(U-WIRE) -On Jan. 15, Spc. Charles Graner was convicted of assault and mistreatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib Prison. This blight on the Iraq war will barely register as a blip in the wake of President Bush's inauguration, despite it being a vital entry in American history.
There's a concept posed by political theorist Hannah Arendt that came into being following the kidnapping and execution by Israel of German war criminal Adolf Eichmann that attempts to explain how otherwise normal people are capable of engaging in terrible acts of torture and murder or accepting the injustice without action. It has come to be known as the banality of evil. It lies in the diffusion of responsibility for the acts across society. The evil is accepted, not societally condemned. It was Eichmann's defense that he was just following orders.
This was the argument made by the high-level Nazi officials at the Nuremberg trials in 1945. It was also the defense made in Graner's case in 2005.
What happened in this case? Graner was a prison guard back in Pennsylvania. That fact works against him immediately. Prison guards in American prisons are widely known to engage in inhumane treatment of inmates. There is extensive documentation of the blind eye prison officials turn toward questionable acts by guards against prisoners and prisoners against each other. In effect, the mistreatment of prisoners is ipso facto an accepted and condoned method of conduct.
There's more to this case than a poorly trained Pennsylvanian prison guard who became a poorly trained Pennsylvanian guardsman-cum-Iraq prison guard.
We have war leaders who have been documented as saying they do not plan on completely adhering to the Geneva Conventions, particularly Articles 13 and 17 of the 1929 conventions, in regards to detainees and POWs. Those articles state, respectively, that prisoners must be treated humanely and that prisoners may not be tortured. The Bush administration has openly ignored said Articles in detainment of individuals who are potentially important in giving information deemed vital to the war on terror.
The question is, where is the line drawn? With whom is it acceptable to ignore international standards when detaining or interrogating? Can we engage in non-standard methods of detainment at Guantanamo, but not in Afghanistan or Iraq? Or in a rural Pennsylvanian prison?
This case is about more than a guy who joins up with the National Guard in order to make ends meet, but ends up on trial due to some bad decisions. It's a sign of a troubling societal and governmental ill that needs to be cured.
When will the leadership take on the claims of responsibility? At some level, the lack of condemnation of such acts on their part is an acceptance of the acts themselves. Simply stating that rules go out the window in times of war isn't a valid argument. The rules, agreements and treaties to which we subscribe define our civilization.
Nor is the banality of evil an acceptable explanation. The United States, along with the other victorious Allied powers, set a standard for judgment of war crimes with the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leadership. The trial of one low-level enlisted man who roughed up prisoners isn't enough for the United States to save face internationally.
The Graner case is an indication that we are due for some deep introspection. Some aspects of the Nuremberg trials were flawed. But the results of the trial were of great importance: those at the top of the bureaucratic pyramid are most responsible for war crimes. Their philosophies on the treatment of civilians and prisoners are Exhibit No. 1. How can an individual soldier be held to a higher standard of behavior than those running the war?
A return to Nuremberg is needed to get at the heart of evil, but I don't suspect that will happen soon.
Sitting leaders aren't in the habit of putting themselves on trial for war crimes.
17 Archives
U-Wire
