Torture by "Psychotic" American Guards at Guantanamo
It is, of course, no longer deniable that the United States has tortured prisoners.
Here's a BBC interview (via Sullivan) with Chris Arendt, a former member of the Michigan National Guard and former guard at Guantanamo Bay. He discusses beatings, sleep deprivation, humiliation and other types of torture. Nothing we didn't already know, actually. But he says something else that I think is very important:
The farther one goes to the left on the political spectrum, the more common it becomes to encounter anti-military types, but most liberals I know have what I'd call the appropriate level of respect for folks in the military. I myself have always had a great deal of respect for military folks, and have rarely been tempted by lefty anti-military views. (Incidentally, my dad was in the Guard, I took the ASVAB and considered enlisting before college, and I've always been the kind of military history buff who can't help but get weepy about Cowpens, Manassas, Normandy Beach... Which is just to say: I'm hardly a deride-the-troops kind of guy.)
But I'm afraid reverence for the military may have gone rather too far--and Arendt's comments seem to confirm this.
I'm reminded of something one of my most astute friends, Peter the Public Defender, said to me once. PPD grew up in just about the most military of military families. He was a military brat. Some of his brothers are in the military. His dad was a general. His grandpa was a general (who knew, e.g., Claire Chenault (he "didn't like him") and, I think, Vinegar Joe Stillwell). PPD has seen a lot of the army. One day when I was waxing poetical about the virtues of our men (and women) in uniform, he looked at me and said something like (paraphrasing from memory): you know, people go into the military for a lot of reasons; some are there because they want to serve their country, or because it's a family tradition; but some are there because they can't find a job; and some are there because they hope they're going to get a chance to shoot somebody.
This is an important thing to remember. There is an aspect of the American military that is extremely honorable and admirable, and only fools deny that. But we are, it seems, deluded in a particulalry dangerous way if we ignore the fact that not all of the various types of people who tend to be attracted to the military are admirable.
Now, Arndt's unit was National Guard, and some suggest that, because of lower standards and laxer discipline, the National Guard is more prone to such things that the rest of the military. I'm certainly willing to consider that possibility, though I fear that there's not as much truth in it as one might hope.
What Arndt is telling us is something we should already have been able to guess: that there is a non-trivial number of sadists and psychopaths in th military, just waiting for the opportunity to do what they've always wanted to do. We should have been able to guess this because, first, there seems to be a non-trivial number of sadists and psychopaths (here I use the terms in their ordinary senses, not in technical, psychological senses) in the general population, and, second, because these people will have some tendency to gravitate toward jobs and ways of life that are more closely associated with violence.
It seems that at Guantanamo we had at least three factors disastrously interacting: (a) radically illiberal and inhumane policy, (b) a non-trivial number of sadists and psychopaths, and (c) a fair number of people who thought of themselves as "just following orders" or "just doing their jobs." This combination should sound fairly familiar to us.
The history of Guantanamo Bay has not yet been written; but even if it's only half as bad as it sounds, it will still be a crime of terrible proportions.
It is, of course, no longer deniable that the United States has tortured prisoners.
Here's a BBC interview (via Sullivan) with Chris Arendt, a former member of the Michigan National Guard and former guard at Guantanamo Bay. He discusses beatings, sleep deprivation, humiliation and other types of torture. Nothing we didn't already know, actually. But he says something else that I think is very important:
For quite a few people in my unit, this was a vacation, this was the opportunity they'd always wanted, to be violent and awful people. They got every opportunity to act like they would really want to act, because they are genuinely psychotic. And for others it was just a job.It has become fashionable to adore "our troops." Ostentatious professions of adoration have become almost obligatory every time the troops are even mentioned. Conservatives have always had their own reasons for being extremely pro-military, and it seems that liberals are eager to defuse any possible charges of being anti-military.
The farther one goes to the left on the political spectrum, the more common it becomes to encounter anti-military types, but most liberals I know have what I'd call the appropriate level of respect for folks in the military. I myself have always had a great deal of respect for military folks, and have rarely been tempted by lefty anti-military views. (Incidentally, my dad was in the Guard, I took the ASVAB and considered enlisting before college, and I've always been the kind of military history buff who can't help but get weepy about Cowpens, Manassas, Normandy Beach... Which is just to say: I'm hardly a deride-the-troops kind of guy.)
But I'm afraid reverence for the military may have gone rather too far--and Arendt's comments seem to confirm this.
I'm reminded of something one of my most astute friends, Peter the Public Defender, said to me once. PPD grew up in just about the most military of military families. He was a military brat. Some of his brothers are in the military. His dad was a general. His grandpa was a general (who knew, e.g., Claire Chenault (he "didn't like him") and, I think, Vinegar Joe Stillwell). PPD has seen a lot of the army. One day when I was waxing poetical about the virtues of our men (and women) in uniform, he looked at me and said something like (paraphrasing from memory): you know, people go into the military for a lot of reasons; some are there because they want to serve their country, or because it's a family tradition; but some are there because they can't find a job; and some are there because they hope they're going to get a chance to shoot somebody.
This is an important thing to remember. There is an aspect of the American military that is extremely honorable and admirable, and only fools deny that. But we are, it seems, deluded in a particulalry dangerous way if we ignore the fact that not all of the various types of people who tend to be attracted to the military are admirable.
Now, Arndt's unit was National Guard, and some suggest that, because of lower standards and laxer discipline, the National Guard is more prone to such things that the rest of the military. I'm certainly willing to consider that possibility, though I fear that there's not as much truth in it as one might hope.
What Arndt is telling us is something we should already have been able to guess: that there is a non-trivial number of sadists and psychopaths in th military, just waiting for the opportunity to do what they've always wanted to do. We should have been able to guess this because, first, there seems to be a non-trivial number of sadists and psychopaths (here I use the terms in their ordinary senses, not in technical, psychological senses) in the general population, and, second, because these people will have some tendency to gravitate toward jobs and ways of life that are more closely associated with violence.
It seems that at Guantanamo we had at least three factors disastrously interacting: (a) radically illiberal and inhumane policy, (b) a non-trivial number of sadists and psychopaths, and (c) a fair number of people who thought of themselves as "just following orders" or "just doing their jobs." This combination should sound fairly familiar to us.
The history of Guantanamo Bay has not yet been written; but even if it's only half as bad as it sounds, it will still be a crime of terrible proportions.
posted by Winston Smith at
8:34 AM
4 Comments:
My best friend of 21 years went into ROTC in college and, as a result of being his roommate, I had the opportunity to hang out with quite a few ROTC students.
Every single one of them I knew mentioned to me at one point or another that they were, in one way or another, excited about the opportunity to shoot someone. It's my personal-experience-based opinion that the large, large majority of young men going into the military do so because they want to kill people. In all the time I knew those people, which, granted, included neither too deep a knowledge nor too frequent an encounter, I heard many references to a desire to kill and not a single reference to a desire to serve one's country or engage in any other remotely honorable act.
That could be because they, like many other young men, sat around and BSed a lot, but even if that's the case, I'm of the opinion that enough time spent wallowing in BS will leave you with a stench that takes a while to fade.
Furthermore, while they may have been BSing, perhaps putting more focus on the violent aspect of their jobs than they really desired there to be, maybe exaggerating their willingness to kill, I don't for a second doubt that a desire to kill someone wasn't one of the main reasons they were in the military.
Two of them on separate occasions told me that they wanted to kill someone because that's just something they wanted to be able to say they did. I even asked if it mattered whether or not the person was genuinely a bad person, or if that worry ever crossed their minds, and both responded that it didn't really matter, that everyone's basically a bad person anyway.
So I'm with you - our military is full of the potential for honorable service, but unfortunately, as I grow older and as I keep a solid eye on my development, I'm beginning more and more to agree with my dad - kids just aren't easily capable of fully understanding what honor and service is all about when they're college-aged (somewhere I read an article that wrote of scientists noting the full development of the brain, physiologically speaking, ending at about 25 - my dad frequently referenced that finding). As a result, they are easily mislead by people in power who aren't exactly well-balanced. The testosterone-driven environment likely leads to rash conclusions which are all the more readily acceptable to misguided youths watching their friends die at the hands of a truly demonic enemy from which easy and loose generalizations quickly arise, resulting in more and more frequent tragedy.
I think that most young men, at least I know this applied to me and those of my friends with whom I spoke about this issue at the time, have a strong desire to do violence to genuinely bad people. It's so strong, in fact, that it makes it hard to sit around not doing anything when bad things are happening. This probably also leads to a quicker adoptation of faulty views that permit for this violence to be vented ("everyone's basically a bad person anyway", for example).
This sort of problem is an argument in favor of the draft. There some professions that really should not be self-selective, since annyone who fins carrying out the core founction of the profession pleasurable in itself shouldn't be allowed to do it. There are other reasons to find pleasure in a military career than in actually enjoying combat of course, like pay, serving one's country, outsize praise in society for your courage (even if you are a drone pilot), cool-looking uniform, and simple pride in being good at something that is very difficult. These however are always going to be compensations for what is, or should be, about the most unpleasant thing the world: killing people who are trying to kill you. For most of us, the prospect of such compensations in not enough to outweight the prospect of doing the most unpleasant thing in the world, since the horror of war admits to prior understanding better than any of them. We might come see them as sufficient with a bit of training, but not from the outside. People who join up are likely to either find the compensations especially compelling - ie, you are poor, your father won't respect you otherwise - or they don't find the prospect of killing people especially unpleasant. Neither of these is a good reason to join, but the latter is especially worrysome. Training can do a good job of taking someone who was in it for the money and turning them into the Stoic that military life demands, but it's hard to see how you can wring the sadism from someone you are trying to push toward combat. You just have to find these people and push them out. There would be fewer of them proportionately if we did not allow the military to self select.
This problem is not unique to the military. It's not hard to think of examples. Imagine for a moment the kind of person who would show up for jury duty (at $5/day) because they acutally wanted to be on a jury. We draft jurors to avoid this problem; maybe the same thing would help to improve the quality of the military.
It's interesting that you've connected the issue of torture to the draft, Anonymous. Andrew Bacevich wrote a book a few years back called The New American Militarism that is worth a read. He argued that we've romanticized the military in part because there is no longer a draft. The service man or woman is such a small percentage of the general public now that most of us don't really think about the military much beyond its media portrayal. Bacevich doesn't argue tha we need to reinstate the draft. But I think the case can be made that some of the excesses of the military and the general lack of interest by the public can be explained in part by a very small participation rate in the military among the public.
It's interesting that you draw the link between soldiers treatment of eachother and the aggressive culture within the military and the soldiers' treatment of detainees. I'm covering Chris and Moazzam's story here in the UK and they had an amazing in-depth coversation about this topic just yesterday. I posted it on my blog - you should check it out and see what you think: www.guantanamovoices.org
I'd be interested to hear your response!
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