May 6-12, 2004

pretzel logic

The Tony Buck Stops Here

by Howard Altman

"Now you know how easy it is." I will never forget that quote, uttered by a charming old mobster in a wheelchair, who was on trial in Courtroom 17A of the U.S. District Court on Sixth and Market.

Anthony "Tony Buck" Piccolo was smiling broadly as he uttered those words, upon watching a reporter loudly rub out a bug with her shoe.

The smile -- from mobster to media -- hammered home the point.

Anyone can behave badly, Tony Buck said with his toothy smirk. Humanity is never a lock.

Wherever he is, I imagine Saddam Hussein is having a Tony Buck moment right about now.

We went to war to remove him because of weapons of mass destruction, no, because of concern about terrorism, no, because we wanted to liberate the people of Iraq from the prisons of the torturer.

Damn, that’s not it either.

Not if our treatment of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison -- one of Hussein’s favorite houses of pain when he was still running the country -- is any indication.

As more news emerges about the abuse of prisoners there, and possibly at other locations in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan and Gitmo, we are all learning just how easy it can be to shuck off the restraints of so-called civilization.

Not that this is anything new.

During our war of independence, captured British soldiers were sometimes killed for being traitors to the patriot cause. The abuse in Abu Ghraib -- and perhaps 10 suspicious deaths of prisoners elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan first reported in Wednesday’s New York Times -- also happened in the name of a greater good.

The British were killed to put the fear of God into anyone thinking about fighting against the Revolution.

Prisoners in this war, apparently, were mistreated, and maybe killed, to extract information.

According to details of an Army investigation provided to CNN, prisoners were threatened with a pistol and with military dogs, sodomized with a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick, and forced naked into compromising positions.

While the behavior of U.S. and British soldiers was not as brutal as what took place in Abu Ghraib under Hussein, it still carried on the spirit of the dictator’s evil intentions.

To date, six military police officers have been reprimanded, as was their commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who, in several interviews, said that military police should not bear the brunt of any punishment, because her soldiers were given instructions by military intelligence.

From the smiling faces on the soldiers shown in pictures aired first by 60 Minutes II, it is apparent that the new keepers of the Abu Ghraib prison -- despite any lessons we’ve learned along the way in places like the ovens of Auschwitz, the killing fields of Cambodia or the jungles of Rwanda -- are finding out how easy it is to lose their humanity.

The good news in this ugly mess is that, unlike what happened with the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, a U.S. soldier came forward to expose the abuses in time for them to be stopped.

And now there are several investigations, including one in the U.S. Senate, that are taking place soon enough after the abuses were discovered to institute some real changes if politicians and the military exhibit any real will to do so.

Whether that will really exists is the big question.

It is very likely that the MPs who are now the target of disciplinary actions not only did not act on their own, but are just the tip of the iceberg. In a morning show interview, Karpinski said she counted more than a dozen sets of boots in one of the pictures taken in Abu Ghraib.

If the soldiers in those pictures were just following orders, they seemed to be not just enjoying their work, but enjoying a level of comfort in doing so in front of a camera.

That comfort level did not occur in a vacuum, which means, somewhere along the chain of command, somebody aside from Karpinski has some serious questions to answer.

The abuses at Abu Ghraib and other military prisons further highlight that we are fighting a war that we should not be fighting and doing so in a wholly inappropriate manner.

George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld can talk all they want about how the images from Abu Ghraib disgusted and shocked them.

But their moral high ground was lost the moment they cooked up this unmitigated disaster -- well before the 9/11 attacks that they like to use as an excuse.

Unlike our troops in the field, Bush and Rumsfeld aren’t just learning how easy it is.

Like Tony Buck, they already knew.