Month: January 2012

This video appears to show four Marines laughing while they urinate on Afghan corpses. One of them jokingly says “Have a great day, buddy.”

Warning: Graphic

The individual who uploaded the YouTube video, which is becoming viral, is not known and the details in the caption that individual provided cannot be independently confirmed. The caption reads: “scout sniper team 4 with 3rd battalion 2nd marines out of camp lejeune peeing on dead talibans.” Whether or not the corpses are Afghan civilians or actual insurgents cannot be verified either.

Capt. Kendra N. Hardesty, a Marine Corps spokesman, said officials would “fully investigate” the incident. “The actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values,” she said in a statement, “and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps.” My question is, when is the promise to fully investigate such wretchedness finally not going to be enough for the American people?

When disgusting photographs of smiling U.S. soldiers proudly standing next to dead Abu Ghraib detainees were released, Americans were basically told to hide their eyes, buy their yellow ribbon bumper stickers and rest assured the incident would be investigated. When news broke of Manadel al-Jamadi, the Abu Ghraib prisoner who in 2003 was hung from his arms twisted behind his back, beaten, and tortured to death at the hands of U.S. interrogators, Americans were told this was the exception and that the war is still just. When the 5th Stryker Brigade in Kandahar – aka “Kill Team” – slaughtered Afghan children for the fun of it, took celebratory pictures next to their corpses, and mutilated their bodies for evidence of their trophy kill, again Americans were expected to buy into the “bad apple” excuse and forge ahead with the support our troops mantra. When American troops forced Afghan civilians to march ahead of them on roads believed to have been filled with bombs and landmines planted by insurgents, Americans were told it would be investigated and promptly looked away.

The point is not that every single U.S. soldier is the type to urinate on the faces of the dead or hunt Afghan children for sport. Rather, the point is that war invades and contaminates the humanity of individuals. And the context of war abroad while Americans sit safely at home pressures people to ignore its brutality in favor of “patriotism.”

The abuses borne on a daily basis by Afghans, and the embarrassment of being militarily dominated as they’ve been, exceed the imaginations of ordinary Americans. There are a million reasons the war in Afghanistan should end tomorrow. But, generally speaking, when people are at the point that they can make fun out of urinating on mangled bloody corpses, it’s about time for some reconsideration.

(h/t to Kevin Hall)

I touched upon similar issues here and here. Note also how this full spectrum dominance is being applied with renewed effort in Asia-Pacific, due to irrational fears of China.

A recent study found that nationalism “brings happiness.”

METHODOLOGY: Tim Reeskens, a sociologist from Catholic University in Belgium, and Matthew Wright, a political scientist at American University, categorized national pride into “ethnic nationalism,” which is tied to ancestry and religious beliefs, and “civic nationalism,” which prioritizes respect for a country’s institutions and laws.

They analyzed the responses of 40,677 people from 31 countries to questions that related to happiness and national pride in the 2008 wave of the European Values Study, and controlled for various demographic variables, including gender, work status, and per capita GDP.

RESULTS: Though national pride correlates with personal well-being, civic nationalists were generally the happiest. The joy of even the proudest ethnic nationalists barely surpassed that of people with the least civic pride.

CONCLUSION: Nationalism makes people feel good…

What a crock. Did it not occur to the researchers to delve into what else nationalism brings? Nationalism is the force that causes vast majorities in America to rally around the flag and fist pump to America’s endless warfare. It causes people to engage in systematic confirmation bias in the domain of international affairs, hawkishly harping on the crimes of other states, while habitually and religiously ignoring the comparatively larger crimes of their own. Nationalism turns tragic terrorist attacks into annual holidays of state worship. Nationalism is the source of so much delusion in contemporary politics – and especially war – that it has virtually no rival.

As I noted about in my article on nationalism back in July, political scientist Paul T. McCartney wrote that “enduring nationalist themes provided the basic structure in which Americans organized their comprehension of and reaction to the terrorist attacks” and that America’s “insular preoccupation with its own lofty distinctiveness” galvanized “a sense of mission, which sometimes emerges as a crusading mentality.” It was “productive of little,” he explained, “but superstition and bloodshed.”

In announcing a violent military surge in Afghanistan in 2009, Obama told Americans that our values “are a creed that calls us together … behind a common purpose.” Doctrines of exceptionalism were the rallying cry of his speech on the intervention in Libya. “America is different,” he said, and it is “our common humanity” and “values” that have impelled us to war. In announcing the eventual withdrawal of surge troops and the continuing commitment to warfare in Afghanistan this summer, Obama said we must be steadfast in “extending the promise of America.” To say that mass murder of civilians via a drone war in Pakistan is for “national security” simply garners obedient nods and support for the policy.

George Orwell wrote that “the abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.” Political scientist Benedict Anderson famously called this unit an “imagined community” made up mostly of strangers held together by pretenses about their countrymen, rather than actual connections to most or even any of them. “Ultimately,” Anderson wrote, “it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”

It may make people attest to their own happiness, but evolutionary psychology tells us that this isn’t because the actual nationalism makes them happy. Rather, being part of the group has been an essential ingredient for survival and well-being going back to our most primitive ancestors. Dissenting from the self-congratulatory whims about living in the greatest country on Earth tends to earn you disdain and exclusion. And now, in both primitive and modern societies, fear of punishment or social ostracism is an imperative tool in reinforcing nationalism. Being a part of that group and ganging up on “the other” – Iraqis, Iranians, Afghans, other Americans, whomever – has a way of fortifying this fraternity and war fever.

As Orwell put it:

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral color when it is committed by “our” side.

Does it make people happy? Eh, perhaps in a way. Is it a force for good? Absolutely not.

Another Iranian nuclear scientist has been assassinated in Tehran and a familiar pattern is emerging: Weeks before a new round of talks, all sides escalate and provoke, mainly to improve their negotiating position at the upcoming talks.

The West has adopted new sanctions and is pressing for an oil embargo. The Iranians, in turn, have started enrichment at the Fordow facility and have warned it will close the Straits of Hormuz if the West proceeds with an oil embargo.

But there are also actors that escalate at times not to strengthen their position at the talks, but to scuttle the talks. The attack on the British embassy in Tehran late last year was partly motivated by the desire of one political faction in Iran to undo the talks. Yesterday’s assassination of another Iranian nuclear scientist was likely conducted by a regional actor who prefers a military confrontation with Iran over a compromise that would permit Iran to retain nuclear enrichment capabilities, even if it doesn’t build a bomb.

Indeed, in late November 2010, nuclear scientist Majid Shahriari was assassinated in an identical way as the killing of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan yesterday. That assignation took pace only seven weeks before a new round of scheduled talks between the P5+1 and Iran in Istanbul. Yesterday’s assassination also precedes the next round of talks with a few weeks.

When Afghan President Hamid Karzai demanded last week that the U.S. cede control of the detention facilities at Bagram airbase, it was ironic, in a cynical way. Came forth the opportunity to pit Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama against the leader of one of the most corrupt and abusive governments in the world; the latter was teaching the former about human rights, the narrative went. A few days later, an Afghan investigative commission accused the American military of abusing detainees in the Bagram prison facilities and reiterated President Hamid Karzai’s demand that the U.S. turn the detainees over to Afghan custody.

Karzai’s statement cited reports of human rights abuse at the facility and said U.S. control of the prison and indefinite detention of Afghan citizens violated the Afghan Constitution as well as international covenants. And he was right. There are now about 3,000 detainees in Bagram, up from 1,700 since June and five times the amount there when Barack Obama took office. Most of them have not been charged, have seen no evidence against them, and do not have the right to be represented by a lawyer. Attorney for Human Rights First Daphne Eviatar said in a recent CBS interview that “It’s worse than Guantanamo, because there are fewer rights.” There is also  strong evidence of serious abuse and torture in black cites near Bagram.

But Karzai isn’t any more on the side of human rights as Obama is. Less than a month ago, Karzai signed a decree which would transfer control of Afghan prisons from the Justice Ministry to the Interior Ministry, starting today, January 10, 2012. Not a good sign. The Interior Ministry operates the Afghan National Police, a gang of thugs implicated in a long and ugly list of torture and other ill treatment. “Criminal justice in Afghanistan will not be improved by giving the police free rein of the prisons,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Greater police involvement in jails is likely to lead to more torture, not less.”

Back in October, the United Nations released a report which found that detainees in Afghan-controlled prisons are hung from the ceilings by their wrists, severely beaten with cables and wooden sticks, have their toenails torn off, are treated with electric shock, and even have their genitals twisted until they lose consciousness. The study, which covered 47 facilities sites in 22 provinces, found “a compelling pattern and practice of systematic torture and ill-treatment” during interrogation by U.S.-supported Afghan authorities. And they weren’t all alone: both U.S. and NATO military trainers and counterparts have been working closely with these authorities, consistently supervising the detention facilities and funding their operations.

The U.S. and their lavishly supported thuggish Afghan counterparts are apparently equivalent in their administration of torture and disregard for human rights. The issue is not whether to let the Americans do it or let the Afghans. The issue is to provide due justice for the people we have caged all over Afghanistan. “Too difficult to prosecute, too dangerous to release” doesn’t cut it.

As the airwaves are set ablaze about the Evil Iranian Menace sentencing to death a former U.S. Marine, Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, suspected of spying for the CIA, let us remind ourselves of our own government’s trampling of individual rights.

Over the weekend, the New York Times (to their credit) published two Op-Eds by former Guantanamo detainees. Both were perfectly innocent, both exposed to torture, both were held for years without charge or trial.

Murat Kurnaz is a German national of Turkish descent and was kidnapped off of a tourist bus in Pakistan in 2001 after the U.S. promised bounties for every person either Afghan warlords or Pakistani police picked up. He was held in Kandahar, then in Guantanamo.

During their interrogations, they dunked my head under water and punched me in the stomach; they don’t call this waterboarding but it amounts to the same thing. I was sure I would drown.

At one point, I was chained to the ceiling of a building and hung by my hands for days. A doctor sometimes checked if I was O.K.; then I would be strung up again. The pain was unbearable.

Kurnaz notes in his piece the strange experience of seeing the German officials who eventually secured his release “teach the Americans a basic lesson about the rule of law” after “the Americans insisted on a trial for war criminals at Nuremberg.”

Lakhdar Boumediene, a Bosnian, was arrested on unsubstantiated charges in Sarajevo in 2001 and held without charge or trial for seven years in an American prison shrouded in secrecy, Guantanamo Bay.

Bosnia’s highest court investigated the American claim, found that there was no evidence against me and ordered my release. But instead, the moment I was released American agents seized me and the five others. We were tied up like animals and flown to Guantánamo, the American naval base in Cuba. I arrived on Jan. 20, 2002.

…I was kept awake for many days straight. I was forced to remain in painful positions for hours at a time. These are things I do not want to write about; I want only to forget…I went on a hunger strike for two years because no one would tell me why I was being imprisoned. Twice each day my captors would shove a tube up my nose, down my throat and into my stomach so they could pour food into me. It was excruciating, but I was innocent and so I kept up my protest.

And let’s not forget that the regime which has codified a system of indefinite detention without charge or trial even for its own citizens is the Benevolent Obama Administration, not the Evil Iranian Menace. And the regime that is garrisoning Iran’s surroundings with provocative militarism, heaping punitive sanctions on core economic sectors, arming enemies with nuclear weapons, engaging cyber-terrorism, commercial sabotage, targeted assassinations, and proxy wars is the Benevolent Obama Administration, not the Evil Iranian Menace.

Pretty much nobody knows the truth about the Hekmati case, which was according to the defendant’s mother, “the result of a process that was neither transparent nor fair.” But at least the Iranians are letting him appeal the verdict.