What you allowed to happen happened. Trends were accepted. Leadership failed to provide clear guidance so we just developed it. They wanted intel. As long as no PUCs [“persons under control,” i.e., detainees] came up dead it happened. We heard rumors of PUCs dying so we were careful. We kept it to broken arms and legs and shit. If a leg was broken you call the PA — the physician’s assistant — and told him the PUC got hurt when he was taken. He would get Motrin [a pain reliever] and maybe a sling, but no cast or medical treatment…. People would just volunteer just to get their frustrations out. We had guys from all over the base just come to guard PUCs so they could fuck them up. Broken bones didn’t happen too often, maybe every other week. The PA would overlook it. I am sure they knew.

—U.S. Army sergeant, 82nd Airborne Division

Human Rights Watch (HRW) came out with a new report this week that presents graphic accounts of torture by U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the extent of the prisoner abuse problems afflicting an overextended U.S. military, and the damage that poor leadership has caused to the Iraq war effort. The report features interviews with two sergeants and one officer stationed at a base in central Iraq who said they witnessed the torture of Iraqi prisoners — torture that was ordered, the soldiers said, by their superiors and by intelligence officers. The practice was so common that soldiers had developed a lingo for it, the report says: “‘Fucking a PUC’ referred to beating a detainee, while ‘Smoking a PUC’ referred to forced physical exertion sometimes to the point of unconsciousness.”

One factor that encouraged prisoner abuse was that the soldiers guarding a detainee were often the very ones who had been shot at by that detainee hours before — contrary to the military’s own policy, which states that prisoners should be placed in the custody of military police far from the frontlines. Not surprisingly, soldiers put in these situations would go beyond the need to collect intelligence and start collecting their pound of flesh. A sergeant described one such incident of retribution:

We had these new high-speed trailer showers. One guy was the cleaner. He was an Iraqi contractor working on base. We were taking pretty accurate mortar fire and rockets and we were getting nervous. Well one day we found him with a GPS receiver and he is like calling in strikes on us! What the fuck!? We took him but we are pissed because he stabbed us in the back. So we gave him the treatment. We got on him with the jugs and doused him and smoked and fucked him.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration’s denials that the Geneva Conventions apply to its war on terror have created a kind of moral havoc within the ranks. Before the invasion of Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers were trained to avoid torture, period. In fact, the Army’s own Field Manual 34-52 on Intelligence Interrogation states explicitly that the use of force is not an effective interrogation tool: “Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.” In today’s military, however, soldiers guarding detainees no longer have clear rules for deciding what is permitted and what is not. They are simply told that they must extract information and that their actions must be “humane” — a dangerously vague standard. “Well, what does humane mean?” said an officer. “To me humane means I can kind of play with your mind … To [another officer I spoke with] humane means it’s okay to rough someone up and do physical harm … We’ve got people with different views of what humane means and there’s no Army statement that says this is the standard for humane treatment for prisoners.”

When stories of prisoners being humiliated and beaten at the Abu Ghraib prison became public, terrorists trying to sabotage the U.S. military in Iraq suddenly had a perfect recruiting tool: concrete evidence of the evil of the American occupation. Now there is reason to believe these abuses are more widespread than first thought, and not just the actions of “rogue” soldiers. In fact, soldiers at one base told an officer that they had taken Abu Ghraib-like photographs but burned them once the Abu Ghraib guards started “getting in trouble for the same things we were told to do.” “It’s unjust to hold only lower-ranking soldiers accountable for something that is so clearly, at a minimum, an officer corps problems, and probably a combination with the executive branch of government,” said the officer.

Did the abuse halt after the media broke the Abu Ghraib scandal? Things “toned down,” said the sergeant, who was interviewed between July and August 2005. “We still did it but we were careful. It is still going on now the same way, I am sure. Maybe not as blatant but it is how we do things.”

The irony is that in torturing detainees with the goal of stamping out the insurgency, the U.S. military has driven even more Iraqis to the cause of the insurgency. That connection was quite clear to one of the sergeants interviewed:

If a PUC cooperated Intel would tell us that he was allowed to sleep or got extra food. If he felt the PUC was lying he told us he doesn’t get any fucking sleep and gets no food except maybe crackers. And he tells us to smoke him. [Intel] would tell the lieutenant that he had to smoke the prisoners and that is what we were told to do. No sleep, water, and just crackers. That’s it. The point of doing all this was to get them ready for interrogation. [The intelligence officer] said he wanted the PUCs so fatigued, so smoked, so demoralized that they want to cooperate. But half of these guys got released because they didn’t do nothing. We sent them back to Fallujah. But if he’s a good guy, you know, now he’s a bad guy because of the way we treated him.

As the officer interviewed in the HRW report makes clear, the abuses he saw were not perpetrated by “dishonorable” individuals. These were courageous soldiers who also happened to be human, he said. They were being put in charge of people who might have tried to kill them or their friends. At a minimum, they deserved leaders who could set clear boundaries and accept responsibility for what happened. The fact that they have not received such leadership has jeopardized America’s mission in Iraq, both morally and practically:

We’re mounting a counter-insurgency campaign, and if we have widespread violations of the Geneva Conventions, that seriously undermines our ability to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim world…. [I]f America holds something as the moral standard, it should be unacceptable for us as a people to change that moral standard based on fear. The measure of a person or a people’s character is not what they do when everything is comfortable. It’s what they do in an extremely trying and difficult situation, and if we want to claim that these are our ideals and our values we need to hold to them no matter how dark the situation.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen