Photo by publik15
President Obama is seeking to block the release of photos of U.S. soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On the eve of his big speech in Cairo – capital of a vibrant Arab democracy where the government never tortures – President Obama is worried that more U.S. detainee torture photos will cause an uproar in the Arab world.
Although Mr. Obama is right to worry about an uproar, he is dead wrong about releasing the photos.
Here’s Why
When the U.S. government tries to cover things up, horrible things happen. Just look at the Secret War in Laos or the illicit bombing of Cambodia that set the stage for the Khmer Rouge genocide.
Granted, the photos Mr. Obama doesn’t want us to see do not represent normal behavior by the U.S. military. But the truth is that war is messy, and no government should be able to get away with covering up the ugliness.
Sanitized Warfare?
Moreover, even “good” U.S. military action in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan is often counter-productive and morally disturbing.
There is something cowardly, sanitized and wrong about techie soldiers in Nevada firing missiles from Predator drones at groups of “enemy combatants” in rural Afghanistan.
Likewise, the American practice of ambushing ethnic minority Afghan fighters who oppose the corrupt and flaccid government of Harmid Karzai is deeply misguided and disturbing.
Finally, the fact that Obama is trying to keep the photos secret raises suspicions about how bad they must be. I mean, are we talking a little nudity, some mild water-boarding or something worse than Abu Ghraib?
Pulling A Cheney
Please don’t pull a Cheney and try to hide the ugly bits, Mr. President. And think long and hard about how much money and blood you want to spend in The Graveyard of Empires.
Read more: Obama Tries To Block Release Of Detainee Photos
Feature Photo: Takomabibelot
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17 Comments... join the discussion!
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There’s a great discussion happening on this issue at the Times – seems about 50 / 50 in terms of who supports / disagrees with the decision.
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Um… Stop me if I’m wrong on this one… But isn’t Egypt one of the recipients of “rendition” detainees, shipped there to be tortured?
As far as the photos go, along with the memos, etc, I’ve watched with concern as Obama has seemed to hesitate on giving these crimes full exposure and due process. I’m hoping — as some media types have speculated — that he is biding his time and playing his hand carefully, trying not to start a full-on partisan war while he’s also trying to handle the recession, but still planning to go after these a**holes when it comes down to it. Think about it: Cheney is basically running around the talk show circuit, defending torture and admitting his role in it. If/when prosecution time rolls around, he can’t exactly plead innocent. (At least, this is my hopeful thought!)
Worse than Abu Ghraib? More of the same, more likely. Those weren’t rogue elements acting out — all these people were following set instructions, as outlined in the memos. Chances are the new photos are near-identical to what we saw in Abu Ghraib (can you really get worse than people tortured to death on camera?), only this time they can’t be written off as the work of a few bad apples.
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Thanks for the comment, Eva.
Yes, Egypt was one of the CIA’s black sites, and torture and repression are standard practice under the dictatorship of Egyptian President-For-Life Hosni Mubarak.
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Ok, so I take it I missed some sarcasm in your opening lines, then?
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Yeah – I get sarcastic when I’m angry.
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From a journalistic perspective, I’m not sure I’m going to bemoan Obama for sitting on this one. Sure, the pictures might be a big deal–to journalists. Particularly, lazy journalists (like me) who work from a quiet office and only have public information at my disposal. This is probably just a few idiot soldiers violating the myriad of rules put in place for detainee treatment (and should be thoroughly punished–by military law, not the New York Times). If that’s the case, the only thing that can come from releasing of the photos is sensationalism; from our end, we get a voyeuristic look at some soldiers at their weakest point. From our enemies (read: countries whose governments don’t necessarily mesh with our own) perspective, it’s excellent propaganda. It’s a lose-lose, really. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad call.
I have to note, the paragraph on ambushing Taliban and cowardly engagement through the predator UAV seem particularly inflammatory. Sure, Karzai isn’t great (what government is?) but painting the Taliban (”ethnic minority Afghan fighters” you called them) as some kind of dissenting voice is a little bit idealistic. We’re not talking about a unique cultural sect that isn’t being given it’s little space to breath–we’re talking about a group who uses a convoluted interpretation of Islamic law to enslave people–oh yeah, a Karzai regime maybe “flaccid”, but the Taliban haven’t exactly shown themselves to be even-handed, forward-thinking leaders.
I think what coalition forces are “opposing” are groups who want to “dissent” through intimidation, coercion and violence. While one could say that this is what “coalition” forces are doing, we’re certainly not punishing little girls for violating our interpretation of the law by making them our sergeants’/lieutenants’ 2nd, 3rd, 4th or maybe 5th wife (sorry, I just watched the Afghan documentary “Osama”, which is where the reference comes from).
And with the sanitized warfare thing–is war somehow better when it sloppy and face-to-face? I imagine that whether its through a video screen or ironsights, no soldier pulling the trigger is thinking about the political implications–only the mission, and the guys/gals to their left and right. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes its justified, but detachment is what keeps us from being a warrior-state.
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Thanks for the thoughts Jacob – good points as always.
I wanted this post to be inflammatory because I want this never-ending war to end and the only way for that to happen is for enough Americans to get angry and informed enough to give a damn.
Re: the Taliban. It’s so, so important to recognize that Afghanistan is a complicated mish-mash of ethnic groups, with different languages, customs and political hierarchies. NO government – not even the Taliban – has EVER controlled all of Afghanistan.
The NY Times article I linked to described the ambush and slaughter of about a dozen people in the Korangal valley. The Korangalis are not Pashtun and while they might take money from “the Taliban” the unique social, linguistic and political structure of the area makes it impossible to lump them in with “Afghans” or “The Taliban” or “terrorists”.
They are wood-cutters who lost their source of income when Karzai’s government banned logging, and they’re justifiably pissed off about the occupying force that’s telling them how to live.
The important subtleties of ethnic affiliation and political history are impossible to ascertain when the U.S. media is complicit and lazy. They’re even harder to figure out from a freaking bunker in Nevada.
How would we respond if Chinese Predator Drones piloted from Shanghai were mowing down Tibetan Resistance fighters?
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Whew… when I saw that byline, I thought you meant he’d shot a man in the face.
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Interesting take on this over at Gawker:
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That is an interesting take at Gawker.
Also interesting to note that while the Beltway crowd plays politics, over 100 civilian Afghan villagers, including dozens of children, were blown to bits in a U.S. missile attack.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/world/asia/15farah.html?ref=global-home
U.S. policy in Afghanistan is so wrong-headed it makes me sick.
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Unfortunately, playing politics is not optional, no matter how good some (a few) politicians’ intentions might be. I’m curious what your ideal action would be? Are you advocating a full pull-out? Or just an alteration of tactics?
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Here’s the thing – preventing Al Qaeda from gaining a safe haven in Afghanistan is important.
What’s NOT important is helping Hamid Karzai’s government extend control over ethnic minority parts of Afghanistan that no Kabul government has ever managed to govern. Doing so is impossible, and just breeds resentment that strengthens the true extremists.
Read Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between to get a sense of just how diverse Afghanistan is – there are several nations in one, vast territory.
Winning hearts and minds is so much more important than killing villagers. I’d like to see a shipment of hundreds of thousands of handmade American quilts go directly to villagers in the Afghan mountains before the next winter.
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I’ve read The Places In Between. I enjoyed it, though as all such books do, it reminded me of how much of the world is open to men, and how easy it is for them to forget/ignore what it’s like for the women in the regions they move through.
I think the contradiction here is this: you agree it’s important to prevent Al Qaeda (and, I assume, by extension the Taliban) from gaining control of those outlying areas, but you don’t want to see time and energy wasted on Karzai’s government making futile attempts to control them, either. So how do we prevent the Taliban from controlling them, if not by making use of the central government? Quilts alone won’t do it — Jacob made some good points about that below, and besides, sewing a handmade quilt is an enormous job. Getting hundreds of thousands of them made by winter would require forced labor on a scale not seen since slavery.
Look, we’ve got a lot of different threads going here now — the recent deaths of those civilians, the release of the photos, Afghanistan’s ethnic diversity… There’s so easy solution to all this. And there isn’t really any straightforward, easy criticism either.
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Thanks for the recommendation on the book–it sounds good.
I think the problem is that, we tried the “leave the government in Kabul” tactic. What happened? The Taliban/Al Qaeda hung out in those ethnic minority parts until the troop numbers went down.
I guess I’m a little clueless about this ethnic diversity, but if a people are so impoverished that they cannot make their own quilts to stay warm in the winter time, are we then affecting change by sending some to them? Should we not consider the socio-economic factors that are leading to such poverty? When we’re done feeling better about ourselves, and the quilts rot (literally and figuratively speaking), what will these people have–more foreign aid? Doesn’t it make sense to unite them–even loosely–under a single, stable, democratically-elected structure? If not, aren’t we just jerking ourselves off by being over there at all.
From everything thing I’ve heard from friends deployed to Iraq/Afghanistan, we’re not in the business of villager killing. It’s amazing how much an combatant looks like a “villager” to an outsider (say, a BBC reporter) when he hides his AK-47. Thankfully, the locals have a tendency to know who isn’t a “local”, and I think American policy (in Iraq, at least) has been working to that end. The Al-Anbar awakening showed us that, if we work with the local people (particularly local leaders), they’ll quickly identify the six Lebanese/Iranian/Syrian/Pakistani men who moved in right around the time the IEDs started getting planted. (I’ll quickly note: NYT didn’t have the balls to embed someone in the Anbar province in the time leading up the awakening. You know who was there? Christian Science Monitor and Army Times. Everyone else was off thumping their chest in Baghdad’s green zone, hearing about the war as second hand as almost everyone else).
At the end of the day, someone is giving up time–probably quilt-making time, if our proposed aid efforts are to be given merit–to crawl up mountains outside of American FOBs and firing old soviet rockets at our soldiers. These are not f*#king goat herders. Maybe they were, but they’re not any more. Even semi-successful farmers don’t have that kind of free time. If anything, these are probably the same guys threatening to kill the goat herder’s family if they say anything to the coalition forces. And I think our “policy” is to do our best to mitigate THAT guy. Because frankly, if we leave and THAT guy is still around (or not given a democratic outlet for his/her grievances), the quilts will just get stolen anyway–and the quilt owner will probably be raped.
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Er, make that, NO easy solution.
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Maybe we could find a Predator Drone that both knit and fired quilts.
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