bookofdays

speaking of reports and rape

The Air Force chooses this week to release its eval. (I won't comment on timing re the Convention or the Abu Ghraib - yet.)

Until I have time to read the actual report, I'll just reprint below the entire AP story (it's short). The statements about cultural and institutional change are very much in line with what I've been asking for, if not exact.

+++++++

Study faults Air Force sexual assault policies

By Angela K. Brown

The Associated Press

The sexual assault problem in the U.S. Air Force is more widespread than officials first believed, and combating it will require changes in the military branch's culture, according to a report released Monday.

After a four-month study of 85 installations in the United States and overseas, Air Force teams found that many rapes go unreported because victims fear they will be disciplined. The report also determined that response programs for the victims are inadequate.

In the study, "respondents repeatedly described sexual assault as a cultural issue," the report said.

The Air Force also lacks a formal sexual assault policy, and prevention training has been sporadic and has focused more on sexual harassment than rape, the assessment found.

"Addressing sexual assault in the U.S. Air Force requires deep, long-lasting, cultural and institutional change," Michael J. Dominguez, Air Force assistant secretary for manpower and reserves, wrote this month in a preface to the report.

The report recommends developing an Air Force-wide sexual assault prevention and response policy; assigning an office to oversee the policy and programs; integrating databases used to report and track rapes; and requiring predeployment sexual assault response training for officers.

"The Air Force must do a better job of defining and understanding the crime of sexual assault and the behavior that spawns it. Ultimately, the Air Force must work through its commanders to create an institutional environment that refuses to accept or facilitate such behavior," the report said.

The study began in February, a year after the rape scandal surfaced at the Air Force Academy in Colorado. Dozens of current and former female cadets said that they were ignored or punished after reporting assaults.

A few months later, Air Force officials decided to study rape allegations in the Pacific Air Forces command. After that commander presented his report in February, top Air Force officials decided to do a system-wide study.

Also in February, U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, called for the Air Force to address reports that as many as two dozen military women were raped in fiscal year 2002-03 at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, about 100 miles north of Fort Worth.

=======================

And when the Army and Navy and Marines do their studies -- does anyone think less change is needed in those institutions?

spearhead: today's not-accidental prophet

Night before last, the night of the huge protest march, I boogied in a Lower East Side Bar with Michael Franti and Spearhead , who've provided the soundtrack to this revolution dance since I lived in their hometown, San Francisco. He alternated between rhythms to keep our courage up ("And the streets are alive with...Boom! Bah!") and more sober stuff, telling us of his trip to the Middle East. His tales of Jerusalem remind me of my own in 1991, as if the M-16s of that time had received an MS-appropriate dose of steroids; and he spoke of singing to Iraqis and then some GIs in Baghdad.

So in lieu of my own rants, on a busy day, I send you to that last morning in Baghdad. While you're there, go download some of his music: it'll sustain you for a long time.

Écrasez l'infame

So I said I'd write about Voltaire some time ago, when I began to prepare to teach World Humanities. City College mandates a traditional "Great Books" with, given a dash of multiculturalism; in the past I've taught the earlier section of the course, and like everyone I've taught these classics with a dash of my own obsessions -- I teach the Odyssey as a veteran's odyssey entirely mediated by women, and have emphasized the impact of the wars that cluster round Shakespeare and even Cervantes.

This term I'm teaching the second half, including Candide, and am blown away by Francois Arouet, who violates all stereotypes with his passion. He signed his letters, "Écrasez l'Infâme!" (Erase the infamy), by which he meant a Catholic Church that had just exhaled from the Inquisition and was busy endorsing the first world war, the Seven Years War, let alone treaties that left war crimes against persons unmentioned.  Of course, the very funny book I'm teaching was written in response to Leibniz, whose scientist's wonder at the miracle of creation led him to claim, famously, that such a wondrous world must be created by a perfect God, and therefore be the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire composed a heroic catalogue to challenge the very idea.

How did this working-class Frenchman get this radical? By spending more than one night in the Bastille, before going to England and tasting Shakespeare, Locke and Hume. (Monty Python moment; "Why, they're Protestants!") What astonishes the contemporary reader are the casual-sounding references to what we now consider war crimes: Cunegund, Candide's ladylove, is raped by invaders in chapter two and is a sex slave for much of the book, while chapters feature such titles as "Chapter 6 - How the Portuguese Made a Superb Auto-De-Fe to Prevent Any Future Earthquakes, and How Candide Underwent Public Flagellation." L'infame is usually identified as Christianity or Superstition; could it be the unthinking obedience to stupid beliefs that chained soldiers to lock him up?

Perhaps Arouet would be cheered by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, or even Michael Moore -- making laughter so you don't cry. (And it is funny: my students were surprised.

But what did I mean by the Mennonites, when I first proposed this post? Only that reading of Voltaire's nearly atheist project had cheered me immensely in this OverFaithful zeitgeist (in a country, as Gore Vidal says, "just crazy for Jesus"). But I then had my glee tempered by an interview I did for the possible Gi Rights book: a young man just 25, about the age of an average soldier, who has recently revived the only overseas node of the the Military Counseling Network.

This young man was raised Mennonite, and is a third-generation pacifist, having majored in Justice, Peace and Conflict Studies at Eastern Mennonite University. He's met with Arafat (as part of a youth delegation) before moving on to spend his day talking to soldiers and sailors across dozens of bases in Europe and Iraq.

And meeting him reminded me:  I'd say over half the people I've known to have any staying power in this work -- for peace, for the environment, for an end to poverty -- did it from a faith perspective of some sort. The gut wants confirmation that it's worth it, that one's small-feeling effort or result is worth it: many, if not, most trying to draw it fromm within fall away. Voltaire made fun of their lot too -- all those hapless Jesuits trying to fix everything -- but that was, perhaps, just to make his point.

Or perhaps he would characterize that sturdy activism as exactly right - as cultivating our garden, in the process fixing the world. (Update; Upon looking at the newest Voltaire biography, "Voltaire in Exile," the man was also William Kunstler in his advocacy work. See the followup post of 3/4/05.)

review panel, part 2

So a few days ago I immersed myself (at the expense of some things that might seem a little more important, like pulling together materials for teaching) in the Schlesinger report, trying to pull from it some glimpses of conditions on the ground at AG.

I had intentionally not got into the(PDF report here) Fay report on the interrogations themselves, including the involvement of the CIA. But that report is much clearer about one key fact: the "confusion" about the limits of torture was exacerbated by General Sanchez, Our Man in Iraq -- who classified the prisoners there as "unlawful combatants," thereby freeing himself from the constraints of the Geneva Conventions, considering that Feb 2002 memo from the White House.

Jackson Diehl is most explicit about the line of accountability that draws to the White House. I don't need to belabor the point as raised by so many, to add to the determination to kick this man out of the White House by all means necessary. Mostly, I'm drawn to how it resembles all the other reports I've seen, in its cowardice and shortsightedness in confronting the Pentagon about interpersonal violence.

It isuseful to note how the Schlesinger report warms up with the biggest apologia for what happened that I've seen since the Gonzales memo. "The Global War on Terror," the volume intones, "the military confronts a far wider range of threats" than before; in Iraq alone, it catalogues the weaponry held by "foreign and indigenous fighters" with a pornographic fascination. Good intelligence is essential and when done "properly," detention and incarceration are sensible enough. The report also applauds the use of "an expanded list " of interrogation "techniques" at Guantanamo, while bemoaning how those practices "migrated" and were joined with those practiced in Afghanistan (under a directive from the 1950s, they point out). Every criticism is wrapped in applause for the Administration's "successes" and only whispers any critique of actual policy. The recommendations are therefore almost completely general: reorganize this, provide more funding for that, take additional time to inform troops of what's appropriate.

Just as in the reports on sexual abuse and domestic violence, no sense of an overall institutional failure - in a way that fails not just some abstract sense of morals but individual men and women in uniform - is ever acknowledged. Yet these questions of individual, interpersonal violence are exactly those where Congressional advice is most appropriate and most needed.

The closest we get is, of course, in the very last appendix, called (rather comically!) "Ethical Issues." After similar blather about how "National security.....can lead to ethical issues" and reviving the "ticking-bomb scenario" so over-rehearsed just after 9-11, it settles down and tells us a couple of important things.

First, it mentions a case of a commander whose troops first beat a detainee "who he had good reason to believe had knowledge of future attacks against his unit." When the beating proved unsuccessful, he leaned down and fired his weapon next to the detainee's ear -- which worked. However, the commander, mindful of violating Geneva, then reported his own behavior and was allowed to retire. This is held up as the ideal scenario - and certainly the commander behaved far more ethically than any at AG.

A few paragraphs later, we finally get to "Ethics Education" -- and learn that in fact, there isn't much of that in the Army. What there is is programs in "core values" --Army Values, Navy Values, Marine Corps Values -- which, as the report acknowledges, "stress organizational efficacy" rather than overall moral issues. So a Marine willl die for the Corps -- never having had a full education in the tensile framework of international agreements and constitutional law that exists to hold the line between war and barbarism.

This amounts to a huge betrayal. You recruit young people, put them through an intentionally traumatic process, throw them somewhere you haven't prepared them to be and skimp on the education they need to behave well and on the clarity of command that is supposed to make up the difference. This applies both to these detainee abuses and to the rape and hazing scandals inside the military, the time bomb of domestic violence, the paucity of services available to vets who carry it all home with them.

Again, I don't mean to exculpate anyone: just to point out that Congress, even in the process of fine-tuning its oversight of warmaking, is blowing its responsibility to the people to whom it's entrusted that work. Only the strongest -- from Maj. Lawrence Rockwood in Haiti in 1993 to the brave girls at Aberdeen in 1996 to the aforementioned Joe Darby -- are left to stand up.

You don't have to be a lifelong pacifist to acknowledge these institutional failures: I think it's in some ways more incumbent on those who continue to urge military action for foreign policy goals to demand better care of individuals all up and down the scale. There's a reason why our constitution mandated civilian control of the military -- not meaning civilian sucking up to the military.

Enough rhetoric. John Berryman said it better.

It is in the administration of rhetoric,
on these occasions, that­not the fathomless heart­
the thinky death consists;
his chest is pinched. The enemy are sick,
and so is us of.

The thinky death. Maybe that's what Schlesinger and Tille Fowler are suffering from.

but first, Najaf

Alex Berenson at the Times demonstrates the potential and the limitations of embedded reporting. He titles his piece appropriately, and his descriptions are professional and vivid. He's also matter of fact about a personal drama:

Civilians walked freely around the shrine on Friday, and the area was nominally peaceful, but passions are running high just below the surface. Just before the noon prayer call, this reporter was accused of being a spy and set on by a crowd just west of the shrine, then briefly taken captive by Moktada al-Sadr's guerrillas, blindfolded and tied up, and threatened with death before being released unharmed after senior Sadr officials intervened.

His writing about the assault in Islam's second-holiest shrine is lyrical, but reminds of All Quiet on the Western Front:

American tanks reached the gates of the shrine and fought in its shadow. On a bombed-out street illuminated only by the stars and the glow from the lights attached to the mosque's walls and minarets, the tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles turned their turrets left and right, searching for targets.

Guerrillas fired rocket-propelled grenades from buildings nearby, but even direct hits did not seriously damage the American armor. The Bradleys returned fire, pouring bursts of 25-millimeter high-explosive shells, essentially miniature grenades, into the buildings. The shells glowed red, setting fires that burned orange in the night. With the shrine's golden dome as a backdrop, the street had a surreal beauty, and soldiers said they were astonished to be fighting so close to one of the holiest sites in Islam.

But the Mahdi Army did not stop fighting

But who did not stop fighting? Does Berenson think he's objective here?

Patrick Cockburn, at the Independent, points out the hazards of such myopia:

There is no doubt about the strength of the US army. But it continues to behave as if it was fighting the Soviet Army. Its main consideration is to keep its casualties low. It does not count Iraqi casualties. In Najaf it demolished any building from which it suspected gunfire was coming. US planes have dropped 2,000lb bombs near the holy shrine. Americans have been killing Iraqis in large numbers and this is unlikely to add to their popularity. Once again, Washington should learn that in Iraq military power does not necessarily turn into political influence.

Nor, likely, to progress in what the Great Thinkers in Washington insist on calling to Global War on Terror.

This time, I'm writing less than I quote because I don't have a lot of analysis to offer of my own. I'm not there and feel like all I can do is look at the multiple mirrors in the Iraqi funhouse, trying to extract a full image from all that refracted light.

"I got George Bush in the National Guard"

Another punt: it's protest weekend in NYC. But I'll finish the Abu Ghraib piece tonight. And in case anybody wondered, Dream Song 10 (which I quoted a few days ago) does re-enact a lynching. Berryman might have been less surprised at AG than many.

just another senior review panel

Rep. Tillie Fowler must be very, very tired.

In early 1997, as a ranking member of the House National Security Committee's Subcommittee for Personnel, she was on a Senior Review Panel set up by the Army in the Wake of revelations of rape at Aberdeen Proving Ground, which had sparked one of our now-periodic episodes of outrage about sexual abuse concomitant with the Armed Forces (see the Miles Foundation for the best overview). I met some of Rep. Fowler's staff when she was on that panel, 7 years after Tailhook and 4 years after the first Air Force Academy scandal, when a freshman was battered and urinated on, she says, during prisoner of war training. (Look up "Elizabeth Saum.") I was there with a team of military sexual abuse survivors who were in the process of founding STAMP, and the staffers were all very earnest as they took notes.

Rep. Fowler was later chair of the review panel that investigated rape at the Air Force Academy -- and now, her name is on the Schlesinger Report, looking into the abuse at Abu Ghraib.

As I read through the new report (now a PDF on my laptop), I think of the thick volumes that contained the 1998 report on sexual abuse: and found a lot that was similar, in ways that limit its usefulness as an agent of real change. Like the 1997 panel, they only interviewed top-ranking military personnel: not a civilian (even the contractors), not a single noncom or specialist or chaplain or harried MP. They did a lot of reading and talked to Rumsfeld, Sanchez, Karpinski. Their outrage is still palpable -- but couched in apologias and soft "recommendations." In other words, another pile of paper.

However - especially, of course, in the appendices -- I found useful glimpses of the chaos attendant on freelancing a war, and the ways in which young people can break under that pressure.

For the latter, first: One of the last appendices is an explanation of the Stanford Prison Experiment, or what happens when you randomly tell a group of people they're prison guards without prior training. How can this happen? When you start to ship hundreds of young National Guard MP troops with neocon theories in place of planning. "Whatever could go wrong, did." Troops were mobilized separately from their equipment, or even from those they'd trained beside; many, if not most, learned only upon arrival in Iraq that their job was working in a detention facility.

Similarly, the arrival of "working dogs" happened with neither the MPs, now military corrections officers/aides to interrogation, or the dog handlers themselves receiving any instruction on what was and was not appropriate to do with them.

Another appendix is GWB's early 2002 declaration that "we accept the conclusion of [our] Department of Justice" that the Geneva Convention did not apply to al-Qaida in Afghanistan, or others tagged with the legal neologism "unlawful combatants." The Panel, in their exec summary and recommendations, details the tangled web of policies and directives that followed, in a twisted effort to translate that free ride into guidelines for action, including the pressure of intelligence, the mandates to extract "useful information," and a command hierarchy so tangled it more resembled lace than the clear line of accountability for which the military prides itself.

Tomorrow I'll comment on what the Panel actually says....Much of the important stuff has been better covered by others: I won't go into the "ghost prisoners" issue, the relation with overall Iraq policy, or even that of Rumsfeld resigning. See Body and Soul, Josh Marshall, Juan Cole, or even the Nation for that! I'll limit my thoughts to the stuff which relates more directly to my own obsessions, to young people caught in this netherworld and military apologias for same. (Hint: what grownup, outside of the Bush Administration or CNN, uses all-caps when they talk about the Global War on Terror?)

power in darfur

While I plow through the Schlesinger report on Abu Ghraib, I wanted to alert to yet another piece of strong New Yorker reporting on subject half a world away: one that I've been consciously skirting, much as I did with the Balkans in the 1990s (when I was pretty busy trying to deal with homegrown military offenses at CCCO). I'm talking about Darfur, of course, and reporting by Samantha Power .

I have often wished I was Samantha Power, even to the extent of feeling unjustified jealousy (who's been obsessed with this stuff longer?),but the stellar quality of her work always stops the latter. Still, being the vessel of these griefs must tax the soul.

meanwhile, from Najaf's mouth....

Chris Albritton's there. Go read.

However things hurt, men hurt worse

Blogging is fast. Writing takes a long time. That includes true writing for blogs, such as the stellar work coming out of even the comments for Body and Soul or Atrios.

So I decided to punt to a poem, and went looking in the work of my old muse (and sometime subject), John Berryman. Then I found one that could apply to Abu Ghraib (I'll write on the Army report later). A little eerie, this voice:

dream song 11

There were strange gatherings. A vote would come
that would be no vote. There would come a rope.
Yes. There would come a rope.
Men have their hats down. “Dancing in the Dark”
will see him up, car-radio-wise. So many, some
won’t find a rut to park.

It is in the administration of rhetoric,
on these occasions, that­not the fathomless heart­
the thinky death consists;
his chest is pinched. The enemy are sick,
and so is us of. Often, to rising trysts,
like this one, drove he out

and the gasps of love, after all, had got him ready.
However things hurt, men hurt worse. He’s stark
to be jerked onward?
Yes. In the headlights he got’ keep him steady,
leak not, look out over. This’ hard work,
boss, wait’ for The Word.