My suggestion that lack of proper training contributed to the atrocities in the Abu Ghraib prison was met with much resistance. Many of the comments on the post claimed that specialized training on the Geneva Convention would have had no effect and that it was solely a breakdown in moral discipline. On his own blog, David Tanner provides one of the most representative and thorough criticisms:
I can't believe that the problem [Joe] points out and the disgusting abuse of the Iraqi prisoners have anything to do with each other. The fact that those reservists never saw the Geneva Convention rules should have nothing to do with the way they conducted themselves. I don't care about the pronouncements of international conventions, or international standards for wartime etiquette; it doesn't require a reference to such proclamations to see that what those individuals did to the Iraqi prisoners was reprehensible.
While I certainly agree with the view of Tanner and others, I think it glosses over an important point. Most everyone has simply stated that these soldiers “should have known” not to act the way they did. They seem to be under the impression that it is both obvious and beyond dispute and, therefore, no argument even needs to be made. Essentially, they're making an appeal to natural law. Like St. Thomas Aquinas, they agree that good and evil is intrinsic and knowable by all people (ST IaIIae 94, 4). These reservists should have known that such actions were wrong because all humans are endowed with the same moral intuition that humiliation and torture are evil acts.
Naturally, I not only have sympathy with this opinion but whole-heartedly agree. The problem, however, is that this fact is not universally accepted. We live in an age where the corrosive force of moral relativism has almost completely eroded the belief in moral intuition. Appeals to “conscience” are as subjective and irrelevant to many people as using “because the Bible says so” as the basis of an argument. Since they don’t accept the premise, they simply dismiss the conclusion. While appeals to natural law are both valid and sound, they should not be the end of the discussion.
Can the rejection of moral intuition, though, be used as an excuse for these atrocities? Of course not. Ignorance of the natural law is no more valid an excuse than ignorance of the Geneva Convention standards. These soldiers were accountable for their actions and should be duly punished. But I think the breakdown extends further than just the individual consciences of these soldiers.
Let me begin by pointing out an important aspect of the American military. The culture is almost hermetically sealed, with a moral center comprised of a unique blend of deontological and virtue ethics. While the deontological side, with its emphasis on regulations and discipline, is the most often associated with the military, it is the honing of virtue ethics that makes the organization a particularly moral institution.
By cultivating specific virtues through an emphasis on "leadership traits” and “core values”, the military shores up the natural moral law already intrinsic in the hearts of its members. Obviously, some people will come into the military with many of these “habits of the heart” already developed while in others they may be completely lacking. The more time a person spends submerged within the culture, though, the more exposure to these values they will receive, increasing the likelihood that they will become inculcated into their own character.
The process, however, is gradual and requires constant exposure to the culture itself, an element that reservists often miss out on. That is why training is essential. If character were a brick, the rules and regulations would be the mold that holds it together while the heat of the culture causes it to harden and set. Eventually, the character of many (though, of course, not all) servicemembers will conform to the moral standards and outside regulations won’t be as necessary. That is why I believe that an active duty soldier would have been less likely to commit these crimes; it would require an almost complete rejection of the Army’s value system. Reservists, on the other hand, are products of two cultures, with the civilian ethos being the dominant one.
This is not to say that if they’d received the proper training, these reservists wouldn’t have committed these acts. As Dave Tanner adds,
“I don’t believe that anyone who could perform such inhumane acts on another human being would suddenly have some kind of ethical revelation from reading the Geneva Conventions.”
Maybe not. But then again, solid training on both the laws of war and the consequences for violating them might have been just the thing to stir their moral conscience. At a minimum, it might have aroused their sense of self-preservation knowing that violating these rules would land them on the other side of the jail door.
[Note: This still leaves open the question of how this moral breakdown could have occurred. That is the topic I’ll attempt to address in my next post.]
1
Poll: What do you think should be done to the U.S. soldiers who have abused Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq?
http://www.epollarity.com/index.php?cat=ALNC&pollID=473
A) They should be court marshaled.
B) They should go to jail.
C) They should be tortured themselves.
D) Nothing, they were doing their job.
I think they should all be court marshaled, and then face jail time. Their behavior was totally unprofessional and has done more to hard the U.S. reputation in the Arab community than all of the goodwill we have built up since toppling the Baathist regime of Iraq.
PoliticalBlogger
posted on 05.04.2004 1:25 PM2
the latest news now is that two prisoners have been murdered by US forces. One got demoted to private, the other was a mercenary so he got nothing. must be nice to be a 'solier of fortune' these days.
as for natural law, well, look at the famous canadian tests that were done to prove that humans, given the situation will torture people because they were told to. the researchers divided a random group into the torturerer and torchee. most torturers hurt the victim because they were told to by the observer. it was done with electric shocks through a button the people were told to push. obviously these tests are illegal now and the people involved needed a lot of conseling.
the point is that anyone will hurt people if they believe it is the right thing to do. the guy who ran the prison admitted to a rush from thinking he was doing good work for the CIA.
i am going out on a limb here, but i think a lot of military people are used to taking orders. if their homies are out getting shot up by the locals and they think they can help by torturing some a-rabs, then they will unless there is an officer telling them it is the wrong thing to do. it doesn't sound like there was any leadership.
frankly, it is sad, but these things coming out don't surprise me at all. this war has been mis-managed from the beginning and we are beginning to see the results.
don't seem to be winning many hearts and minds these days.
posted on 05.04.2004 3:49 PM3
oh, and i would pick A and or B
i think it is reprehensible that soldiers get a hand slap and the mercenaries get nothing. america is gaining no world-wide PR here. we are setting a very bad example.
posted on 05.04.2004 3:51 PM4
What do you know about how the military operates dicknbush? What these guys did was reprehensible, but the way you puff yourself up with self-righteus indignation about it makes me wonder if you are secretly pleased to have a something to beat those mindless killbots in the Army over the head with.
posted on 05.04.2004 4:49 PM5
Whatever happened to battlefield executions?
Whatever happened to being "an officer and a gentleman" (and I don't mean the movie that demonstrated something quite different)?
The 60s and Clinton, as near as I can tell. :-((
posted on 05.05.2004 9:37 AM6
finlay,
just want justice, don't care who did the injustice. they abuse people and get nothing.
posted on 05.05.2004 11:24 AM7
DnB,
The Milgram studies were not conducted in Canada, but at Yale.
More importantly, they do not undermine the idea of natural law. They knew what they were doing was wrong, but they also did not know how to deal with the situation. The questioners implored the researchers to let them stop. They trembled, shook, protested, dug their fingernails into their flesh, bit their lips until they bled. As one researcher wrote,
I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within twenty minutes he was a reduced to the twitching, stuttering wreck who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse. He constantly pulled one this darlobe and twisted his hands. At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: "Oh, G_d, let's stop it!" And yet he ... obeyed to the end.
Does not seem to me like someone who does not know what he is doing is wrong.
It also seems a bit premature to conclude that the abusers will get nothing.
One other thought, does not your desire for justice conflict with your belief in pacifism?
posted on 05.05.2004 12:35 PM8
Why are you surprised at the behavior in the Iraqi prison? If you cannot treat each other with respect and honor, then how else would you treat an enemy?
You are judged not by how you treat those you love, but by how you treat those you hate.
“Faggot, faggot down the street.
Shot him, shot him ‘til he
retreats.”
– Cadence reported at Fort Campbell
in the weeks following Private First
Class Winchell’s murder.
The tragic 1999 murder of Private First Class (PFC) Barry Winchell for his perceived sexual orientation exposed on the national stage the months of daily anti-gay taunts and harassing comments from the two killers and others prior to his death. Winchell had tried to report the harassment to the Fort Campbell Inspector General, but was turned away.
Winchell’s chain of command was aware of the harassment and did little. Some members of Winchell’s chain of command even participated
in the harassment.
At Fort Campbell, soldiers continued to report anti-gay graffiti and anti-gay cadences in the weeks and months after Winchell’s death.
Gay discharges at Fort Campbell skyrocketed after the murder. In FY1999, Fort Campbell’s gay discharges represented 3.6% of the Army total. By FY2000, they represented almost 28% of the Army total.
Winchell’s murder, and the Army’s inadequate response to it, was a clear sign to gay soldiers that their lives would not be protected
in the face of anti-gay violence.
Many consequently came to view assignment to Fort Campbell as a death sentence. Gay soldiers fled the installation in droves, often making statements of homosexual orientation purely as a means of self-preservation.
Fort Campbell was not the only place in the military where anti-gay rhetoric was pervasive. Rather, it was the most extreme example of a
systemic problem across the services.
Just three months following the Winchell murder, a Marine Lieutenant Colonel at Twenty-Nine Palms sent an email to his subordinates mocking the Winchell murder and deriding the premise that commanders should take responsibility for the safety of their gay Marines, or “backside rangers,” as he called them.
The case of Airman Sean Fucci illustrates how military leadership has consistently failed to stop harassment. Fucci reported a note reading, “DIE FAG” left in his room. His commanders offered him no protection, and failed to investigate the source of the threat. Instead, his supervisor questioned him about his sexual orientation, forcing Fucci to move off-base at his own expense for his personal safety.
Even the tragic death of Seaman Allen Schindler at the hands of fellow sailors was not enough to make the leadership of the USS Belleau Woods take anti-gay violence seriously.
In 1996, a young sailor on the same ship from which Schindler and his murderers hailed was told by his Chief Master at Arms that he would be killed in the same way Schindler was if he exercised his right to a discharge board to fight allegations of gay conduct. Assured that his leaders would not protect him and fearful for his safety the sailor accepted the discharge.
Perhaps the most heart-wrenching example of an inappropriate administrative investigation was the case of Air Force Captain Monica Hill, subjected to invasive and demeaning questions about her sexual life after requesting a deferment of her active duty report date to care for her terminally ill partner. Upon receiving the deferment request, the Air Force immediately suspended Hill’s orders in order to investigate her. Hill’s partner died several months later, and the Air Force discharged Hill several months after that.
Complaints of inappropriate investigations by service members rarely resulted in the investigations being stopped, and often resulted in retaliation. Such was the case of Nikki Galvan, a West Point cadet who stood up for what she believed were her rights under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” when she reported a Lieutenant Colonel for inappropriately questioning her about her sexual orientation and sexual activities.
In response to her complaint, Galvan’s diaries and three years worth of emails were seized, and information contained in them led
to her discharge.
In early 2000, a senior non-commissioned officer on the USS Carl Vinson told a sailor rumored to be gay, “I’m not the one you want to
tell that you are gay; I will discharge you from the Navy and send you home in a box.”