Slouching Donkey, Lying Elephant: In the Line of Duty

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - A military police officer was discharged partly because of a head injury he suffered while posing as an uncooperative detainee during a training exercise at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Army acknowledged Tuesday.

....

Baker, 37, a former member of the 438th Military Police Company, said he played the role of an uncooperative prisoner and was beaten so badly by four U.S. soldiers in another company that he suffered a traumatic brain injury and seizures.

Baker, of Georgetown in central Kentucky, said the soldiers only stopped beating him when they realized he might be American.

The first is the fact that there was a training exercise at Gitmo which involved practicing beating uncooperative detainees. Think about that for a minute: this isn't a case of a few privates going overboard absent supervision. If this story is true, they were being trained to break the law.

Also disturbing is the attitude revealed by the second passage. To me, it epitomizes the disregard the Bush administration has for universal human rights as anything more than a card to play when it offers a strategic or diplomatic advantage. They only stopped beating him in this training exercise when they realized he might be American.

It does make me wonder--why would these soldiers not know that Baker was American? How many other such "exercises" are there where the subject is a real live detainee who drew the short straw? And why should it be any way acceptable that we are not only training our soldiers to beat uncooperative prisoners, but possibly using real prisoners as unwilling training dummies?

UPDATE: Apparently Nicholas Kristof broke this story in the NY Times a few days ago--and his column has much more information than the wire articles. First of all, we learn that this was in fact a planned exercise, and that the soldiers participating in it were told he was a real prisoner:

Then in January 2003, an officer in Guantánamo asked him to pretend to be a prisoner in a training drill. As instructed, Mr. Baker put on an orange prison jumpsuit over his uniform, and then crawled under a bunk in a cell so an "internal reaction force" could practice extracting an uncooperative inmate. The five U.S. soldiers in the reaction force were told that he was a genuine detainee who had already assaulted a sergeant.

At a bare minimum, this officer needs to face a court martial. I can conceive of no explanation for this which is not incredibly damning. If he sent these soldiers in there to extract what they were told was a violent prisoner and gave them no guidance or supervision on how they were to act, then he's guilty of criminal negligence. If, as I suspect, he presided over the exercise himself, then we have a much more serious problem.


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	June 10, 2004


	In the Line of Duty

	Via Josh Marshall, yet another disturbing story on the torture front: LOUISVILLE, Ky. - A military police officer was discharged partly because of a head injury he suffered while posing as an uncooperative detainee during a training exercise at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Army acknowledged Tuesday. .... Baker, 37, a former member of the 438th Military Police Company, said he played the role of an uncooperative prisoner and was beaten so badly by four U.S. soldiers in another company that he suffered a traumatic brain injury and seizures. Baker, of Georgetown in central Kentucky, said the soldiers only stopped beating him when they realized he might be American. The first sense that I get from this is that we're clearly not getting anything near the whole story. But two things jump out at me as very unsettling, and I've highlighted them. The first is the fact that there was a training exercise at Gitmo which involved practicing beating uncooperative detainees. Think about that for a minute: this isn't a case of a few privates going overboard absent supervision. If this story is true, they were being trained to break the law. Also disturbing is the attitude revealed by the second passage. To me, it epitomizes the disregard the Bush administration has for universal human rights as anything more than a card to play when it offers a strategic or diplomatic advantage. They only stopped beating him in this training exercise when they realized he might be American. It does make me wonder--why would these soldiers not know that Baker was American? How many other such "exercises" are there where the subject is a real live detainee who drew the short straw? And why should it be any way acceptable that we are not only training our soldiers to beat uncooperative prisoners, but possibly using real prisoners as unwilling training dummies? I suspect we haven't seen the end of this. UPDATE: Apparently Nicholas Kristof broke this story in the NY Times a few days ago--and his column has much more information than the wire articles. First of all, we learn that this was in fact a planned exercise, and that the soldiers participating in it were told he was a real prisoner: Then in January 2003, an officer in Guantánamo asked him to pretend to be a prisoner in a training drill. As instructed, Mr. Baker put on an orange prison jumpsuit over his uniform, and then crawled under a bunk in a cell so an "internal reaction force" could practice extracting an uncooperative inmate. The five U.S. soldiers in the reaction force were told that he was a genuine detainee who had already assaulted a sergeant. I, for one, am very interested in knowing who this officer is who asked Baker to participate in this exercise--along with where they are now and what they're doing. And while we're at it, how far up the line does this go? At a bare minimum, this officer needs to face a court martial. I can conceive of no explanation for this which is not incredibly damning. If he sent these soldiers in there to extract what they were told was a violent prisoner and gave them no guidance or supervision on how they were to act, then he's guilty of criminal negligence. If, as I suspect, he presided over the exercise himself, then we have a much more serious problem. Posted by Catsy at 02:12 AM \| Comments (0) \| TrackBack (0) Comments: