Posted on 05/10/2004 2:05:39 PM PDT by Dick Holmes
Found on Google News, the story claims:
The report, published in full on Monday by the Wall Street Journal, said arrests tended to follow a pattern. "Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property.
"Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people. Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles."
The report said some coalition military intelligence officers estimated that "between 70 per cent and 90 per cent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake".
(Excerpt) Read more at news.ft.com ...
Interesting point. Since the official Iraqi army was disbanded, I wouldn't think that any of the miscreants who are currently trying to kill coalition members would be eligible for Geneva protections.
It seems that detainees were often rounded up indiscriminately in house-to-house raids. When the ostensible suspect wasn't available, their sons etc. were taken, threatened, frequently beaten, their 'crimes' never explained, often mistreated while in custody and released without explanation or apology.
And yes, some of those mistreated were elderly, handicapped or sick.
Absolutely clear in an environment where everyone wears uniforms. A lot more murky where non-uniformed people are involved in combat - and in part, this is why the penalties for performing war without uniforms are so severe.
It's a point drilled into the heads of all U.S. soldiers, so it's hardly subtle. And technical though it may be, it is a core definition.
Yes, they could have been shot, but they weren't. They were taken into custody. World of difference.
Nonetheless, they fall into an intentianal treaty black-hole. They are specifically and explicitly excluded from protections of the Geneva conventions. This is done so as to protect noncombatants from the effects of legitimate military actions.
By the Geneva Conventions, rather than liberal la-la land, the people who are conducting combat without being clearly identified as a military force are responsible for the harm that comes as a side-effect of taking them out.
A similar example: Using an occupied protected area for combat operations or munitions storage is illegal under the conventions. If another military comes and blows the whole mosque or school, or hospital to bits, those who occupied the facility, as well as any who had to do with ordering the facility to be used in that matter are the only ones guilty of a war-crime - not the ones who blew it up. Like in OKC, if attacking that building was an acto of war, killing all of the kids would have been a war-crime by our government for placing them within a legitimate target, not the attacker for having killed them.
Each of these examples, as well as the "technicality" is a form of using non-combatants or protected places as a shield - which legally, is the act that endangers the non-combatants. That crime renders pretty near all treaty protections void for those involved. Conducting War without a uniform uses the common people in the area as a shield.
I like that, unnamed source and failure to define "deprived of liberty," which probaly means held for a few minutes while the area was searched.
I hope you're right. I posted this as a breaking story, but what I'm reading now about the Red Cross report is, this might be older news, at least to Powell, Rice and Wolfowitz, than I thought.
The inspectors were also able to document the exact sort of behavior that has produced a firestorm over the last two weeks: "acts of humiliation such as being made to stand naked against the wall of the cell with arms raised or with women's underwear over the heads for prolonged periods — while being laughed at by guards, including female guards, and sometimes photographed in this position."
The report also said military intelligence officers had confirmed the inspectors' impression that those "methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information."
The 24-page report, completed in February, appears to contradict several statements by senior Pentagon officials in recent days concerning how and when the military learned of potential abuses in Iraq, how they reacted to reports of abuses and how widespread the practices might have been.
A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva said Monday that the organization's president, Jakob Kellenberger, complained about the prison abuses directly to top Bush administration officials during a two-day visit to Washington in mid-January when he met with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. (from the NYTimes.)
I'm afraid we haven't seen the worst fallout of this story, whether it's true or not, the public perception is going to hurt us.
/john
/john
That AP story is from the Settle (Please) Thymes. It's not the most accurate newspaper in the country. Sometimes they lean a little left. Just a little.
But that's ok. And I thought the Kerry advert was pretty cute. Not smart, or good... but cute.
/john
Note to self: Cross cultural, anti-lawyer, inside jokes may not always work. Lose the cross-cultural and inside joke part....
/john
The AP story was carried by many other outlets as well, that's just the one that I first clicked on when I Googled the story. I'm not a regular reader of the Seattle Times, though perhaps anything left of the Washington Times is suspect in your books?
Which newspapers do you trust?
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