The U.S. Military, Ethical Hellhole

News of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal had just broken. President Bush was in the Rose Garden, holding a joint news conference with the King of Jordan. “I told His Majesty as plainly as I could,” Bush said, “that the wrongdoers will be brought to justice, and that the actions of those folks in Iraq do not represent the values of the United States of America.” But of course they did. The Abu Ghraib torturers weren’t just a few bad apples. They were United States soldiers doing what they thought was right under the perverted rationales of their perverted training. They were a few of the tens of thousands of American soldiers who have abused, and continue to abuse and torture Iraqis—not because some liberal media outlet did a “study” or extrapolated some numbers from some third-class source. No. This is by the Pentagon’s own accounting.

In November 2006 the Pentagon concluded a survey of about 1,800 soldiers’ mental health and ethics in Iraq and Afghanistan. The results, and the survey itself, which you can read entire here, were released in early May. You didn’t read much about it because the results were pretty grim. The results drill 50-caliber bullet holes in the myth of the American soldier as an ethical fighting machine, as an individual out to protect Iraqis, as an individual who’d never commit such acts as the torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib—which, it should be said again and again, was barely the tip, not of an iceberg, but of an entire sea of icebergs stretching across Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and wherever else the American gulag has spread its chains.