Torture in Afghanistan

This New York Times article is disturbing reading. Read it anyway. It is important that we understand what has happened and why. Let me first say that this strikes me as being very good reporting. The New York Times seems to have gone to great lengths to make sure they covered it completely and reported it factually. They follow up on the status of the military investigations and make clear what happened, and what has been done about it since. If we are going to criticize the media, me also owe it to them to acknowledge what they do right. I won't repeat any of the details of the tortures and abuses that took place in Bagram here, but I do want to focus on one paragraph in the article that I think is the major factor in what went wrong.

The new interrogation unit that arrived in July 2002 had been improvised as well. Captain Wood, then a 32-year-old lieutenant, came with 13 soldiers from the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Bragg, N.C.; six Arabic-speaking reservists were added from the Utah National Guard. Part of the new group, which was consolidated under Company A of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, was made up of counterintelligence specialists with no background in interrogation. Only two of the soldiers had ever questioned actual prisoners. What specialized training the unit received came on the job, in sessions with two interrogators who had worked in the prison for a few months. "There was nothing that prepared us for running an interrogation operation" like the one at Bagram, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the interrogators, Staff Sgt. Steven W. Loring, later told investigators.

Interogation and Jailing of prisoners is specialized and demanding work. This should never be a job for amateurs. In all honesty, we do a crappy job of dealing with this issue in our domestic prisons, and there we expect more training than this. The standards should be at least as high for military detention personal. One could make a claim that the standards should be even higher for military detentions, due to the fact that military detentions are sure to contain, at least temporarily, a large number of innocent people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Personally, I think we would do well to improve conditions at both domestic prisons and the military detention facilities and not worry too much about which is more important. The bottom line here, is we certainly did not, and probably still do not, have enough properly trained people to serve as guards and interogators at these facilities. In addition, it certainly appears that the directives were no where clear enough about what was, and was not, proper behavior, and insufficient, or inept, supervision by superior officers further allowed the situation to get out of hand. Some of those things were preventable in 2002, all of those things are areas that we can improve now. I believe that the military has taken at least some of the proper steps for mitigating this sort of problem (abuses will happen occassionaly under the best system, but systematic torture can, and must, be curtailed.) The techniques that interrogators can use have been clarified. Hopefully, the Officers in charge of these detention facilities have gotten the message that they are responsible for keeping this sort of thing from happening. I expect that we still do not have enough properly trained guards and interogators but that is something that will take time, even if proper attention is being paid toward making this a priority. I have mentioned before that I think we need a 'nation building' branch of the armed forces. Among the duties of such a branch would be prisoner detention and interrogations. Having such a branch would help make this a proper priority for training and would, I believe, greatly help mitigate such things in the future. (article via Instapundit)