Aiden Delgado, an Army Reservist in the 320th Military Police Company, served in Iraq from April 1st , 2003 through April 1st, 2004. After spending six months in Nasiriyah in Southern Iraq, he spent six months helping to run the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad.
Delgado says he observed mutilation of the dead, trophy photos of dead Iraqis, mass roundups of innocent noncombatants, positioning of prisoners in the line of fire - all violations of the Geneva conventions. His own buddies - decent, Christian men, as he describes them - shot unarmed prisoners.
In one government class for seniors, Delgado presented graphic images, his own photos of a soldier playing with a skull, the charred remains of children, kids riddled with bullets, a soldier from his unit scooping out the brains of a prisoner.
When I interviewed Delgado recently, he expressed his deep love of his country, but he also insisted that racism - a major impetus to violence in American history - is driving the occupation, infecting the entire military operation in Iraq.
The author of this article misses the point. War contains all that is most horrible about humanity. People are expected to do things beyond their sense of values, beyond what is reasonable or prudent.
"Their's is not to reason why, their's is but to do or die."
The Charge Of The Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1809-1892
Humans have to integrate into their personal logic the things they must do. When asked to do heinous things, they will sometimes create diabolical explanatory fictions to justify their behavior. Those that don't will most often suffer from a serious form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Without a rationalization of why such actions are necessary, a soldier's conscience eats him from the inside out, fills him with shame, self-condemnations, and vivid memories and re-experiencing of the traumatizing events.
A racist point of view is just one of those explanatory fictions humans use to justify unacceptable behavior. Once self-justified, some will demonstrate their commitment to the new rationale by committing atrocities consistent with their new ideology. Sometimes soldiers bring to war this ideology, but many simply go along with their unit as they are trained.
John Kerry spoke the truth on April 22, 1971, when he gave testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
Some of those explanatory fictions include explaining away the atrocities as actions of a "few" or "lies". Some just want the story to stay silent because they don't want anyone to know what horrible things they had participated in their battle experiences.
Policy makers and professional military leaders don't want the truth known because the people might make it a whole lot harder to conduct another war. The truth that it is all real and more common than anyone wants to admit is more horrible to live with than the rationalizations created to protect the soldiers victimized by the experience and those who benefit from the spoils of war.
And so Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Mi Lai in Vietnam and countless other examples of atrocities have happened over and over throughout history. The problem isn't the morality of the kids conducting the war, in general, it's the morality of war. With war comes atrocity, it's only human. If a society accepts war, then they must accept that some of their soldiers will return from that war with the blood of innocents on their hands, and a memory of actions that they will carry with them for their entire lives. And some will come home capable of monstrous behavior.
Read the entire interview at the link:
Complete Article
Aiden Delgado, an Army Reservist in the 320th Military Police Company, served in Iraq from April 1st , 2003 through April 1st, 2004. After spending six months in Nasiriyah in Southern Iraq, he spent six months helping to run the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad.
I first met Delgado in a classroom at Acalanes High School in Lafayette, California, where he presented a slide show on the atrocities that he himself observed in Southern and Northern Iraq.
Delgado says he observed mutilation of the dead, trophy photos of dead Iraqis, mass roundups of innocent noncombatants, positioning of prisoners in the line of fire - all violations of the Geneva conventions. His own buddies - decent, Christian men, as he describes them - shot unarmed prisoners.
In one government class for seniors, Delgado presented graphic images, his own photos of a soldier playing with a skull, the charred remains of children, kids riddled with bullets, a soldier from his unit scooping out the brains of a prisoner.
When I interviewed Delgado recently, he expressed his deep love of his country, but he also insisted that racism - a major impetus to violence in American history - is driving the occupation, infecting the entire military operation in Iraq.Here is Aiden Delgado story.
Q: When did you begin to turn against the military and the war?
DELGADO: From the very earliest time I was in Iraq, I began to see ugly strains of racism among our troops--anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiments.
Q: What are some examples?
DELGADO: There was a Master Sergeant. A Master Sergeant is one of the highest enlisted ranks. He whipped this group of Iraqi children with a steel Humvee antenna. He just lashed them with it because they were crowding around, bothering him, and he was tired of talking. Another time, a Marine, a Lance Corporal - a big guy about six-foot-two - planted a boot on a kid's chest, when a kid came up to him and asked him for a soda. The First Sergeant said, "That won't be necessary Lance Corporal." And that was the end of that. It was a matter of routine for guys in my unit to drive by in a Humvee and shatter bottles over Iraqis heads as they went by. And these were guys I considered friends. And I told them:" What the hell are you doing? What does that accomplish?" One said back:" I hate being here. I hate looking at them. I hate being surrounded by all these Hajjis."
Q: When you arrived at Abu Ghraib, what did you see, beyond what we all learned from the scandal in the news? And how were you affected?
DELGADO:..The prisoners were housed outside in tents, 60 to 80 prisoners per tent. It rained a lot. The detainees lived in the mud. It was freezing cold outside, and the prisoners had no cold-weather clothing. Our soldiers lived inside in cells, with four walls that protected us from the bombardment. The Military Police used the cold weather to control the prisoners. If there was an infraction, detainees would be removed from their tents. Next, their blankets were confiscated. Then even their clothing was taken away. Almost naked, in underwear, the POWs would huddle together on a platform outside to keep warm. There was overcrowding, and almost everyone got TB. Eighteen members of our unit who worked closely with the prisoners got TB too. The food was rotten and prisoners got dysentery. The unsanitary conditions, the debris and muck everywhere, the overcrowding in cold weather, led to disease, an epidemic, pandemic conditions. The attitude of the guards was brutal. To them Iraqis were the scum of the earth. Detainees were beaten within inches of their life.
DELGADO: T...He showed me these grisly photographs, and he bragged about the results. "Oh," he said, "I shot this guy in the face. See, his head is split open." He talked like the Terminator. `I shot this guy in the groin, he took three days to bleed to death." I was shocked. This was the nicest guy you would ever want to meet. He was a family man, a really courteous guy, a devout Christian. I was stunned and said to him: "You shot an unarmed man behind barbed wire for throwing a stone." He said, "Well, I knelt down. I said a prayer, stood up and gunned them all down."
Q: Commanders permitted use of lethal force against unarmed detainees. What was their response to the carnage?
DELGADO: Our Command took the grisly photos and posted them up in the headquarters. It was a big, macho thing for our company to shoot more prisoners than any other unit.
Q: When did all this happen?
DELGADO: November 24th. The event was actually mentioned in the Taguba Report, under Protocol Golden Spike. And there's more... I got photos from the guy who was there, my friend. I have a photo of a member of my unit, scooping out the prisoner's brains with an MRE [meals-ready-to-eat] spoon. Four people are looking on, two are taking photographs. If you remember the Abu Ghraib stuff that came out on CNN, this kind of stuff was common. You see guys posing with bodies, or toying with corpses. It was a real common thing in the military, all because the guys thought Arabs are terrorists, the scum of the earth. Anything we do to them is all right.
Q: So far as I know, no commanders have been held accountable for events at Abu Ghraib. Your story implicates commanders...
DELGADO: After the Abu Ghraib scandal broke on CNN and TV, commanders came out to us and said: "We are all family here. We don't wash our dirty linen in public. This story doesn't need to go on CNN. Nobody needs to find out about this." There was a sort of informal gag order.
DELGADO: I went to Fort Knox for basic training. It was known to be harsher than other bases. The training was mentally taxing, and there was already some anti-Arab sentiment.
Q: Like what?
DELGADO: In the early stages I remember Army chants. We sang in cadences. And the chants had anti-Arab themes. Like burning turbans, killing ragheads, killing the Taliban.
Q: What did the chants say?
DELGADO: It was three years ago. I can't tell the exact words, but the sentiment was to burn turbans and kill ragheads. That was the phraseology. Our drill sergeants would give us motivational talks to pump up our fighting spirit. The theme was the need to get revenge, to go to the Middle East to fight Arabs.
Q: All this was before you even went to Iraq?
DELGADO: Yes. My own commander was infamous for anti-Arab speeches. Before we were deployed to the Middle East, he said, “Now don’t go tell the media that you’re going over there to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans.†Everybody laughed, and he laughed with them. I remember standing there in formation, having grown up in Egypt. And I was thinking: “Oh, my God, this is going to be a disaster. Our commander has this anti-Arab attitude even before we go over.†The commander would give lectures about Islam. He said that Muslims advocate a holy war against us, that Islam promotes perpetual war. I’ve been surrounded by Muslims for a decade, exposed to their culture. He is wrong.
Q: In the 1980s the U.S. military made a lot of reforms. It is widely believed that racism in the military is now a thing of the past.
DELGADO: I have two answers. First, have we overcome racism in the sense that blacks and whites are banded together in the hatred of Arabs? That’s not progress. Second, we had an incident in our unit with a black specialist. He was a nice guy, really popular in the unit. There was no physical fight, but there was a dispute over him dating this white girl, having a relationship with a white girl. Two white guys took a piece of rope, tied a noose, and put a hangman’s noose on his bed. He found out who it was and went to his black sergeant. They went to the equal opportunity representative. The issue was effectively stifled.
Q: After your long ordeal, how do you feel about your country, and what do you want from the American people?
DELGADO: I still love my country. I love the idea of America. But I became disillusioned. Now I want to let the American people know what they’re signing on for when they say they support the war in Iraq. And I want Americans to recognize the racial undertones of the occupation and to understand the human costs of war.
Paul Rockwell is a columnist for In Motion Magazine. He can be reached via e-Mail at rockyspad-at-earthlink.net.
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