland with the intent, after the elimination of the educated classes, Jews and others deemed particularly inferior, to reduce the surviving population to helots who would live on (perhaps) only to serve their German masters. A distant second was a Soviet superiority-sense that stemmed from feeling (and from being told) they were "superior" because they were what might be termed the fist of the working class, fighting off German, capitalist/imperialist invaders.
Had the Nazis treated captured American combatants in the appalling manner they treated captured Soviets, would American behavior towards captured Germans have been less "correct" than it was? We can't know.
What we do know is that it was against Japan that the U.S. came closer to its own version of a German-Soviet war. The Japanese had racial superiority attitudes of their own, as well as an iron-willed belief that a soldier who allowed himself to suffer the indignity of capture deserved nothing but contempt; he had ceased to be a man. Also:
Yet amazingly, though U.S. captives were routinely brutalized by the Japanese (and word did get out that such was happening), in dealing with captured Japanese, while the U.S. could be rough on occasion (as they are accused of being today with Islamists), the U.S. did NOT fall to the low level the Soviets did in dealing with their captured Germans. The U.S. played reasonably straight with Japanese POWs, even given Japanese atrocities.
A lot like the U.S. does, today, with captured, irregular combatant Islamists. There seems little question that their confinement is not pleasant -- to say the least. But there is also outright killing going on right now in Iraq and in Afghanistan; we all know that in just the month of November, the U.S. may have killed some 2,000 or more of the enemy at Fallujah for the loss of somewhat less than 100 Americans killed. I am not defending guards who may -- may -- stick "lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings". But if that is to be called "torture", what label is to be applied to shooting people by the thousands and tossing their bodies into unmarked graves, and slicing off non-combatant heads and placing the video of the murders on the internet? And, of supreme importance, how will an enemy that engages in such activity be dealt with, and by whom?
To be blunt, thus far we have heard of nothing happening regarding Islamist captives along the lines of the following, which was undertaken by a few members of "the Greatest Generation":
Indeed, where was the Secretary of War? (It then being the pre-Secretary of Defense days.) Well, he was trying to win the freakin' war -- much like the current Secretary of Defense is trying to do. And just like that earlier war, we didn't ask for this one either.
It is definitely relevant that Bosnian Serb "militia" (or Yugoslav soldiers, for that matter) did NOT suicidally crash hijacked planes full of non-combatants into buildings in New York and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001. Islamist attackers did. Therefore, based on their well-demonstrated ability to get young pilots to crash their planes into U.S. aircraft carriers and other ships increasingly regularly (especially from mid-1944 on), I feel it is eminently reasonable to state -- now, for my promised conjecture -- that had the Japanese possessed the reach to be able to do so, they might very well have tried to crash planes into the Empire State Building, or the U.S. Capitol, or the White House. . .
. . . And as we had fought (and won) a war against Japanese suicidal fighters, so we must again -- this time against Islamists. And such a war is ALWAYS especially ugly.
On that depressing note, Merry Christmas everyone. ¶ by Robert, Friday, December 24, 2004
The Belgravia Dispatch:
. . . anyone with half a brain who continues to insist that the torture (sorry, "abuse") story is about a few bad apples taking a frat hazing a tad too much to heart at Abu Ghraib alone are full of it and doing the country a disservice through their intellectual dishonesty. It's clear that, while not some God-awful American gulag archipelago--torture has manifestly occurred in detention facilities from Afghanistan to Iraq to Cuba. Likewise, it's time to say loud and clear that the fact that those tortured are Arab and South Asian detainees is noteworthy. Why? Because it's reminiscent of the different treatment afforded the Japanese enemy as compared to the German during WWII. Recall that the Japanese during WWII, above and beyond Korematsu, were more viciously dehumanized in the popular culture than their less offensive Kraut partners in crime. Put differently, race matters. Can anyone imagine the tortures that have taken place in places like Bagram, Gitmo and Abu Ghraib having been inflicted against, say, Bosnian Serbs in Brcko or Banja Luka? Highly doubtful indeed. 9/11 happened, of course. And Islam has too often been conflated in the popular imagination with the radical jihadists who would so gleefully kill thousands as they did in lower Manhattan that fateful day. . .I have great respect for Belgravia, but to be direct, I don't agree. Indeed, scattered shots like "anyone with half a brain", "are full of it" and "doing the country a disservice through their intellectual dishonesty" are thin, and unworthy of this important debate. Worst of all, it's a waffle that reads like something that might have come out of the Clinton administration -- or perhaps a Kerry administration.
Few have asserted the "abuses" were as lighthearted -- or lightheaded -- as the above states. Most know there is a horrible war going on; this enemy is no joke. If anything, if you drop by here regularly, you already know that my major concern isn't that the "abuses" were "frat hazing" stuff or frivolous.
On the contrary, far from it. That any "abuse" is unworthy of us should go without saying. But since I must apparently say it, having done so -- again -- let me be clear that my overriding complaint remains that while so much was and is made of "women's underwear", simultaneously so little was and is made of both the utter scale of Saddamist atrocities (relative to the size of the Iraqi population, they would have probably impressed Stalin) and of heads being sliced off non-combatant captives.
I'm sorry if I am not "nuanced", but I do not consider the former "evil" as being on par with the latter two. Are we actually comparing those latter to dogs barking at captives? Or perhaps punching and kicking? Or perhaps standing on someone for some reason that is unclear? Or setting the A/C too low? Or a "well over" 100 degree room? And even if all true, NONE OF THOSE -- even all taken together -- is worse than shooting whole families and burying their remains in Saddamist versions of "Katyn", or Islamists slicing off the heads of still living captives. Where has rational perspective gone!? I mean, Good God!
Nor do I believe the "abuse" is a result of all-encompassing policy, mostly because there is -- as of yet -- no good evidence there is a plan to torture captives. Yes, we are told of the "cover-up". Inevitably. Cover-ups last in the U.S. all of 10 minutes, because few cover-ups are any good. Word always seeps out.
And word of what goes on is there for us to review. The President has to deal with it. So does the Secretary of Defense. There is no "hidden" here. Indeed, all things considered, if what we have been told really has happened and is supposed to shock us, as evidence of systematic, planned torture on a horrific scale, it is hard to believe we come across as particularly menacing to any al Qaeda captive who might be willing to blow himself up in his own cell . . . if he could only lay his hands on some explosives in order to do so.
Until it is proven that the "abuse" is either because of "a few bad apples" or because of policy, the only other possibility would appear to be that any "abuse" has been (and will likely be, again in the future) a result of what often happens in wartime. It is a sad reality that war means killing; and while capture often means survival, it may also mean not getting treated very nicely -- and worse. Such is especially likely to be one's fate if one is an imprisoned, irregular enemy, an enemy from whom the captor wants (and needs) information that might help kill or capture further of your irregular comrades still on the battlefield, and as a result save the lives of the captor's troops and civilians. So, unsurprisingly, sometimes, lines are crossed. (While we're on the subject. For most of history, "irregulars" -- or even regulars -- who were caught in the act of espionage or otherwise taken in action while NOT wearing a recognizable uniform, were often quickly swung from trees, or otherwise killed shortly after capture. So, in that respect, that the U.S. has not thought to do that, is something for which the Guantanamo bunch probably ought to be pretty damn thankful.)
First, Guantanamo, etc. are either our "gulag archipelago" -- which is essentially what is charged by those wailing the loudest about the "abuse" -- or they are not. And they are not, as most sane people do agree. Enough said.
Secondly, bringing in the Bosnian Serbs might be worthwhile for conjecture purposes (those being white, European fascists of more recent times than Nazis), but how the U.S. would have treated numbers of Serb captives in a long war is just that -- pure conjecture, since we did not face that situation. (It is also worth noting that several Americans captured by the Yugoslav army said they were beaten badly in captivity. But that's understandable; it must have been that sense of Yugoslav "racial superiority" at work. However, I will leave further conjecture to the end.)
Most troubling is the "mixture" within the cited post of the Japanese-American/Japanese legal resident domestic U.S. internment and related cultural issues with the treatment of captured enemy combatants. (Actions taken against Italians and Germans, whose treatment was, we are left to assume, not apparently "racially motivated", goes unmentioned as usual.)
Of more usefulness is confining the discussion regarding al Qaeda/Islamist treatment as detained irregular combatants to differing treatment that did or did not occur when it came to captured Japanese combatants v. captured German combatants.
More Germans than Japanese were captured by the U.S., mostly because Japanese often died rather than surrender. But those Japanese who did get captured were often pleased when they were:
. . . all those aboard[Hiryu] when she sank had not perished. On June 18 an American PBY on patrol reported to Midway the sighting of a lifeboat with survivors aboard. Simard promptly dispatched the seaplane tender Ballard to the spot. . .
. . . The group originally numbered thirty-nine, but four died during their long ordeal at sea, and one aboard Ballard. The remainder were flown to Pearl Harbor, thence to various prisoner of war camps on the mainland. None of the prisoners wanted to return to Japan, nor did they wish their government to be informed of their capture, preferring to be recorded as lost with their ship.Americans captured by the Japanese tended not to be quite so lucky:
. . .A few days later, with[the Japanese destroyer] Makigumo headed toward the Aleutians, Commander Isamu Fujita decided the prisoners had outlived their usefulness. Even the promise of the Americans' personal effects -- including the ensign's lighter inscribed with the affectionate little pun, "To my Matchless Husband" -- elicited no volunteer executioners. But late that night, the unfortunate men were taken on deck, blindfolded, weighed down with five-gallon kerosene cans filled with water, and thrown overboard. According to Captain Shigeo Hirayama, then Makigumo's navigation officer, the two Americans accepted their fate quietly, with no sign of fear. . .There is no excuse for mistreatment of enemy captives. However, whatever the nature of a given war naturally is apt to explain a great deal when it comes to "below the radar" treatment of captives/POWs.
Indeed, while our current elevated debate over the "better angels of our nature" rages on, it is so easy to forget that the overwhelming majority of Guantanamo and other Islamist captives appear likely to survive captivity and return home at some point -- and, the way things appear to be headed, probably get themselves a compensation judgement eventually. Such being the case, it would seem that given circumstances and the nature of this enemy, we are actually rather "angelic" already. (Similarly, it is worth recalling that despite the viciousness of the Japanese towards American prisoners, a much larger percentage of Japanese combatant POWs, even if roughly treated on occasion -- as were some Germans and Italians -- survived U.S. captivity, when compared to the percentage of U.S. captives who survived brutal Japanese captivity. More below.)
As in so much else when it comes to U.S. actions in war, too many seem to overlook that in war two tango. What about the enemy's treatment of American captives?
Well, be they civilian or military, if unfortunate enough to be taken captive by Islamists, Americans are quite likely to be summarily murdered. It would be much welcomed if we could manage at least to get to the point of being able to worry about THEIR treatment of AMERICANS in captivity, but the fact is that Americans are usually not allowed to live long enough for us to get to that point.
In the American war against the Germans from 1941-1945, the overwhelming majority of U.S. soldiers captured alive survived captivity. In contrast, in the war against the Japanese an appalling 37% of U.S. POWs are believed to have died in captivity. Why?
One argument as to why is that, against the British and the Americans, the German professional army fought, more or less -- depending on the situation, and especially on whether there were Waffen SS units involved -- under what had been "time-honored" rules of war and prisoner treatment.
But the Germans did not observe such "rules" when it came to captured Soviets. That was mostly because the Nazis believed they were "racially superior" to the Soviets; Hitler had demanded a "war of extermination" against those "racial inferiors". So, while captured British and Americans were for the most part treated reasonably and relatively humanely (but that does not mean they were at a "Holiday Inn", as any survivor of German imprisonment will tell you), captured Soviets were for the most part treated utterly brutally, and died in the millions at the hands of their German captors.
The Soviets returned the favor. Hundreds of thousands of captured German soldiers died behind Soviet wire. However, Soviet hatred of Germans was not overtly "racialist" along Hitlerian lines. Germans were killed primarily because of a visceral, almost pathological (and understandable) Soviet hatred for a German army that had invaded the Soviet motherland with the intent, after the elimination of the educated classes, Jews and others deemed particularly inferior, to reduce the surviving population to helots who would live on (perhaps) only to serve their German masters. A distant second was a Soviet superiority-sense that stemmed from feeling (and from being told) they were "superior" because they were what might be termed the fist of the working class, fighting off German, capitalist/imperialist invaders.
Had the Nazis treated captured American combatants in the appalling manner they treated captured Soviets, would American behavior towards captured Germans have been less "correct" than it was? We can't know.
What we do know is that it was against Japan that the U.S. came closer to its own version of a German-Soviet war. The Japanese had racial superiority attitudes of their own, as well as an iron-willed belief that a soldier who allowed himself to suffer the indignity of capture deserved nothing but contempt; he had ceased to be a man. Also:
. . . In what John Dower calls the "power of the bayonet," the rank and file enlisted man in the Imperial Japanese Army took out their anger over mistreatment by their officers on the Allied prisoners. Beatings were routine; reasons were not given or presumed needed. Thousands of Filipinos and Americans died in captivity in the first few days after surrender because of the death march and the treatment of the guards. . .Remember that the Japanese had first invaded Manchuria in 1931 and launched a full-scale invasion of China in 1937. (In 1937, Hitler was hardly getting started, being just a year removed from sending a few understrength units to remilitarize the Rhineland. Without the benefit of hindsight, in 1937, the Japanese looked a helluva lot worse than Nazi Germany.) Given news footage and knowledge of the Japanese war in China, in addition to how the Japanese later behaved towards captured Americans much as the Germans behaved towards captured Soviets, it is hardly shocking that Americans may have tended to "demonize" the Japanese in "popular culture" more than they did the Germans (especially early in the war).
Yet amazingly, though U.S. captives were routinely brutalized by the Japanese (and word did get out that such was happening), in dealing with captured Japanese, while the U.S. could be rough on occasion (as they are accused of being today with Islamists), the U.S. did NOT fall to the low level the Soviets did in dealing with their captured Germans. The U.S. played reasonably straight with Japanese POWs, even given Japanese atrocities.
A lot like the U.S. does, today, with captured, irregular combatant Islamists. There seems little question that their confinement is not pleasant -- to say the least. But there is also outright killing going on right now in Iraq and in Afghanistan; we all know that in just the month of November, the U.S. may have killed some 2,000 or more of the enemy at Fallujah for the loss of somewhat less than 100 Americans killed. I am not defending guards who may -- may -- stick "lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings". But if that is to be called "torture", what label is to be applied to shooting people by the thousands and tossing their bodies into unmarked graves, and slicing off non-combatant heads and placing the video of the murders on the internet? And, of supreme importance, how will an enemy that engages in such activity be dealt with, and by whom?
To be blunt, thus far we have heard of nothing happening regarding Islamist captives along the lines of the following, which was undertaken by a few members of "the Greatest Generation":
. . . During the campaign seventy-three Italian prisoners were murdered by soldiers in the 45th Division. General Omar Bradley ordered two men to face a general court-martial for premeditated murder. The men's main defence was that they were obeying orders issued by Patton in a speech he made to his soldiers on 27th June. Several soldiers said they were willing to give evidence that Patton had told then to take no prisoners. One officer claimed that Patton had said: "The more prisoners we took, the more we'd have to feed, and not to fool with prisoners." In order to protect Patton from the charge of war crimes, Bradley decided to drop the investigation into the murder of the Italian soldiers. . .Did such discredit the ENTIRE U.S. war effort? All U.S. soldiery of that "generation"? Of course not. Still, imagine also -- as we now think of it -- the "cover-up" insinuation possibilities? Two of the greatest soldiers America has ever produced? In that situation? The mind boggles. . .
Indeed, where was the Secretary of War? (It then being the pre-Secretary of Defense days.) Well, he was trying to win the freakin' war -- much like the current Secretary of Defense is trying to do. And just like that earlier war, we didn't ask for this one either.
It is definitely relevant that Bosnian Serb "militia" (or Yugoslav soldiers, for that matter) did NOT suicidally crash hijacked planes full of non-combatants into buildings in New York and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001. Islamist attackers did. Therefore, based on their well-demonstrated ability to get young pilots to crash their planes into U.S. aircraft carriers and other ships increasingly regularly (especially from mid-1944 on), I feel it is eminently reasonable to state -- now, for my promised conjecture -- that had the Japanese possessed the reach to be able to do so, they might very well have tried to crash planes into the Empire State Building, or the U.S. Capitol, or the White House. . .
. . . And as we had fought (and won) a war against Japanese suicidal fighters, so we must again -- this time against Islamists. And such a war is ALWAYS especially ugly.
On that depressing note, Merry Christmas everyone. ¶ by Robert, Friday, December 24, 2004
