2004-05-27

Editorial

"This Is What You Get When You Lose"

Torturing others is more than spontaneously mistreating and abusing prisoners. It begins earlier with an attitude.

One can get a quick indoctrination into what that attitude is by looking at a movie clip from a Frontline TV show that was sent to me by Sam Bahour. If you look at the movie clip and then transfer the attitude of the soldier speaking in it to a prison situation, you can get a brief insight into the underpinnings of some of the U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison.

http://www.prisonplanet.tv/video/050204stolewood.htm

The extent to which that attitude prevails among the American population, from the "plain folks" in our smallest communities to the highest echelons of our government and the military is not known. One can only surmise from the wide public support of the illegal invasion of Iraq that the attitude is present in a substantial portion of the populace.

It is a punitive, winner versus loser attitude, coupled with a "bring 'em on" disposition and it pervades a significant segment of our population. For those who possess these characteristics, it starts in early childhood and if reinforced sufficiently, extends into adulthood where it becomes fixed as a personality trait.

It is present at all levels of sports activities, in the business world, in our schools, our neighborhoods and even in our religions. Coupled with the right emotional trigger . . . stress, rage, fear, and with a lack of smarts it can lead precisely to what happened at Abu Ghraib.

Those who are able to control it, the more intelligent of the type, keep it within themselves, but are, nevertheless, driven by it. They become the administrators, planners, CEOs, power brokers who administer the torture. Those who can't contain it act out, not only following orders to torment others, but doing so with glee, relishing the release of tension that accompanies the action.

The "torture," can take many forms. It can be physical, as at Abu Ghraib, but psychological as well. Making "strict hard headed business decisions" that cost people their jobs and lead them into deep despair is a form of torture. Outsourcing of work is a form of torture when viewed from the perspective of the person whose job is lost, family destroyed, life-savings exhausted. It operates at all levels of society.

You can see it in one of its manifestations in the movie clip. The main character and another soldier fire their pistols at the car, releasing their own tensions a bit; then, controlling his emotions, the lead soldier signals to a tank driver to run over the car. The tanker obeys, probably getting immediate gratification from obeying the order, actually running the car over twice when once was all that was necessary. He had to show the Iraqis in question what a winner does to losers. One can hear the other troops laughing as the tank destroys the car. Then the final words, looking directly into the camera, not a shred of shame or guilt or sympathy: "This is what you get when you lose."

"This is what you get when you lose" is related to "This is what you get when you disobey me" but I won't go into that now. Perhaps in later editorials we can explore some research findings relating certain kinds of behavior to whether one was physically punished as a child or not. The dynamics are complicated. The turn a physically punished kid can take in adulthood is not entirely predictable; anything from becoming submissive to becoming a punisher oneself.

Man's felt superiority to other men is one factor at the core of wars, of atrocities. An almost inbred desire that some people have to make other people lose drives them to commit unsavory acts. Obviously, when you go to war you go to win and in so doing you have to make someone lose and by the very nature of war you can't afford not to be a winner, so you dump on the others as hard as you can, just to make sure. Shock and awe. The bigger the shock and awe, the more inadequate the user of it.

And, if you can't do it yourself, if the job is too big for you or you are not brave enough, you do it vicariously using other people's children as your means to the end of destroying others. You create a phony aura of patriotism or of religious fervor, depending on what country you live in.

The need to win, to conquer, is the basis of all arms development and use. The greater the need to win, the more punitive the weapons developed and used. Examples are the bombing of Dresden, the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the UN sanctions against Iraq that led to the deaths of 500,000 children.

And while shock and awe kills untold numbers of Iraqis, untold numbers of American citizens cheer, wave flags and sneer at those who disagree because "this is what you get when you lose."

It is the basis of the "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" mentality.

It was the basis of the following incident reported by Patrick Sloyan, writing about the Gulf War in November of 2002:

Leon Daniel, as did others who reported from Vietnam during the 1960s,
knew about war and death. So he was puzzled by the lack of corpses at
the tip of the Neutral Zone between Saudi Arabia and Iraq on Feb. 25,
1991. Clearly there had been plenty of killing. The 1st Infantry
Division (Mechanized) had smashed through the defensive front-line of
Saddam Hussein's army the day before, Feb. 24, the opening of the Desert
Storm ground war to retake Kuwait. Daniel, representing United Press
International, was part of a press pool held back from witnessing the
assault on 8,000 Iraqi defenders. "They wouldn't let us see anything,"
said Daniel, who had seen about everything as a combat correspondent.

The artillery barrage alone was enough to cause a slaughter. A 30-minute
bombardment by howitzers and multiple-launch rockets scattering
thousands of tiny bomblets preceded the attack by 8,400 American
soldiers riding in 3,000 M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks, Bradley fighting
vehicles, Humvees, armored personnel carriers and other vehicles.

It wasn't until late in the afternoon of Feb. 25 that the press pool was
permitted to see where the attack occurred. There were groups of Iraqi
prisoners. About 2,000 had surrendered. But there were no bodies, no
stench of feces that hovers on a battlefield, no blood stains, no bits
of human beings. "You get a little firefight in Vietnam and the bodies
would be stacked up like cordwood," Daniel said. Finally, Daniel found
the Division public affairs officer, an Army major.

"Where the hell are all the bodies?" Daniel said.

"What bodies?" the officer replied.

Daniel and the rest of the world would not find out until months later
why the dead had vanished. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them
alive and firing their weapons from World War I-style trenches, were
buried by plows mounted on Abrams main battle tanks. The Abrams flanked
the trench lines so that tons of sand from the plow spoil funneled into
the trenches. Just behind the tanks, actually straddling the trench
line, came M2 Bradleys pumping 7.62mm machine gun bullets into the Iraqi
troops.

"I came through right after the lead company," said Army Col. Anthony
Moreno, who commanded the lead brigade during the 1st Mech's assault.
"What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with people's arms and legs
sticking out of them. For all I know, we could have killed thousands."

A thinner line of trenches on Moreno's left flank was attacked by the
1st Brigade commanded by Col. Lon Maggart. He estimated his troops
buried about 650 Iraqi soldiers. Darkness halted the attack on the Iraqi
trench line. By the next day, the 3rd Brigade joined in the grisly
innovation. "A lot of people were killed,"' said Col. David Weisman, the
unit commander.

One reason there was no trace of what happened in the Neutral Zone on
those two days were the ACEs. It stands for Armored Combat Earth movers
and they came behind the armored burial brigade leveling the ground and
smoothing away projecting Iraqi arms, legs and equipment.

PFC Joe Queen of the 1st Engineers was impervious to small arms fire
inside the cockpit of the massive earth mover. He remained cool and
professional as he smoothed away all signs of the carnage. Queen won the
Bronze Star for his efforts. "A lot of guys were scared," Queen said,
"but I enjoyed it." Col. Moreno estimated more than 70 miles of trenches
and earthen bunkers were attacked, filled in and smoothed over on Feb. 24-26.

"This is what you get when you lose?"

8000 Iraqi soldiers armed with rifles and machine guns are attacked by 8,400 American soldiers riding in 3,000 M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks, Bradley fighting
vehicles, Humvees, armored personnel carriers and other vehicles and that wasn't enough? "This is what you get when you lose" means burying human beings alive in sand while gunning them down to make sure they lose and then plowing the evidence under?

When you get to this point, to these depths of depravity, you've lost. When you slaughter people who are overwhelmed, outgunned, outmanned, you've lost. You've lost whatever trace of humanity you had. You've lost whatever sense of decency you had. You've lost the right to be considered a member of the human race.

The majority of the citizens of this country don't know about these kinds of episodes, of which there are far more than we think. What's even worse, most of them don't want to know. They don't want to hear about it. Yet, they flock to a theater to see an extremely bloody film of the crucifixion of Christ, wallowing in bloody scenes, yet protest if the body of an American soldier is shown in the newspaper. So, if it isn't the blood that's upsetting, what is it?

How do we get beyond this sad place? How do we get beyond this place we're in where at last count nearly 50% of the population still thinks Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks and that he had weapons of mass destruction? How do we get beyond the attitude of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who said we were justified in using sanctions on Iraq that killed 500,000 Iraqi kids under 5 years of age?

"This is what you get when you lose." For all intents and purposes we've lost in Iraq. We've lost militarily and morally. As losers, we might well ask what we got?

We got an awareness of a large segment of American humanity that wallows in its own ignorance and in its lack of caring about others;

We got a democracy that is eroding due to its lack of moral character;

We got a rising police state and our hard fought for liberties are slowly slipping away;

We got a substantial number of ignorant, religiously fanatic lemmings who became enthralled to a leadership that has no sense of humanity, no sense of decency, no common sense and even less intelligence, led by an egotistical incompetent who fancies himself the new messiah.

We got us into a situation where we are now collectively flailing about randomly, not knowing in which direction to go. We got a President who attempts to beguile us with a "What Me Worry?" simplicity while his challenger acts like "Little Sir Echo."

No one did this to us. We did it to ourselves because most of us didn't know what was going on. We attacked ourselves with the most deadly weapon of all . . . ignorance. The extent of our collective ignorance is both shocking and awe inspiring, on a par with the 500,000 kids killed and the 3,000 Abrams tanks and other armed vehicles.

We've succumbed to a leadership that stalked that ignorance and deliberately took advantage of it, knowing what it was doing each step of the way.

We have nothing to fear but man at his worst. We have reached a low point in our history and the punitive types are getting more punitive as they get pushed to the wall, striking out blindly at imaginary bogey men. They can't bring themselves to the awareness that they have met the enemy and it is themselves.