POWs in Iraq: Get a Grip

by John Thompson

May 12, 2004

Last week’s "scandal" about the treatment of some Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops has got me annoyed--not horrified, just annoyed. But it has been almost amusing watching everybody’s reactions, almost as fun as watching citified kids finally see where milk really comes from.

Why am I so blasé about this? Well, I’ve twice run interrogation centres on peacetime military exercises that looked about as ‘savage’ as the American treatment of Iraqi detainees. Moreover, I’ve been a soldier, been around soldiers most of my life, and have made the study of warfare my life’s work.

These captured Iraqis insurgents are lucky: They’re alive. Soldiers tend to be discriminating about just who gets taken prisoner, and they are not partial to accepting the surrender of snipers and ambushers in the heat of the moment. If somebody had just been shooting at you from inside a building, and then threw their rifle down the moment you kicked in the door to stand with a silly little ‘who me?’ grin, guess what the likely outcome is...

Soldiers, particularly experienced veterans, like a quiet simple life, don’t like troublemakers, and really hate terrorists. Which is why it is not uncommon in situations like Iraq for, um, hard treatment to be administered on recently captured terrorists. One of the quietest and most peaceful men I know once kidnapped a particularly effective terrorist, administered a short sharp interrogation and then put a bullet in his ear and dumped the body in a ditch. Brutal? Yes, and it saved dozens of lives over the following year. A similar individual of my acquaintance once pushed a dozen guerrillas over a cliff--it was a hasty (and successful) interrogation to determine where a large arms cache was. This probably saved hundreds of lives.

Yes, these behaviors don’t fit the Geneva Conventions--but, barring one or two exceptions, have any of the terrorists, guerrillas and bandits that Western troops have engaged since 1948 ever abided by the rules? In the main we follow them, largely because (and this is an important point), there have to be rules otherwise we would all become the monsters we have to fight against. So, we follow the rules for our own protection, but sometimes our protection requires other behaviors.

Brutality and dehumanizing behaviors are disgusting, vile, and cruel--and the persons they demean the most are the ones who employ such techniques, not the ones who suffer for them. Yet, sometimes they are necessary.

In my military career, I twice ran interrogation centres during peacetime military exercises. The ‘prisoners’ who passed through my hands didn’t really have anything vital that I needed to know, but it was important to give them a taste of what they might (and have) experience if captured on real operations (including peacekeeping) with the Canadian Forces. The Americans, Australians, British and French run many of their personnel through similar experiences. Prisoners were bound, blindfolded, stripped, and, um, ‘preconditioned’ to lower their capacity for psychological resistance prior to my interviews with them. Many of them learned to resist and some even tried to escape.

In my case, the handlers of my prisoners were military policemen, and were very experienced at their jobs. My MPs watched each other like hawks to make sure every act was witnessed, and that nobody forgot just what we were doing--watching to see who would resist (and silently cheering those who did so effectively, even as we made their lives still tougher).

The temptation that the MPs knew to resist was that, once a human being is helpless in your hands, it is easy to treat them with contempt and casual cruelty can easily develop into a sick form of fun. If you don’t believe me, watch ordinary Canadian students conducting ‘initiations’ for newcomers to their schools; it never takes long for the process to get out of hand. This temptation is endemic to most human beings. In our case, experience, firm discipline and exacting protocols kept trouble away. Evidently, in the Iraqi POW cages, the American National Guardsmen let the standards slip, and the inevitable happened.

If I was to be interrogating Jihadists and other terrorists, I would want them dazed, disoriented and feeling psychologically vulnerable before interviewing them. Rested and relaxed prisoners might give no information at all, and their powers to resist probing questions can be remarkable. But the only possible justification for letting prisoners be treated this way was to precondition dangerous individuals prior to their interrogations on time-urgent matters; afterwards, they would be treated as well as any other prisoner--with full respect to their dignity and needs. To allow anything else would demean my cause, and my guards and corrode their humanity, possibly turning them into the very beasts they were pledged to fight against… This is where America has just failed.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca