I’ve been thinking a lot about the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, and its implications for the U.S. and the rest of the world. Here’s my short list of implications:
- Irreparable damage to our “hearts and minds” campaign
- Proves that if you tell the army they can do anything they want, they won’t disappoint you
- This story will get bigger the further up the chain of command it can be traced, and may result in either Rumsfeld or Bush being replaced
Then I started thinking about how this whole stiuation came about. Sy Hersh explains that a secret Pentagon program to implement new interrogation methods in violation of the Geneva Convention was exported from Guantanamo to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Supreme Court is about to review the constitutionality of the Guantanmo project, where people are being held without charges and apparently being interrogated in violation of the Geneva Convention. I recently came across a Newsweek article which details the legal squabbles within the white House about the treatment of prisoners and the awareness that our maltreatment of prisoners violates the U.S. War Crimes Act, which forbids U.S. citizens from committing “grave breaches” of the Geneva Convention. Alberto Gonzales (whom you may recognize from a previous post) warned the White House in January 2002 that they ought to be careful not to be prosecuted under this law, which was passed in 1996.
I recall there was a day in my American politics class where we spent the lecture talking about Nixon and the Supreme Court. It turns out that Nixon is a very important figure in the definition of presidential power, by dint of having broken the law many times and having the Supreme Court declare his actions unconstitutional. It seems to me that Bush has done as many illegal things, but he rarely gets tested by the Supreme Court.
Anyway, the implications of the White House legal strategy in terms of the Geneva Convention are tremendously dangerous. The U. S. used to be a country which nominally observed the treaty (which really means that if we wanted to, say, torture some prisoners to extract information, we would hand you over to another state’s secret police to keep our hands ‘clean’). Now, we can just declare anyone we want an “enemy combatant,” even if they’re a U.S. citizen, and then they are magically unprotected by Geneva.
As bad as this sounds, it does make a certain perverted sense. I have always maintained that our military is unprepared for future conflicts because they are locked into last century’s mode of thinking, i.e., Westphalian state-to-state combat. Terrorist groups (at any rate, the ones we’re currently worried about) are not state armies, and we are at a loss when it comes to understanding how to fight them. The Geneva convention is a vestigial remainder from the state-to-state conflict system.
The terrorists aren’t bound by any kind of international treaties. So it kind of makes sense when we say that Al-Qaeda soldiers are “unlawful combatants” (forgetting for the part about we don’t give a flying fuck about international laws ourselves… useful hypocrisy) and therefore unprotected by Geneva, if we ignore the fact that almost all of the detainees at Guantanmo are citizens of signatory countries (whoops, thought you could have it both ways, didn’t you!).
In today’s globalizing world, states and non-state entities (corporations, terrorist groups, liberation movements) are rapidly gaining more equal footing with state actors. But corporations are not specifically bound to the Geneva convention, unless you apply the things like the U.S. War Crimes Act. Only states can be signatories to treaties of international law; the new emerging order provides states with all sorts of “subcontracting” options when it comes to getting around those laws.
Speaking of which, I found an old post in my archives which I never made public (I probably just forgot). Here it is:
April 7th – Recently, several mercenaries were killed as part of an attack on “contractors” in Iraq, as the corporate media refer to them. Tom Tomorrow has some links to background about the private army industry. Basically, when the Pentagon decides that a certain objective would have trouble standing up before public review, they turn to an independent military contractor who sends in some not-quite-soldiers. When those troops die, they aren’t officially ours, so there are fewer inquiries. Of course, occasionally you’ll get scandals like DynCorp, where private soldiers were discovered to be running an underage white slavery prostitution ring in Bosnia, but since they aren’t U.S. troops, they can’t get court martialled. They just fire you and send you on the next plane home.The private army industry is experiencing a boom right now due to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. I think this is a sign of the new future political system; territories held by private corporations, with outsourced political muscle. No matter who gets to lead a post-U.S. Iraq, the oil wells will likely remain western property, existing in a semi-autonomous martial state; sort of like small fiefdoms, actually. Listen, there are no western interests in any part of Iraq that doesn’t have oil in it, they’d prefer the Shiites and Sunnis and Kurds have it and fight it out if they please.
Is Iraq poised to become a neo-feudal wasteland? Stay tuned.
So, getting back to the prison abuse scandal:
Doesn’t look good for the Geneva convention, does it? And for some people, merely the fact that we are engaged with an enemy who clearly does not respect Geneva makes it palatable for us to ignore it, too.
Here’s the problem–if we sink to their level, we really have nothing to fight for in terms of our “exporting freedom” rhetoric. There’s a pretty clear line in the world between nations that do respect Geneva and those who do not. (For me, it’s the line between whether or not I would like to live there.) Even as the state system which supports Geneva withers away, the principles behind it do not.
What I’m saying, in the face of more and more actors who do not feel bound to Geneva, our decision to join them is reprehensible and erases the gains we had made in international law. Now, laws like the War Crimes Act are a good step towards restoring Geneva, even to prisoners who do not have a country to complain when they get tortured. Why not revoke contracts with military subcontractors who violate the War Crimes Act, etc?
If there is any substance to the assertion that we are a force for good, we have to lead by example. I’m not saying this as part of some moral appeal; this is a practical matter. We’re the most powerful country in the world, and play a huge part in the definition of international law. If we keep defining down war, we will lose human rights not only for U.S. citizens and detainees, but for every human being around the world.
