Thin Prisoner Abuse Story Hits Page 1

I am mostly unmoved by the latest war prisoner scandal, which is flared across the front page of today's LA Times. (here) It reports what the ACLU found out about the treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Cuba via a Freedom of Information lawsuit.

The story is confusing and poorly reported, blurring (deliberately or otherwise) the line between witnessed incidents and detainee allegations that must be held to a high level of scrutiny. It is also predicated on FBI agents who compain that FBI policies for prisoner interrogation aren't being followed.

Perhaps they shouldn't be. Agents in the FBI office in Omaha, interrogating someone suspected of insurance fraud, need different guidelines than interrogators in Guantanamo, who are working with hardened fanatics who would love to die if it meant taking out a few agents of "the Great Satan" with them.

The ACLU and their friends in the media have a bad habit of reporting harassment as torture. The two are not the same. Here are a few examples cited as torture in the article; clearly, they are far removed from the favored methods of Uday Hussein:

• sleep deprivation
• stress positions (being handcuffed in uncomfortable positions)
• loud music
• yelling at subjects
• hoods on heads
• and, earning special recognition with multiple mentions, being forced to sit with an Israeli flag drapped over the shoulders.

Trying once again to make a case out such meager lists of wrongdoings is not beating a dead horse; it's beating a dead gerbil.

I said at the beginning I was "mostly unmoved." There are some troubling items in this story, including reports that an under-age boy was raped at Abu Ghraib. The story is unclear whether there was one such case or two, and said a "contractor" was the perpetrator, but did not give the nationality of the contractor. I wonder why an under-age boy would be in Abu Ghraib in the first place, and would like more information about the investigation and prosecution of this case, because we must have a higher standard than UN Peacekeepers.

The story also included reports of burning with cigarettes and beatings. Again, the paper is not always clear about whether these incidents were witnessed by FBI agents or alleged by detainees, but if they did occur, the perpretrators need to be investigated and disciplined.

The larger question in all this is whether such techniques, if indeed they are used, hamper the gathering of intelligence from detainees. The Times says they do, and I think they're right. Torture's limited success comes from its diligent application; half-way measures that are more degrading than painful, like those explained in the article, probably only steel the reserves of the detainees.