GIs calling out for help and speaking the truth

Steve Morse’s hands are rough from years working in sheet metal, and his voice is soft and a little hoarse, as if he were still teaching math to fifth graders from 7 a.m. to sundown, and then volunteering a few hours a week on the G.I. Rights Hotline. Now, he coordinates the Hotline for CCCO, which means part of his job is to say, over and over, to the press: "Last year we got 32,000 calls." Except, as he said Monday night, that number only counts the calls coming over 1-800-FYI-95GI. It doesn’t count the calls directly to offices of the groups that offer military counseling, the emails, the tens of thousands of hits a day at girights.org and similar pages. The number of G.I.s who want help — most of whom want to explore ways out — is likely three times higher. Steve, who was in town hoping our little New York group would grow and become stronger, thus carries about 100,000 calls a year in the lines on his hands.

Steve’s background is rather singular: he went from a student deferment to a conscientious objector status, easy because he was a Quaker; then decided even that was too privileged and joined the Army, where he shot at the ground, organized against the war, and was courts-martialed for it twice. He was watching the war from 1963 on, and he said with some authority to me Tuesday morning. "This is only going to get worse."

That’s what makes revelations like today’s report from the generals so maddening. Tell me what was not predictable below:

In interviews and briefings this week, some of the generals pulled
back from recent suggestions, some by the same officers, that positive
trends in Iraq could allow a major drawdown in the 138,000 American
troops late this year or early in 2006. One officer suggested Wednesday
that American military involvement could last "many years."

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The officer said the ban appeared to have been announced by the new
defense minister, Sadoun al-Dulaimi, without wider government approval,
and would be replaced by a "more moderate" policy. To raise the level
of public confidence, the officer said, the new government would need
success in cutting insurgent attacks and meeting popular impatience for
improvements in public services like electricity that are worse, for
many Iraqis, than they were last year. But he emphasized the need for
caution - and the time it may take to complete the American mission
here - notes that recur often in the private conversations of American
officers in Iraq.

"I think it’s going to succeed in the long run, even if it takes
years, many years," he said. On a personal note, he added that he, like
many American soldiers, had spent long periods of duty related to Iraq,
and he said: "We believe in the mission that we’ve got. We believe in
it because we’re in it, and if we let go of the insurgency and take our
foot off its throat, then this country could fail and go back into
civil war and chaos."

"We believe in it because we’re in it." Pardon me for not re-assessing whether tactics that have recently produced, at best, dispiriting body counts and a few flattened cities are conducive to improving people’s lives. Oh wait! I’m wrong! They are considering one change.

Arriving at a lunch with reporters from a meeting with Iraqi cabinet
ministers and military commanders, the officer said he expected the
government to make an early move to revise the defense minister’s
announcement of a ban on raids on mosques and religious schools. The
revised policy, the American officer implied, would allow Iraqi forces,
backed by Americans, to raid mosques when they are used as insurgent
strongholds.

So much for the credibility of the Iraqi defense minister, or to your claim of trying to balance respect for religion and "mission goals" that ever more amount to damage control. That claim, no matter how many Allahu Akbars your clients and PR people spit out, was fricasseed at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, even before Michael Isikoff found a military source to confirm detainees’ repeated reports of Koran-trashing by interrogators. By then, as Anne Applebaum at the Post notes,

But surely the larger point is not the story itself but that
it was so eminently plausible, in Pakistan, Afghanistan and everywhere
else. And it was plausible precisely because interrogation techniques
designed to be offensive to Muslims were used in Iraq and Guantanamo,
as administration and military officials have also confirmed. For
example:

· Dogs. Military
interrogators deployed them specifically because they knew Muslims
consider dogs unclean. In a memo signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez in
September 2003, and available online, the then-commander in Iraq
actually approved using the technique to "exploit Arab fear of dogs."

·
Nudity. We know (and the Muslim world knows) from the Abu Ghraib
photographs that nudity has been used to humiliate Muslim men. More
important, we know that nudity was also approved as an interrogation
technique by Donald Rumsfeld himself. He signed off on a November 2002
policy memo, later revised but also available online, that specifically
listed "removal of clothing" as a permissible, "category II"
interrogation technique, along with "removal of facial hair," also a
technique designed to offend Muslims who wear beards.

·
Sexual harassment. The military’s investigation of U.S. detention and
interrogation practices, led by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III, stated
that at Guantanamo there were "two female interrogators who, on their
own initiative, touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive
manner in order to incur stress based on the detainees’ religious
beliefs." Although the report said both had been reprimanded, there is
no doubt, again, that the tactic was designed for men whose religion
prohibits them from having contact with women other than their wives.

·
Fake menstrual blood. When former detainees began claiming that they
had been smeared with menstrual blood intended to make them "unclean"
and therefore unable to pray, their lawyers initially dismissed the
story as implausible. But the story has been confirmed by Army Sgt.
Erik Saar, a former Guantanamo translator, who told the Associated
Press that in a forthcoming book he will describe a female interrogator
who smeared a prisoner with red ink, claimed it was menstrual blood and
left, saying, "Have a fun night in your cell without any water to clean
yourself."

There is no question that these were
tactics designed to offend, no question that they were put in place
after 2001 and no question that many considered them justified. Since
the Afghan invasion, public supporters of "exceptional" interrogation
methods have argued that in the special, unusual case of the war on
terrorism, we may have to suspend our fussy legality, ignore our high
ideals and resort to some unpleasant tactics that our military had
never used. Opponents of these methods, among them some of the
military’s own interrogation experts, have argued, on the contrary,
that "special methods" are not only ineffective but counterproductive:
They might actually inspire Muslim terrorists instead of helping to
defeat them. They might also make it easier, say, for fanatics in
Jalalabad to use two lines of a magazine article to incite riots.

This Newsweek brouhaha has been infuriating on so many levels — from the magazine’s craven retraction, meaning that Isikoff’s military source likely got cold feet, to the Pentagon demanding the impossible feat of repairing the reputation f the U.S. military abroad, despite ample evidence that degrading Muslim beliefs was common and often an approved technique at Guantanamo. The link above from Jeanne at Body and Soul, which links to Human Rights First’s cheat sheet on same, also asks the obvious question: why wasn’t Newsweek working from day on to shake loose those sources? Why weren’t Dexter Filkins and Judith Miller (ha!) ordered to chase that dog till it couldn’t hunt? (Update: CJR Daily makes some similar points here.)

The synergy is breathtaking. Dismember the press while broadcasting to the world, including the young men and women in uniform you accuse them of endangering, that the fault is in the messenger, not the men who decided that the way to stop violence based on religious hatred was to capture and humiliate semi-random Muslims turned "enemy combatants." By extension, say they’ve "manipulated" Muslims who saw in that Newsweek story confirmation of their lives. And therefore make concrete, as solidly as the Western Wall of Jerusalem, the racist "Arab=terrorist" equation that made MPs at these prisons so confident in their assumptions — thereby guaranteeing it’ll happen again.

And when it does, the next Aidan Delgado, the next Camilo Mejia, the next Kevin Benderman may just be there. Or some other, more confused young man or woman, who’s not quite with the program, who may not be sure what to think but reaches for the camera function on her phone and presses Send. Or just gets mom back home to call the Hotline.

Any journalist covering this war who does not call Steve Morse on a regular basis — which is to say, most of them — is shirking responsibility and in the process, destroying their own profession.

The alternative, though it may require travel or ruining your eyesight on PDFS of FOIA’d documents, is at any rate far less boring. You want leads? You want to be noticed? Then take what Romenesko at the Poynter Institute calls a "risk-taking" approach to stories — and don’t give a damn if the press flacks don’t return your calls.

Maybe Dan Rather, now that he’s back at his old 60 MINUTES gig for a brief spate, can start pulling up some floorboards and showing us the bodies. The rest of us need to act as if we, like he, don’t have anything to lose by doing it. What we have to lose by NOT doing it is both obvious, and hurts too hard to say out loud.

Add the victims of torture and dead civilians to that 100,000 above. The number of voices that should run through all our hands. The noise, for anyone who’s listening, is deafening.

Cross-posted at Book of Days.