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August 26, 2004
Rampant Hostage-Taking in Iraq
Phil Carter highlights a very important fact coming out of the newly-released Abu Ghraib reports. It's something we knew from sporadic, if widespread, reports. Women and children were taken hostage by the U.S. military:
These two reports will get all the publicity, but it's two lesser-known studies that should trouble Americans even more. The first report, authored by the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth in May 2004, indicates that several American units in Iraq detained wives and children of insurgents in an attempt to make the insurgents turn themselves in or talk while in custody. According to a study by U.S. Army Maj. Christopher Varhola (one of the report's authors), it was also common practice for Americans to "collectively detain ... all males in a given area or village for up to several weeks or months." The collective and family detentions served to "alienate much of the population," Varhola concluded. Such collective detentions played a major role in inflating the Abu Ghraib prison population, to the point where the Red Cross reported that 70 percent to 90 percent of detainees were "arrested by mistake." (Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, an Army spokesman in Baghdad, said there is currently no policy endorsing such detentions, and such past detentions fell outside the bounds of standard operating procedure. But Johnson said such detentions could still occur where family members were personally connected to insurgency activities, and commanders decided it was necessary to detain them.)
And, of course, all this constitutes a war crime under pretty much any existing international legal structure you pick governing rules of warfare:
Where international law speaks to these issues, it is generally quite clear. The 4th Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War flatly prohibits the practice of detaining insurgent family members to get intelligence. Article 31 of that treaty prohibits "physical or moral coercion" to obtain information from citizens of an occupied state; taking someone's wife and children hostage certainly qualifies as moral coercion. Likewise, Article 33 proscribes the use of collective punishment, and Article 34 states plainly that "[t]he taking of hostages is prohibited." Similarly, international law and U.S. law clearly prohibit torture, whether for intelligence purposes or not. The U.N. Convention Against Torture makes such acts an international crime, and Section 2340A of the federal criminal code outlaws the practice as well.
I don't know if one needs to explain how incredibly wrong-headed this policy is even on pragmatic grounds -- let alone the blatant immorality and the illegality of the practice. Let's just say people don't like their children being imprisoned in a place like Abu Ghraib and might hold a grudge for a long, long time. Is that too hard to comprehend?
Posted by zeynep at August 26, 2004 12:16 AM
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