NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana, 29 May 2004 — American will not release any more photos or videos of US military abuses at Abu Ghraib. They are too horrendous, too demoralizing, and paint too truthful a portrait of moral corruption. The Pentagon worries that publicly releasing them could place Americans in danger from enraged Muslims. US senators and congressmen viewing new materials have reportedly emerged shaken and ashen-faced.
“What you see in these pictures,” declared US Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director for coalition operations in iraq, “may reflect the acts of individuals, but by God, it does not reflect my army.”
Gen. Kimmitt may well be right.
Whose army did this, then?
Whose army is responsible for the tortures, degradations, deaths, and perhaps even murders at Abu Ghraib?
Someone knows, and someone’s not talking.
We hear from lowly US prison guards who gleefully stacked and posed naked prisoners, and then posed themselves at the top of fleshy pyramids for a snap or two for the folks back home. They weep and wail that they were just following the orders of their superiors.
Superiors? Of whose army?
We hear also from mighty US generals in Iraq, who were recently questioned by the US Senate Armed Services Committee. None of these generals said they knew anything, or did anything wrong. They were just following some “Rules of Interrogation.”
“Rules of Interrogation?” Of whose army? Whose army did this?
Nobody’s saying directly, but there are hints the US Army, the mightiest on earth, may have been led astray. Or led, anyway. But by whom?
The US generals’ Senate testimony indicated that the “Rules of Interrogation” for Abu Ghraib were drafted by US Army “Capt. Woods,” identified only as an “obscure” female military intelligence officer about whom nothing is said, and little is known.
“Capt. Woods” was, curiously, not at the Senate hearing, despite the not inconsiderable powers of subpoena the US Senate possesses. So Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the highest commanding officer then in Iraq, conveniently referred senators’ questions about interrogation rules to her.
To her empty chair.
Where is she?
And how did she come to invent a set of interrogation rules that so appalled the US Congress that the US Department of Defense rescinded them immediately?
Instead of hearing from Capt. Woods, US Army Col. Marc Warren, a military lawyer, told the Senate that the methods Woods derived for “interrogation,” if used in certain combinations, “may very well... violate the Geneva Conventions” against torture.
Where did Capt. Woods get her ideas? Col. Warren said only that Woods had modeled her list of interrogation “techniques” after researching methods “used by interrogators in other places.”
Other places?
Like where?
Like Israel?
Surely the US Senate wants to know, and it’s impossible to believe that the Pentagon doesn’t know. So why didn’t anybody ask?
Is it possible the answer might be Israel?
It is. Last November, the Los Angeles Times reported intricate and increasing contacts between the US and Israeli armed forces. According to “private security consultant” Lenny Ben-David, former Israeli deputy chief of mission at Israel’s Washington, D.C. Embassy, the US military has undergone training in Israel for more than a decade. “The American military has been very interested in our lessons,” an Israeli official reportedly acknowledged, referring to the Israeli Army’s increasingly ruthless and violent tactics against Palestinians, which some Shin Bet retired leaders and Chief of Staff Moshe Yallon have criticized as unduly harsh and ultimately destructive to Israel’s national security.
US Brig. Gen. Michael Vane, a military planner, admitted in July, 2003: “We recently traveled to Israel to glean lessons” from Israel’s “counterterrorism operations in urban areas.” Like how to tear down the family home. Hundreds and thousands of homes.
What emerges is Israel’s policy aim to make the US not just sympathetic and supportive, but to cement an identification so strong that Americans are now willing to send their military — their sons and daughters — halfway around the world to Iraq, to die there in a cause not to defeat the Taleban or any of the original Al-Qaeda operatives, but to protect Israel “against,” as the erstwhile neoconservatives put it, “all enemies.”
So whose army committed the Abu Ghraib abuses? It’s getting hard to tell.
“After years of working closely together at all levels, the Israeli and US militaries in some respects think increasingly alike,” said Shoshana Bryen, director of “Special Projects” at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a group the Los Angeles Times reported as “interested in links between US and Israeli defense tactics and policy.”
Stephen Cambone, US undersecretary of defense for intelligence and a former Jerusalem-based lawyer, was more circumspect: “Those who have to deal with like problems tend to share information.”
Bryen agrees. “After 9/11, they (Israel and the US) discovered they had more things to talk about.”
Really?
Like how to fight a war against Arabs based in Afghanistan?
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former military prosecutor, observed that the “prisoner abuse and mistreatment... certainly involved more than six or seven military police. It seems to have been planned.”
Planned? By whom?
The Senate must talk to Capt. Woods.
Find her, seat her in that empty chair, and get some answers. After all, whose army does she work for?
— Sarah Whalen is an expert in Islamic law and taught law at Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans, Louisiana.
