May 4, 2004

The Role
Another Open Letter to the Troops in Iraq
By STAN GOFF
In 1994, I was running an A-Detachment in 3rd Special Forces, ODA-354 to be
precise, a team that specialized in free-fall parachute infiltration and
special (strategic) reconnaissance. 3rd Special Forces Group's area of
operation encompassed sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, and our team was
specifically designated for the Dominican Republic and Haiti. So we had two
language requirements on the team, Spanish and French (even though most
Haitians actually speak Haitian Kreyol).
I had a communications sergeant on my team named Ali Tehrani. His father was
an expatriate Iranian who'd married a German, and Ali had been raised in
extremely comfortable circumstances in Europe, where his father and the
society around him pushed him to fluency in English, German, Spanish, and
French. Ali also spoke decent Italian. He was the most fluent French-speaker
on the battalion, and a year before we were sent to Haiti with the 1994
invasion, Ali had been sent to the camps constructed by the United States
military in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for the purpose of detaining tens of
thousands of Haitians who were trying to escape the brutal repression and
grinding poverty of Haiti in ramshackle boats. Ali was needed there because
of his language fluency.
Ali was typical of many of the "non-white" members of Special Forces in two
respects. He was demonstrably patriotic--compelled, it seemed, to prove his
devotion to the American security state--and he adopted the prevailing
attitude within much of Special Operations of Negrophobia--a kind of
institutional disdain for Black troops that served to bloc other
"non-whites" with whites in SF. It's a peculiar mechanism of white supremacy
where there is not a master-race mentality so much as a deficient-race
ideology from which all others could self-exclude. This--along with an
anabolic version of masculinity--served as one form of social glue in SF
culture, though there were a few exceptions.
Ali's Negrophobia wasn't virulent like that I had witnessed in other SF
troops. In fact, he was willing to grant exceptions among individual Black
soldiers fairly easily. It was more part of his obsessive desire to fit in.
Ali had spent six months "working the camps" at Guantanamo in 1993.
When we received word of our mission to invade Haiti in 1994, he reacted
violently. His revulsion toward Haitians was visceral and white-hot. Given
that my own team's mission might depend on both Ali's language capabilities
("my" language was Spanish) and on our ability to establish rapport with
local Haitians, Ali's outburst sent up a warning flare in front of me, and I
made time to sit down with him for a long talk.
Ali was, aside from his passive racism and the simmering rage that one could
always sense just below his surface, a very intelligent and sensitive man. I
always suspected that he may have suffered either physical or psychological
abuse as a child.
When we talked, we fairly quickly concluded together that his aversion to
Haitians had something to do with the role he had been thrown into against
the Haitians at the camps, the role of jail-boss, and he agreed to keep that
in mind and to subordinate his conditioned reflexes on the matter to mental
time-outs in order to assure that he would behave appropriately while we
were on the mission in Haiti, which he did... most of the time.
But the point I'm getting to is this. The antagonism that Ali experienced as
an individual toward Haitians was structured by the institutional antagonism
built into the jailer-and-jailed relationship. Ali had internalized the
external reality that he was a prison guard and they were the prisoners. His
job was to dominate, to bend Haitians to his will, and every exercise of
human agency by the Haitians threatened that. Their very humanity--that
combination of independent consciousness and will--was structured by the
prison-camp phenomenon to be an enemy force in relation to Ali and the other
prison-keepers.
In 1971, Stanford University Professor of Psychology Phillip Zimbardo
designed an experiment that would come to be known as the Stanford Prison
Experiment. Subjects were recruited and paid a modest stipend, whereupon
they were separated into "prisoners" and "guards," and placed in a mock
prison built in a Stanford basement. The prisoners were stripped, deloused,
shackled, and placed in prison clothes, while the guards were given
authoritative uniforms, sunglasses, and batons. Long story short--within two
days there was a near prison riot, psychosomatic illness began to break out,
white middle-class kids in the role of guards became rapidly and
progressively more sadistic and arbitrary, and the two-week experiment had
to be abandoned after only six days... before someone was badly hurt or
killed.
The experiment seemed to support the truism that "absolute power corrupts
absolutely." But that conclusion serves as a description, not an
explanation. It describes what happens to the individual, but it fails to
account for the role of rationalization that legitimates the domination, and
it completely fails to account for institutional support of that domination.
When one uses the term "systemic," she is saying that the source of this
abuse is not individual moral failure, but a predictable expression of the
system and its structures.
The abuses of detainees, by US troops, by CACI International and Titan
Corporation mercenaries, and by the CIA in Iraq, is "systemic."
But in the same way that the system found an expression in the thoughts and
emotions of Ali Tehrani, in the same way that the structure of domination
and subjection pushed him to rationalize away his shared humanity with his
Haitian captives, we can now see in the leering grins of the Abu Ghraib
prison guards, who are regular people--like the experimental subjects in the
Stanford Prison Experiment--who quickly learned to behave as sadistic
torturers. The military has admitted that 60% of these detainees are neither
combatants nor threats.
As this is written, the US military is about to release hundreds of
detainees who fall in that category, and there will be more horror stories
coming, because it was systemic.
People were not only humiliated and forced to pose in degrading positions
with each other naked. They were forced to masturbate in front of taunting
guards. Some were sodomized with foreign objects. It appears that some were
also beaten to death during interrogation--one whose body was put on ice for
a day then carted away the next on a litter with a faked intravenous
infusion in the arm.
Now the cover stories are being spun out like webs.
We are being asked to believe that:
(1) The only abuse that occurred against anyone detained by American
forces in Iraq was photographed and reported.
(2) No abuses occurred anywhere that were not photographed or
reported.
(3) The one percent of US troops who are the "bad apples" all happen
to serve together in the same unit... the unit that is the only one guilty,
and that happened to get caught because of the photographs.
(4) The aggressive investigation now being proclaimed by everyone
from George W. Bush to CENTCOM, about abuses that were already on record in
the military (an internal investigation had already been launched in
February by Major General Antonio M. Taguba, but was kept from the public),
would have happened had the photographs and story not been aired on national
television.
(5) The military was not attempting to cover up their own
investigation, and that they would have informed the public of these abuses
even had Seymour Hersh not put the whole miserable episode into print.
(6) The military did not cover anything up in the two weeks between
the time CBS warned them that they were going to air an expose and when they
actually did air it.
(7) No one in the chain of command above Brigadier General Janis
Karpinski is responsible for the failure to halt these abuses, even though
Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez was informed of the investigation of
these abuses, complete with sworn statements and photographs, by General
Taguba last February.
Other abuses and violations of the Geneva Conventions and Laws of
Warfare are already on record, some with videos available on the web, such
as:
(1) Shooting people who are clearly not armed and who are engaged in
no threatening behavior.
(2) Shooting into ambulances.
(3) Shooting wounded people who are not armed.
(4) Shooting wounded people who are obviously no longer capable of
fighting.
(5) Shooting into crowds.
There has never been a Stanford Military Occupation Experiment to complement
the Stanford Prison Experiment, unless we just count the military
occupations themselves. There is a structured, systemic antagonism between
an occupying military and the people whose land they occupy. And there will
be no investigations of any of it, because there never are, unless and until
the American public is confronted with them.
The National Command Authority and its cheerleaders cannot say out loud...
this is what we are doing, and it can't get done unless we dehumanize the
occupied. This reality, this system, will express itself in the thoughts and
emotions of you, the troops who carry it out, because this military
occupation is in a sense making a prison of Iraq and making you, the troops,
its turnkeys.
It will only be those exceptional individuals among you in the military who
refuse to surrender their humanity--no matter how little you may understand
the big picture--and who will witness. You who do break with the system and
witness are very important people, important to history, because your
refusal to surrender your own moral integrity to the system may lead to our
collective salvation by ending this felonious occupation. The troops who
filed reports about the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison were such
exceptions.
So were Tom Glen and Ron Ridenhour.
In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch wrote in 1979 about US
leadership during the occupation of Vietnam:
"Success in our society has to be ratified by publicity... all
politics becomes a form of spectacle. It is well known that Madison Avenue
packages politicians and markets them as if they were cereals or deodorants;
but the art of public relations penetrates more deeply into political
life... The modern prince [an apt turn of phrase for the current member of
the Bush political dynasty] ... confuses successful completion of the task
at hand with the impression he makes or hopes to make on others. Thus
American officials blundered into the war in Vietnam... More concerned with
the trappings than with the reality of power, they convinced themselves that
failure to intervene would damage American 'credibility...' [They] fret
about their ability to rise to crisis, to project an image of decisiveness,
to give a convincing performance of executive power... Public relations and
propaganda have exalted the image and the pseudo-event."
What these images of the Abu Ghraib humiliation and torture have done in the
United States is collide with the "exalted image and the pseudo-event" of
the Bush propaganda apparatus, just as the images of the My Lai massacre did
in 1969. That collision between the reality and the real image of war
startles civilians here in the La-La Land of wide screen TV and suburban
SUV's, and it shakes them out of their opiated shopper dream-state.
My Lai is what General Colin Powell was remembering when he implemented "the
Powell Doctrine" for the military, which includes a co-opted press and a
vigorous attempt to keep things like flag-draped coffins off of those wide
screen TVs.
Most of you don't remember My Lai.
On March 16, 1968, units of the Americal Division, to which Powell was
assigned as a staff officer in Chu Lai, entered a Vietnamese village called
My Lai and spent four hours raping women, burning houses, then finally
massacring men, women, and children--including infants who dying women tried
to shield with their own bullet-riddled bodies. The massacre was stopped by
a Georgia-born helicopter pilot named Hugh Clowers Thompson who landed his
chopper between the few surviving Vietnamese and the blood-intoxicated
soldiers, and ordered his door gunners to open fire on the Americans if they
failed to stand down.
A few weeks later, General Creighton Abrams, then commanding general in
Vietnam, received a letter from a young Specialist-4 in the Americal
Division named Tom Glen:
"The average GI's attitude toward and treatment of the Vietnamese
people all too often is a complete denial of all our country is attempting
to accomplish in the realm of human relations... Far beyond merely
dismissing the Vietnamese as 'slopes' or 'gooks,' in both deed and thought,
too many American soldiers seem to discount their very humanity; and with
this attitude inflict upon the Vietnamese citizenry humiliations, both
psychological and physical, that can have only a debilitating effect upon
efforts to unify the people in loyalty to the Saigon government,
particularly when such acts are carried out at unit levels and thereby
acquire the aspect of sanctioned policy... [American soldiers attack
Vietnamese] for mere pleasure, fire indiscriminately into Vietnamese homes
and without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves...
Fired with an emotionalism that belies unconscionable hatred, and armed with
a vocabulary consisting of 'You VC,' soldiers commonly 'interrogate' by
means of torture that has been presented as the particular habit of the
enemy. Severe beatings and torture at knife point are usual means of
questioning captives or of convincing a suspect that he is, indeed, a Viet
Cong... It would indeed be terrible to find it necessary to believe that an
American soldier that harbors such racial intolerance and disregard for
justice and human feeling is a prototype of all American national character;
yet the frequency of such soldiers lends credulity to such beliefs... What
has been outlined here I have seen not only in my own unit, but also in
others we have worked with, and I fear it is universal. If this is indeed
the case, it is a problem which cannot be overlooked, but can through a more
firm implementation of the codes of MACV (Military Assistance Command
Vietnam) and the Geneva Conventions, perhaps be eradicated."
Glen's letter was forwarded from Abrams' office to the Americal Division and
ended up with Major Colin Powell in Chu Lai.
Powell never followed up by questioning Glen, and instead ended his
"investigation" of Glen's allegations after accepting uncritically the claim
by Glen's commander that Glen hadn't been close enough to "the front"
(whatever that was supposed to be in Vietnam) to have any knowledge of such
alleged abuses. Powell then began his career as a damage-control expert in
the military by writing a letter, dated December 13, 1968, in which he said,
""There may be isolated cases of mistreatment of civilians and POWs... [but]
this by no means reflects the general attitude throughout the Division... In
direct refutation of this [Glen's] portrayal is the fact that relations
between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." He went
on to impugn Glen's account for having been brought to light only
reluctantly and lacking sufficient detail.
This was, of course, horseshit. Abuses were systemic.
Glen had only heard through rumors about My Lai. It was another GI, Ron
Ridenhour, an infantryman who was not willing to surrender his humanity to
occupier-racism, who finally pieced together, on his own initiative, the
story of the My Lai massacre, and brought it to public light. When the
photographs of the massacre were combined with Ridenhour's account, and the
American public was confronted with the reality of an entire unit
participating in a systematic massacre of civilians, it marked a turning
point in the loss of political support in the United States for continued
military occupation of Vietnam.
Powell himself admitted war crimes in his memoir, My American Journey, where
he wrote, "I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age
male... If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely
suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him.
If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the
next burst was not in front, but at him." Powell would also come to the
defense of Brigadier General John Donaldson who had the door gunners on his
own helicopter shoot Vietnamese for sport. Donaldson was exonerated,
naturally, in a military investigation.
Powell not only developed as a skilled cover-up artist, he would eventually
incorporate this ability to manage public perception about war as a key
element in the "Powell Doctrine," which he imposed on the military and the
press. He never forgot My Lai, and he has always believed that exposure of
My Lai and other atrocities were responsible for the US defeat in Vietnam.
Donald Rumsfeld shares these beliefs with Colin Powell. They are both wrong.
The two phenomena that collide with this Powell-Rumsfeld orientation were
and are (1) the decision of their 'enemy' never to quit, and (2) the
inevitability that someone who is part of the occupation force will be
confronted with these contradictions between "the exalted image and the
pseudo-event" and the real character of war--and that this someone will
expose it in an attempt to rescue his or her own humanity.
The war in Vietnam was lost by the French then the Americans because they
didn't belong there, and the resistance endeavored to do whatever was
necessary to make that point. This is also the situation in Iraq.
So I'll leave to others the analysis of whether the troops facing courts
martial are scapegoats (they are, and they are also probably guilty as
hell), and whether or not the military is letting the officers off with
reprimands and walking papers to prevent the fire spreading (which it is).
I'll just emphasize that the war in Iraq cannot be won. Not because of the
inability of US troops to fight, but because we don't belong there. And
since that's the case (which I firmly believe it is) every life--Iraqi,
American, or otherwise--that is lost or ruined... is wasted.
All this talk of whether Military Intelligence or the mercenaries working
for CACI International or the CIA or the MP commanders were responsible is
diversionary bullshit so we won't see how Iraq itself has become the
Stanford Military Occupation Experiment.
Because if we conclude that the problem is systemic, then the only thing to
do to stop this is to walk away. And the Bush administration sent troops
there for the purpose not of building democracies, but of building permanent
military bases in the heart of oil country, and if they walk away, they
can't rightly build bases, can they?
So we can either blithely obey and support our new Neros, or we can continue
to cling to the absurd notion that the vandal can rebuild the house they
just ravaged, or we can do what we might to make them walk away. Troops that
come forward will play a key role in this moral imperative.
Every troop that comes forward with accounts of the inhumanity of this
war--while jeopardizing his or her career--is serving to hasten an end to
this criminal enterprise of the Military-Petroleum Complex. These
troop/witnesses will serve to hasten an end to the suffering of Iraqi
families and the suffering of the families of the occupying forces. They
will serve to prevent more torture, more humiliation, more suspicion and
hatred, and more lives being thrown away on this imperial folly.
Every troop who keeps his secrets, who faithfully serves the system and
never bears witness, can travel for the rest of his life.
She can go to Rio de Janeiro.
He can go to Bangladesh.
She can go to Lagos, or Montreal, or Tokyo, or Moscow, or Antarctica.
But no matter where he goes, there he'll be--alone with the growing weight
of his own silence on his head, wrapping himself in his own
rationalizations, and restlessly turning away from the faces that look back
at him in the mirrors of his memory.
Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US
Invasion of Haiti
<http://www.softskull.com/cgi-bin/SoftCart.100.exe/store/goff/hideous_dream.
html?L+scstore+jssh4901+1060182363> " (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the
upcoming book "Full Spectrum Disorder
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1932360123/counterpunchmaga> " (Soft
Skull Press, 2003). He is a member of the BRING THEM HOME NOW!
<http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/>  coordinating committee, a retired
Special Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier.
Email for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org