The US military's problem with the truth.
The Washington Post has been doing a pretty amazing job covering the ongoing document dumps and legal developments involving the US military's and the CIA's use of torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yesterday, they published a really gutwreching piece on the developments that led up to Iraqi Major General Mowhoush's death inside a sleeping bag wrapped in electrical wire at Qaim holding facility in Iraq, back in November, 2003.
Aside from the story's strong narrative suggestion that humiliating and later torturing Mowhoush actually made him clam up rather than break down, the really awful part of the article is this:
Hours after Mowhoush's death in U.S. custody on Nov. 26, 2003, military officials issued a news release stating that the prisoner had died of natural causes after complaining of feeling sick. Army psychological-operations officers quickly distributed leaflets designed to convince locals that the general had cooperated and outed key insurgents [which was also entirely false].
The U.S. military initially told reporters that Mowhoush had been captured during a raid. In reality, he had walked into the Forward Operating Base "Tiger" in Qaim on Nov. 10, 2003, hoping to speak with U.S. commanders to secure the release of his sons, who had been arrested in raids 11 days earlier.
Two paragraphs and three lies. Sure, a "keep the locals from rioting" argument can be made for the initial, probably panicked, press release. But why make the lie bigger to include false information about what Mowhoush had disclosed to interrogaters? And why lie about how he was captured in the first place? If you weren't going to cop to having killed him, why try to make his capture sound more heroic?
This isn't just immoral lying. It's bad lying. It's the sort of lying that eventually gets found out, making all the other lies worse. And the CIA's attempts to keep the whole thing quiet to avoid disclosing the existence of their "Scorpian unit", whose members, including some indigenous Iraqis, carried out some of the fatal torture, is also pretty unpleasant, given what we also know about the CIA's history in carrying out clandestine extraordinary renditions.
And it's not like this was some isolated thing. The culture of lying is as strong as ever. CNN reported last week, and TNR repeated in its Notebook this week, in the midst of a bigger complaint about bullshit from the Department of Defense, that:
After a car bomb planted near a Baghdad police station killed dozens of Iraqis on Sunday, the military circulated a gung-ho quote attributed to an anonymous Iraqi damning the attackers: "The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the ISF, and all of Iraq. They are enemies of humanity, without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today, and I will now take the fight to the terrorists." Curious that an Iraqi would sound so much like President Bush, or that he would use an English military acronym like ISF (as in "Iraqi security forces"). As it turns out, there's a simple explanation: He probably doesn't exist. On July 13, after another deadly bombing, the military circulated the exact same quote, only with "the children" substituted for "the ISF." A spokesman for the Third Infantry Division blamed an "administrative error"--presumably the error of making stuff up.
How do you honestly evaluate an institution whose leadership continues to just make shit up, and to do it in such a completely incompetent, grandstandiing way? Morality aside, the US military, no matter how far it's come in the the past 50 years, just isn't competent enough to be torturing anybody, or to be running any more wars and occupations than are absolutely necessary (like, say, against governments who are protecting leaders of organizations who recently flew planes into buildings in your biggest city). If this isn't a case against wars of choice, what is?
Aside from the story's strong narrative suggestion that humiliating and later torturing Mowhoush actually made him clam up rather than break down, the really awful part of the article is this:
Hours after Mowhoush's death in U.S. custody on Nov. 26, 2003, military officials issued a news release stating that the prisoner had died of natural causes after complaining of feeling sick. Army psychological-operations officers quickly distributed leaflets designed to convince locals that the general had cooperated and outed key insurgents [which was also entirely false].
The U.S. military initially told reporters that Mowhoush had been captured during a raid. In reality, he had walked into the Forward Operating Base "Tiger" in Qaim on Nov. 10, 2003, hoping to speak with U.S. commanders to secure the release of his sons, who had been arrested in raids 11 days earlier.
Two paragraphs and three lies. Sure, a "keep the locals from rioting" argument can be made for the initial, probably panicked, press release. But why make the lie bigger to include false information about what Mowhoush had disclosed to interrogaters? And why lie about how he was captured in the first place? If you weren't going to cop to having killed him, why try to make his capture sound more heroic?
This isn't just immoral lying. It's bad lying. It's the sort of lying that eventually gets found out, making all the other lies worse. And the CIA's attempts to keep the whole thing quiet to avoid disclosing the existence of their "Scorpian unit", whose members, including some indigenous Iraqis, carried out some of the fatal torture, is also pretty unpleasant, given what we also know about the CIA's history in carrying out clandestine extraordinary renditions.
And it's not like this was some isolated thing. The culture of lying is as strong as ever. CNN reported last week, and TNR repeated in its Notebook this week, in the midst of a bigger complaint about bullshit from the Department of Defense, that:
After a car bomb planted near a Baghdad police station killed dozens of Iraqis on Sunday, the military circulated a gung-ho quote attributed to an anonymous Iraqi damning the attackers: "The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the ISF, and all of Iraq. They are enemies of humanity, without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today, and I will now take the fight to the terrorists." Curious that an Iraqi would sound so much like President Bush, or that he would use an English military acronym like ISF (as in "Iraqi security forces"). As it turns out, there's a simple explanation: He probably doesn't exist. On July 13, after another deadly bombing, the military circulated the exact same quote, only with "the children" substituted for "the ISF." A spokesman for the Third Infantry Division blamed an "administrative error"--presumably the error of making stuff up.
How do you honestly evaluate an institution whose leadership continues to just make shit up, and to do it in such a completely incompetent, grandstandiing way? Morality aside, the US military, no matter how far it's come in the the past 50 years, just isn't competent enough to be torturing anybody, or to be running any more wars and occupations than are absolutely necessary (like, say, against governments who are protecting leaders of organizations who recently flew planes into buildings in your biggest city). If this isn't a case against wars of choice, what is?
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