Hersh artikel (uit New Yorker)

[Henk Elegeert]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Hein van Meeteren wrote:
> REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl
>
> THE GRAY ZONE
> by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
> How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.

Even kijken of het mij ook lukt hoor Hein, dat copy/paste.....

Uhmm.....,  yep!
Ik vind het wel imposant, om maar eens een dwarstraat te
noemen.  ;)

Goed, nu maar weer even ernst ..

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040524ta_talk_hertzberg
The New Yorker

"
The Talk of  Town

COMMENT
UNCONVENTIONAL WAR
by Hendrik Hertzberg

Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-17

One passage of the Declaration of Independence which seldom
gets quoted in Fourth of July oratory is the final item on
the long list of George III’s “injuries and usurpations.”
It’s the bit where the delegates to the Continental Congress
accuse the King of Great Britain of endeavoring “to bring on
the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian
Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished
destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Like the
ideologues of 2004, the revolutionaries of 1776 had less
than perfect empathy for the unruly, alien culture upon
which they were forcibly conferring the benefits of
enlightened Christian civilization. (Their plea, however,
was different: Don’t bring ’em on.)

The Declaration’s invocation of the Indians’ alleged “rule
of warfare” suggests that there were other, better such
rules. So there were, arguably, but they took the forms of
widely varying custom, of unwritten codes of gentlemanly
conduct and honor, and of national laws regulating national
armies. The codification of rules of warfare into laws of
war—that is, into formal, written, supposedly binding
international agreements—was a product of the nineteenth
century. It arose from the same can-do spirit of the age as
did the invention of mechanized wars fought by huge
conscript armies. The visionary behind that humanitarian
effort—its Napoleon—was a young Swiss businessman named
Henri Dunant, who, in 1859, witnessed the aftermath of the
Battle of Solferino, fought in northern Italy between the
French and the Austrians. So horrified was Dunant by the
sufferings of the wounded, thousands of whom died of
injuries that could have been treated if there had been
anyone to treat them, that, in short order, he founded what
would become the International Committee of the Red Cross
and convened an international conference to draft a new kind
of universal treaty. The result, in 1864, was the Convention
for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in
Armies in the Field—the first Geneva Convention. By 1867, it
had been ratified by all the great powers of Europe. The
United States did not ratify it until 1882, but in 1863
President Lincoln’s War Department had drawn up its own set
of rules, which anticipated many of the provisions not only
of Dunant’s Convention but also of the revised and extended
versions of 1906 and 1929. The four Geneva Conventions that
are in effect today—covering the treatment of the wounded on
land and at sea, prisoners of war, and civilians in time of
war—were drafted in 1949, in the aftermath of the Second
World War. Some two hundred countries have ratified them,
including all the members of the United Nations.

There is something a little unsettling about the suggestion
that war is just another routine human activity, like
driving or stock trading, that needs to be conducted
according to the rules lest someone get hurt. Baroness
Bertha von Suttner, the 1905 Nobel Peace laureate, once
remarked that improving the laws of war was like regulating
the temperature while boiling someone in oil. Yet the Geneva
Conventions have been surprisingly successful, given that
the activity they regulate is in many ways inherently
lawless. The reason is not just that gentlemen prefer to
slaughter each other in the most ethical way possible. To
the extent that the Conventions have been observed, they
have been observed mainly because it was in the interest,
mutual or individual, of warring entities to observe them.
If you took their soldiers prisoner, they might take yours;
and if you tortured theirs they might torture yours. If you
made a habit of torturing and killing enemy prisoners, then
enemy soldiers and enemy units would be reluctant to
surrender. As long as the other side was still strong enough
to fight, mistreatment of prisoners was, in theory,
deterrable; once the other side was too weak to carry on, it
was pointless.

George W. Bush’s Administration has never had much use for
international agreements. As soon as it took office, it set
about unencumbering itself from those it considered irksome,
such as the Kyoto environmental protocol, the Anti-Ballistic
Missile treaty, and the statute of the International
Criminal Court. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the
Geneva Conventions, among other niceties, were added to its
list of obstacles to be got around. The “war on terror,” we
have been told, incessantly and for the most part correctly,
is not like other wars. The Iraqi Army, as we know from the
stories of Private Jessica Lynch and others, seems to have
treated its American captives without undue cruelty. But the
real enemy, the terrorist enemy of Al Qaeda and its ilk, is
stateless and fanatical, ruthless and undeterrable. It is an
enemy that takes hostages but never takes prisoners, an
enemy that congratulates itself on murdering the helpless,
as the sickening, videotaped executions of Daniel Pearl and,
this week, Nicholas Berg demonstrate all too vividly. In
conventional wars, prisoners seldom have much useful
information to yield up; in this war, information
—“intelligence”—of the kind that terrorists may be presumed
to possess trumps armor. The temptation to torture, to
abuse, to humiliate is strong, and one need not be a sadist
to authorize or overlook it.

In past wars, there were both ethical reasons and practical
reasons for adhering to the Geneva Conventions—soft reasons
and hard reasons. In the campaign against terror, the hard
men of the Bush Pentagon seem to have concluded, there would
be only soft reasons. What they are learning—what one hopes
they are learning—from the global political catastrophe
prompted by the revelations from Abu Ghraib and other
military prisons is that there were hard reasons, too. The
damage—to the unravelling “coalition,” to America’s standing
everywhere in the world, to the chances of a decent outcome
in Iraq and the Middle East, to the goal of eradicating
terrorism rather than nourishing it, and to the morale of
our long-suffering troops in Iraq—is unfathomable.

The grotesqueries at Abu Ghraib seem to have been
exceptional in their stupidity and senselessness. But, as
Pierre Krähenbühl, the director of operations for the
International Committee of the Red Cross, told a news
conference in Geneva recently, the abuse at Abu Ghraib
represented more than isolated acts. “We were dealing here
with a broad pattern, not individual acts,” Krähenbühl said.
“There was a pattern and a system.” And there was an
atmosphere of something like impunity. It emanated from the
top: from a Secretary of Defense who designated “unlawful
combatants” as a category of people who merit no rights;
from a White House counsel who derided the Geneva
Conventions for insufficient “flexibility”; and from a
President who, in his 2003 State of the Union address,
seemed to boast of extrajudicial killings (“Let’s put it
this way,” he said of certain suspected terrorists. “They
are no longer a problem”). It remains to be seen if anyone
other than a few enlisted men and women will be held
accountable in any serious way. “This was not just a failure
of leadership at the local command level,” the Army Times,
the weekly trade journal of the uniformed military,
concluded last week in an unprecedentedly angry editorial.
“This was a failure that ran straight to the top.
Accountability here is essential—even if that means
relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.” For that
kind of accountability, the best—perhaps the only—chance
will come on November 2nd.
"

Overigens, is het niet opmerkelijk dat Nicholas Berg (een
Amerikaan die maar niet wilde luisteren) niet werden geruild
tegen de gevangen in Abu Ghraib, en dat na de dood van Berg
wel gevangen werden vrijgelaten!!!

Men tevens bovenop een terrorist zat en deze liet moorden ,
maar tevens ook ontsnappen en dat ondanks het feit dat men
zegt achter de terroristen aan te zitten.

Henk Elegeert

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