The hidden rules of the game came closest to being officially acknowledged during two uninterrupted weeks of simulated interrogations towards the end of the training course. These sessions involved only a student interrogator, an instructor in the role of the detainee, and a video camera.
When, during a simulation, I asked an imaginary guard to take away the detainee's chair, the instructor feigned being removed violently. When I told the non-existent guard to hit the detainee, the instructor played along. All of us knew that a failed interrogation could mean being dropped from the course. I was not dropped; I finished first in my class.
For those who benefit from the politics of ambiguity, international law is an indispensable prop. In his recent US Senate testimony, Rumsfeld claimed that the military police at Abu Ghraib were instructed to abide by the Geneva conventions.
So was I. Throughout my training as an interrogator, the admonition to follow the Geneva conventions accompanied virtually every discussion of "applying pressure." Unfortunately, like "applying pressure," the Geneva conventions were never defined. We never studied them, nor were we given a copy to read, much less tested on their contents. For many of us -- teenagers or only slightly older -- the Geneva conventions were at best a dimly remembered cliche from war movies that meant, "Don't do bad stuff."
Again, the tacit rules said otherwise. One instructor joked that although the Geneva conventions barred firing a 50-caliber machine gun at an enemy soldier -- an act defined as "excessive force" -- we could aim at his helmet or backpack, since these were "equip-ment." Others shared anecdotes about torturing detainees.
Whether such talk was true is irrelevant. We were being conditioned to believe that the official rules set no clear limits, and that we could therefore set the limits wherever we liked.
In the end, the politics of ambiguity may fail Rumsfeld; all those high-resolution photographs from Abu Ghraib are anything but ambiguous. If similarly shameful disclosures multiply, as I believe they will, let us at least hope that official apologies and condemnations may finally give way to wider, more genuine accountability and reform.
Michael Manning is a former specialist interrogator with the 142nd Military Intelligence Battalion, US Army National Guard.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
RSS