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| Iraq-Jordan |
| U.S. Officer Tells of Order to Lie in Abuse Probe |
| 2005-01-08 |
| From Reuters (posted on Khalifah) A senior U.S. Army officer ordered soldiers to lie to investigators probing an incident in which two Iraqi civilians were pushed from a bridge and one may have drowned in the Tigris River, an army major testified on Thursday. At the first of two military trials at Fort Hood this week over alleged abuse of Iraqis by U.S. occupation forces, Maj. Robert Gwinner said Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman had ordered soldiers to lie about the bridge incident to the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, or CID. "They (senior officers) did not want CID to know that the Iraqis had gone into the water," Gwinner said. He was testifying in the court-martial of Army Sgt. 1st Class Tracy Perkins, who faces more than 25 years in military prison on charges of involuntary manslaughter, aggravated assault and obstruction of justice. ..... Perkins is accused of killing Zaidoun Hassoun, 19, by having subordinates force him off a ledge about 10 feet to 12 feet above the Tigris at Samarra, Iraq. Marwan Fadil, who was forced off the bridge along with his cousin Hassoun, testified on Wednesday that U.S. soldiers tossed the two at gunpoint into the water and laughed as his relative drowned, after the two had begged for mercy. However, Gwinner said intelligence information had shown that Hassoun survived, buttressing earlier testimony by soldiers called as defense witnesses, who said they saw two Iraqis safely ashore on the nearby riverbank. A pathologist had also testified that a body recovered 12 days later by Hassoun's family and shown in a videotape could not have been Hassoun. Gwinner, the battalion commander of the troops involved, was testifying under immunity for what he said in court. He has been disciplined for relaying the order he said came from Sassaman. The two Iraqis had been detained shortly before an 11 p.m. curfew on Jan. 3, 2004. Punishing curfew violators by pushing them into water was probably within troops' discretion, Gwinner said. "It was within the scope of nonlethal force, but not one that we recommend, or we will use again." Closing arguments in the case were expected later on Thursday. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #32 Re #31 (lex): Most do not have "jobs to do" or families to support." What if their job is to kill or otherwise hinder the infidel enemy? You seem to be assuming that everybody who is captured is a professional terrorist. A group of captives is a mixed bag. Some will be fanatic, professional terrorists. Some will be innocent by-standards. Some will be inbetween. The fanatic, professional terrorists are probably not going to tell you the truth, no matter what you do. They won't tell you if you torture them, and they certainly won't tell you if subject them to moderate physical duress. It's a waste of time and effort, and you engage him in a contest of wills that prevents his eventual conversion. US military personnel have been captured and tortured. An entire ship crew was captured by North Korea and was tortured for years. Many US pilots have been tortured for years. How many of them provided useful tactical intelligence to the interrogators who captured them. As far as I know, none of them at all provided such information. What makes you think that if we capture a fanatic, professional terrorist, then we will be able to torture him into quickly revealing to us where all the bombs are hidden? The people who talk when they are tortured are mostly the innocent by-standers and the casual supporters. They know nothing at all or they know little. Much of what they tell you under torture will not be true. . |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2005-01-09 12:02:43 AM |
| #31 In these circumstances, many people talk truthfully rather quickly. They have families to support, jobs to do, lives to live, and they don't want to stay in confinement indefinitely This doesn't square with what the interrogators have reported (see Heather MacDonald's article in the Manhattan Institute's City Paper). Most do not have "jobs to do" or families to support." What if their job is to kill or otherwise hinder the infidel enemy? |
| Posted by: lex 2005-01-08 11:41:51 PM |
| #30 Re #25 (lex) Which methods are better? If we capture proper soldiers, then we treat them according to the Geneva Conventions. We respect their right to provide only their name, rank and serial number, and we use only persuasion to try to obtain other information. In The War on Terrorism and in the War in Iraq, we capture many people who are not proper soldiers. They are not covered by the same rules of the Geneva Conventions. So, how should we treat them? First of all, I think we can confine them indefinitely, as long as the war lasts, and we decide how long it lasts. If we think someone might be a terrorist, we can simply confine him for months and years without much further ado. We establish only a minimal procedure to review his status periodically. If he doesn't talk, then he doesn't talk. If he does talk and tells a story we don't believe, then we simply continue to confine him. We keep talking with him. We ask him what he thinks about politics, about religion, about morality, about current events. We ask him whether he thinks Al-Qaeda eventually will defeat the USA, whether the Iraqi resistance will expel the Coalition, whether the Palestinians will defeat Israel, whether the world's Moslems will establish a new Khalifah. We talk for a while about what he wants to talk about and then for a while about what we want to talk about. We have lots of time -- days, weeks, months and years -- to talk. When we're not talking, he can read magazines and books we give him, and then we can discuss what he's read. In these circumstances, many people talk truthfully rather quickly. They have families to support, jobs to do, lives to live, and they don't want to stay in confinement indefinitely. They'll make a deal, they'll compromise, they'll rat on people, they'll even change sides openly. You'll get a lot of information from a lot of people. Focus your time and effort on collecting information from those people and on recruiting them to collaborate with you in the future. Don't waste a lot of time and effort on captives who refuse to talk. . |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2005-01-08 11:16:47 PM |
| #29 Truth is, I love this topic not for its merits, but because it's nice and gray and I can pontificate my ass off and sound authoritative. |
| Posted by: Catfish 2005-01-08 10:25:21 PM |
| #28 Re #20 (Zhang Fei): in Mike's view, Stalin used torture to find out the truth. .... used it to obtain politically-convenient confessions so he could execute potential political rivals .... It's not either/or. In a few cases, when there was to be a show trial, torture was an essential method for ensuring that prominent Communists admitted publicly that they indeed had committed treason and planned terrorist attacks. Beyond that motivation, though, torture was used in hundreds of thousands of cases that individually were concealed from the public. During the two years, 1937-1938, when torture was permitted and authorized explicitly and used most systematically, about 680,000 Soviet citizens were arrested, investigated, convicted and executed. In 1939 the Soviet government publicly and actually retracted the authorization to torture people. The reason for this change was that the use of torture had caused too many people to be arrested, convicted and executed mistakenly -- a problem that the Soviet government itself recognized from the experience. Torture produced too much information that was far too false. . |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2005-01-08 10:23:54 PM |
| #27 Hear him out. The Brits' experience in Ulster has been that torture is counterproductive. Perhaps the jihadists are made of sterner stuff-- I doubt it, but then again I'm biased ;-) -- but let's learn from experience here. Would also like to learn more about the French experience in Algeria. Whatever works, works. I'm a pragmatist on this. |
| Posted by: lex 2005-01-08 10:08:56 PM |
| #26 thx Mike - you don't mind if we dismiss anything you say outta hand, as usual, considering the source and motivations..... |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-01-08 10:05:40 PM |
| #25 Which methods are better? |
| Posted by: lex 2005-01-08 10:02:50 PM |
| #24 #22 (lex): The torture story is the MSM's last best hope for diverting attention away from ... the US military has made possible .... the first free elections in the arab world I've always supported the USA's military intervention in Iraq, and I've written so several times in Rantburg. It was the main reason I voted for Bush in the last presidential election. In my opinion, the US forces have caused themselves more problems than they have solved by trying to physically force captives to talk. I think it's foolishness. I think it's based on false promises of success. I think it's counter-productive. I think other methods are better. I think it gets out of control and causes excesses and scandals and embarrassments. . |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2005-01-08 9:58:32 PM |
| #23 Re #19 (Zhang Fei): torture doesn't work as well as actually killing them. I understand your thought here to be that it would be just as easy -- even easier -- for the corrupt authorities to silence an inconvenient witness as it would be to kill him. Sure. But that doesn't disprove my point. History is full of situations when corrupt authorities handled such situations by arresting and torturing witnesses instead of killing them. The Mafia doesn't always kill inconvenient witnesses. Sometimes the Mafia merely threatens or beats them a little, and that suffices. . |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2005-01-08 9:48:18 PM |
| #22 The torture story is the MSM's last best hope for diverting attention away from the fact that the US military has made possible an extraordinary event that will occur in three weeks' time: the first free elections in the arab world in the last three decades. |
| Posted by: lex 2005-01-08 9:47:05 PM |
| #21 Re #19 (Zhang Fei) Exactly how was torture applied to cover up this situation? I should have expressed my thought better. I did not mean to suggest that torture was used in this particular situation. My thought was that, in general, torture is justified for certain purposes (preventing terrorist attacks) but eventually might be misused for other purposes (silencing inconvenient witnesses to crimes committed by people in authority). I related my thought to this particular case only because here there was obviously (in my opinion) an attempt by the US Army unit to cover up the incident. The young Iraqi man had witnessed an incident when some US soldiers had pushed his cousin into a river and his cousin had drowned. The witness began to tell others what he had seen. When the authorities are using torture to cause people to make statements they don't want to make, then the authorities who might be exposed by the witness can easily arrest the witness and subject him to torture on false pretexts. The authorities can force the witness to change his statement, to deny that he saw what he saw. Also, when a witness knows that the authorities are using torture, he will be inhibited from reporting what he saw to the authorities. I intended to speak in generalities. I did not intend to say that anybody was tortured in this particular case. . |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2005-01-08 9:41:13 PM |
| #20 Mike Sylwester is on some kind of torture-is-the-root-of-all-evil kick. In his narrative, Stalin's gulags and mass killings wouldn't have occurred without torture. Yup - in Mike's view, Stalin used torture to find out the truth. Nah - Stalin couldn't possibly have used it to obtain politically-convenient confessions so he could execute potential political rivals while retaining an image of communist rectitude. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-01-08 9:32:15 PM |
| #19 MS: The Rantburgers here who think that torture is a good idea ought to ponder the thought that torture is used not only to collect intelligence, it's also eventually used to help cover up situations like this. Exactly how was torture applied to cover up this situation? For intimidation, not to mention silencing people, torture doesn't work as well as actually killing them. Maybe we should order our troops to stop killing terrorists - they might be killing them to cover up situations like this one. Heck, maybe we should forbid our cops to kill people who are shooting at them - maybe they are going after them to silence them. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-01-08 9:19:38 PM |
| #18 due to attention-span issues and bitching by others (although actionable) - I have as well.... right TW? |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-01-08 9:14:38 PM |
| #17 I've stopped paying attention to the southern-european-whose-name-must-not-be-mentioned too. |
| Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2005-01-08 9:12:54 PM |
| #16 Re #13 (Ptah): ... in that thread and this one ... we agreed to a certain amount of duress to be applied against a terrorist reasonably suspected to know of a plot that would kill innocent human beings Who is "we"? Who was talking about "a certain amount of duress"? In yesterday's posting nobody used the word "duress". The word in the postings and in the comments was "torture". You yourself used the word "torture" in your one comment (I understand you were kidding). Where is yesterday's or today's thread is this "agreement" by "we" about "duress" that "was repeatedly said"? It is a practice among leftists of your ilk that you deem yourselves capable of making moral judgments based on the implications of what other people say. Why do you call me a leftist? I voted for Ronald Reagan, for George Bush I, and for George Bush II. True, I didn't vote for Pat Buchanan. Does that make me a leftist, in your book? Please tell me what I have ever written in Rantburg would cause you to call me a leftist? you have clearly made your choice: you would rather risk that innocents DIE than terrorists be discomforted Many choices in life are complex. For example, the policy that the USA establishes for treating captives in Iraq is complex. It's not simply a choice between innocents dying and terrorists being discomforted. There are many other considerations, some of which I pointed out in yesterday's and today's threads. any single motivation out of the only reasonable possible set would make you the kind of person I do not want near me or my family .... Pretentious pissant. Dont' get so upset about other people expressing other opinions. If you don't want to discuss public issues civilly with me on this forum, then so be it. There are several people in this forum who are incorrigibly incivil, and I ignore them completely. I can ignore you too, if that's your preference. Keep it up, and this will be our last exchange. . |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2005-01-08 9:06:31 PM |
| #15 Well said, Ptah. |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2005-01-08 7:01:54 PM |
| #14 thx Ptah, yours was much more clear than mine, but agreed wholeheartedly - good post |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-01-08 6:58:08 PM |
| #13 Glad you brought back up the terrorism thread yourself, MS, so now I can justifiably say this: It was very clear, in that thread and this one, that we agreed to a certain amount of duress to be applied against a terrorist reasonably suspected to know of a plot that would kill innocent human beings, but which your oh-so-sensitive intellect declares to be torture. This was repeatedly said, so either you deliberately do not read posts that would disturb your fragile ego, or read them and deliberately ignored what they said to pursue a straw man argument in hopes of deceiving casual readers of this blog. It is a practice among leftists of your ilk that you deem yourselves capable of making moral judgments based on the implications of what other people say. Unless you wish to admit that you are a hypcrite, you must grant that we have the same right as well. By ignoring the qualifications people have made about interrogative duress, it logically follows that, if given the choice between hard interrogation of a terrorist that would leave no permanent scars, and a reasonable chance of innocents being REALLY injured or ACTUALLY dying in an attack that would otherwise have been thwarted, that you have clearly made your choice: you would rather risk that innocents DIE than terrorists be discomforted. It would seem to me that those bent on mischief (to put it mildly) would certainly want this sort of thinking to be in force, want it to be believed, and applaud people, such as yourself, who advocate it. I don't know what your REAL motivations are for preferring kid-glove treatment of terrorists over innocent lives, but any bawling from you in the future about innocents dying won't be taken seriously. In fact, I really don't need to TRY to find out that real motive, since any single motivation out of the only reasonable possible set would make you the kind of person I do not want near me or my family. It'd make you the kind of person I'd take pleasure in NOT lifting my finger to help in any way. In fact, it'd make you the kind of person that great civilizations are better off without, and whose greatness is enhanced by identifying, morally neutering, and scorning such. Pretentious pissant. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2005-01-08 6:46:36 PM |
| #12 Frankly Mike, although I hope we don't descend to their level, we are perfectly correct to adopt less-civil responses to those who would behead innocents, kill children, use human shields, and torture/kill our allies. If it makes you squeamish, make it known and suffer the first lashes when restraints imposed by your ilk result in US dead and Iraqi civilian casualties. You won't do that, tho', will you? It's a "we should be above that" moral superiority crusade that ends up killing Americans. Traitorous scum would do the same....let them be your be-mates. I think the anti-Gonzalez crowd exposed themselves, just as often as you have, Mikey. |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-01-08 5:12:46 PM |
| #11 Slate also had a detailed article by Wendell Steavenson. It's pretty obvious that the Army unit tried to cover the incident up, but failed. Now there's an attempt to peddle this story that the guy did not drown, at attempt that will fail too. It's a sad situation. The Rantburgers here who think that torture is a good idea ought to ponder the thought that torture is used not only to collect intelligence, it's also eventually used to help cover up situations like this. Inconvenient witnesses are arrested, questioned, tortured, discredited, silenced. People who have "seen too much" are afraid to report what they saw to authorities who torture people. Such are some of the consequences of using torture. Back in February in a comment about this incident I expressed my impression that the the American military leadership in that area lacks the integrity to do what they ought to do to punish the culprits. I am satisified that this current trial has proved that I was wrong about that. . |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2005-01-08 4:48:06 PM |
| #10 HealingIraq provides a lot of details about the incident on this webpage. |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2005-01-08 4:31:27 PM |
| #9 That would be healingiraq.com,guy is pretty straight-up. |
| Posted by: raptor 2005-01-08 2:11:07 PM |
| #8 You won't understand it correctly if your source is Al-Reuters. |
| Posted by: lex 2005-01-08 9:27:11 AM |
| #7 Wait a minute. If I'm reading this article correctly, the soldiers did push the two Iraqis off the bridge, but nobody drowned. This behaviour was within allowable bounds for use of non-lethal force at the time. The dead body was someone else. The case is about the soldiers having been ordered to lie about the incident to CID investigators? I remember reading about this some time ago, I think on the Instapundit site. One of the Iraqi bloggers was related to the "surviving" cousin, and he appealed to the blogging world to help resolve the family's complaint against the US military. Am I understanding this correctly? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-01-08 9:09:34 AM |
| #6 You know I saw the headline and I thought: Mike Sylwester. Mike, you never disappoint: Rather you don't disappoint because I can always trust you to be Mike Sylwester. And that is disappointing... |
| Posted by: badanov 2005-01-08 8:22:49 AM |
| #5 Bottom feeder? |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-01-08 7:46:34 AM |
| #4 Fatwa Fish? |
| Posted by: Sock Puppet of Doom 2005-01-08 6:51:07 AM |
| #3 Don't ask, don't tell. |
| Posted by: gromgorru 2005-01-08 5:23:13 AM |
| #2 Key passage: However, Gwinner said intelligence information had shown that Hassoun survived, buttressing earlier testimony by soldiers called as defense witnesses, who said they saw two Iraqis safely ashore on the nearby riverbank. A pathologist had also testified that a body recovered 12 days later by Hassoun’s family and shown in a videotape could not have been Hassoun. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-01-08 2:14:37 AM |
| #1 Mike, I dub thee Catfish. |
| Posted by: .com 2005-01-08 1:35:13 AM |