For a number of years during our war in Iraq, I constantly confused two place names in my mind: Bat Orb, Germany and Abu Ghraib, Iraq.
Abu Ghraib is a city just west of Baghdad, and was the location of Abu Ghraib prison, used after the invasion by American forces to incarcerate, and interrogate, “enemy combatants.”
In 2003 it earned notoriety when the torture and abuse practiced there became widely known. You may remember seeing the photographs of detainees, posed in naked pyramids.
Bad Orb, Germany, was the site of a POW camp during WWII named Stalag IX-B.
It may rank as one of the worst German camps that held American POWs, most of them captured after the Battle of the Bulge, according to a Wikipedia article.
My father was housed there as a prisoner of war.
While at the Bad Orb camp, my father suffered great hunger and intense cold, a result in part of the general lack of food and fuel in Germany.
He was also beaten over the head to such an extent he suffered flashbacks later in life, dragged from sleep in the act of fighting off a Nazi guard.
That American forces could engage in practices as inhumane as those practiced in Nazi Germany [I am referencing POW camps, not the death camps of the holocaust] is insupportable.
When the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, first came to light my father was recovering from a motor vehicle accident in which he had received a severe head wound.
His injury triggered a new round of flashbacks from his war experiences.
Beaten, threatened, starved. Bad Orb, Abu Ghraib, my mind had to sort them out continuously.
According to news accounts, the recently released “torture report” is full of the grisly details of our actions: Men drowned repeatedly to the point of vomiting and convulsion, even insensibility, men subjected to rectal feeding for no medical reason, men deprived of sleep and forced to stand on broken feet.
There are mentions of mock executions, Russian roulette, threats of violence to mothers and children, and the death by hypothermia of one man brought on, at least in part, by being forced to sit on a bare concrete floor without pants.
The governmental argument now seems to be, were these techniques effective?
The answer is immaterial.
I would rather risk death by terrorists than live with this; that the brutal treatment of POW’s at Bat Orb should pale in comparison to the American atrocities that first began to surface in Abu Ghraib in 2003.
On Sept. 11, 2001, almost 3,000 innocent Americans died at the hands of al-Qaida operatives who hijacked four planes and, in three instances, flew them into buildings where people were working.
Passengers in the fourth plane brought it down after hearing what had happened to the other planes.
That horrific scenario on the east coast sent CIA officials scrambling to find out who was responsible and if there were more attacks on the way.
That is the framework that must be remembered when reviewing the interrogation tactics that were used by the agency to obtain information.
Last week’s release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “torture report” prompted this question: “Why now?”
Was it because Democrats will soon no longer be the majority in the Senate and this was a last stab at scoring political points?
How can you trust the accuracy of the 525-page executive summary of the mostly classified 6,700-page report that was compiled by staff of a partisan committee?
Especially when top CIA intelligence officials say they were never consulted about their practices regarding detainees after the start of the Middle East wars.
Three former CIA directors — George Tenent, Porter Gross and Michael Hayden — have repudiated the report as a “one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation.”
They have challenged one of the report’s most explosive arguments — that harsh interrogation techniques did not lead to Osama bin Laden. Without Ammar al-Baluchi having been questioned, CIA officials point out that it would not have been known that an al-Qaida operative was relaying messages to and from bin Laden in Pakistan.
That information eventually led to the name of that operative and the killing of bin Laden by a Navy SEAL team.
Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee have issued their own 100-page rebuttal of the report that challenges many of the assertions made. They contend the conclusion for the report was developed first and then Democrats fashioned the facts to fit.
It becomes impossible to trust the data in a report when you cannot trust the motivation.
Meanwhile, Americans around the world have been put at risk, including our troops in harm’s way (yes, there is still a war going on) because of potential fallout from this report.
And that is perhaps the most egregious action of this entire debacle — that American lives could be lost in days and months to come due to acts of vengeance. And the blood of those lives will be on the committee’s hands.
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