Empire Notes

Human Rights Watch has just come out with a report based on interviews with soldiers from the 82nd Airborne based at Forward Operating Base Mercury, 10 miles east of Fallujah. According to these soldiers, in the time leading up to March 2004, when the 82nd Airborne was replaced by the Marines, torture at FOB Mercury was "systematic and … known at varying levels of command."

By the standards of torture already uncovered, in Bagram and elsewhere, this was minor – breaking of bones, keeping detainees in stress positions for over 12 hours, denial of food and water. Those interviewed didn't speak of electric shock, beating prisoners to death, making them roll in feces, or other inhuman extremes.

But what's interesting is the clear light these interviews shed on the motivation for these acts. Sometimes these things were done at the behest of the CIA and intelligence services to prepare detainees for interrogation, and at other times simply for fun or because people were bored.

In the following quote, keep in mind that PUC (person under control) is the standard term in Iraq for detainees:

"On their day off people would show up all the time. Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport. … One day [a sergeant] shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a mini Louisville Slugger, a metal bat. He was the bleeping cook. He shouldn't be in with no PUCs."

These acts were commonly spoken of. There were two things people liked to do. One was to "Blank a PUC" (it rhymes), which meant to beat him. The other was to "Smoke a PUC," meaning to keep him in stress positions for hours.

According to an interviewee, " We had guys from all over the base just come to guard PUCs so they could bleep them up."

This is not a story of our "brave, virtuous boys and girls" who volunteer to protect America, only to be deceived and forced into beating and torturing defenseless Iraqis by heartless, cruel elites. And neither is the entire war on Iraq. However heartless and cruel those elites are, their attitudes are reflected – often with enthusiasm -- in a great many ordinary Americans and an even higher percentage of soldiers.

This is a reality that the antiwar movement doesn't want to grapple with. Strangely, to much of the movement, this war is a moral horror being carried out on the ground not merely by extraordinarily virtuous human beings, but by veritable angels in human flesh.

Someone who, unlike me, was not forced by Hurricane Rita to cancel attendance at the big DC protest, told me of seeing a woman with a T-shirt that said "Support Our Troops" along with a graphic that is one of the iconic pictures of tortured Iraqis (if I remember correctly, the Hooded Man). It is hard to overstate the moral (and intellectual) idiocy of such a juxtaposition (no, it was not ironic).

This strategy of cognitive dissonance has not worked. Even though we have a cause that in theory everyone ought to support – after all, the United States is losing the war – we have not achieved mainstream legitimacy. One index of that was that, with a few honorable exceptions, celebrities and Democratic politicians stayed away from the protest in droves. And, though it's hard to find anyone enthusiastic about this war, the number of people for immediate withdrawal hovers around 25-30% in most polls.

Perhaps people find it odd, as I do, to imagine that such an immoral enterprise as the Iraq war is being carried out by such paragons of virtue as our boys and girls, and thus lose the moral dimension of our critique. Perhaps it is easy for them to see a man screaming in Arabic and sawing off a man's head on videotape as savage and barbaric but not so easy for them to see a group of fatigue-wearing men beating a young Afghan taxi-driver to death that way – and perhaps we haven't helped them to do so. And perhaps, just perhaps, that is why they continue to accept the idea that we can't "cut and run," that we can't abandon the good things we're doing in Iraq.