The Character of Occupation
Specialist James Barker, United States Army, took a plea agreement that will allow him a life sentence in a Federal Penitentiary.
He was among the group of soldiers that killed an Iraqi family in Mahmoudiya — a father, a mother, and a 4-year-old boy. They had spared the fourth, 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, from death for a few minutes after the rest of her family had been executed in a bedroom. They used this delay, as the 14-year-old girl was screaming and crying, for Barker and his team leader, Sergeant Paul Cortez, to rape her. After the group of five soldiers had murdered her family, and after Cortez and Barker had raped the screaming girl, Private Steven Green — who had done the executions of the two adults and the 4-year-old boy in the bedroom — also raped Abeer. When he finished, he buckled his trousers and fastened his belt and shot Abeer in the head.
The fact that Barker is telling this story — which he does without showing the least remorse — as part of a plea agreement that gives him a life sentence, means that capital punishment is not only on the menu, but that the likelihood of conviction is very high. The military means to make an example, though they will spin this as an aberration.
On the same day that this story is breaking, General John Abaziad — Commander of the entire regional theater — is being quoted from his appearance before Congress, saying that there is still a chance that the US Armed Forces can stabilize Iraq. He wants a little more time.
So now the ghost of Westmoreland is standing alongside the ghosts of My Lai in the shattered ruins of Mespotamia. Yet no one is paying them any mind. The enumeration of the dead here is trying to catch that of the living. There are ghosts everywhere. This has become our new vampire colony, The Kingdom of the Dead.
Abazaid, Congress, the Bush administration, and television-medicated America are all in a parallel universe from the actual war, that war Abeer Qassim al-Janabi experienced. It’s an abstraction, even to Abazaid, who reside safely in the Green Zone — that great, glowing, electrity-eating, alien presence in the midst of the ruin… sitting in Baghdad like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
I have engaged in more debates than I can remember now, about how wars become race wars on the ground, about the trope of sexual revenge in the heart of martial masculinity, and about the situational construction of the atrocity. Perhaps the sociopathic testimony of James Barker will put these arguments to rest, once and for all.
James Barker was not born a rapist or a murderer. Who was James Barker before he went to Iraq? Who were Jesse Spielman, Bryan Howard, Paul Cortez, and Stephen Green? Either they were born with a genetic predispoition to rape and murder, and fate placed them all in the same unit at the same time; or there is a common experience they share that shaped them to visit this horror on a modest household in Mahmoudiya.
They are men, shaped and calibrated in the hothouse fraternity of a hostile military occupation. This is the reality of the war that Abazaid says can still succeed in “bringing stability to Iraq,” the reality for which we dare not speak its name. The reality of James Barker, 22-years-old when he poured lighter fluid on the lifeless body of Abeer and set her afire.
Spielman was 21. Howard was 18. Cortez was 23. Green was 20.
I have been challenged more than once for having said, “Perfect masculinity is sociopathic.” If that wasn’t part of this equation, then why the rape? If masculinity is not constructed as vengeful violence, and eroticized as such, then how do three young men achieve orgasms in the process of inflicting sexual torture on a child they intend to murder?
I have been challenged more than once for having said that all wars of occupation become race wars on the ground. Thus it was in Vietnam. So it is in Iraq. I have cited the Stanford Prison Experiment to explain this, but still the power of denial, denial that we socialize boys for rape and murder, that we deny the humanity of The Other, and that we are not the source of light in the world, has prevailed against these attempts at persuasion.
So now I am going to give you the argument of Barker’s own words:
“Cortez pushed her to the ground. I went towards the top of her and kind of held her hands down while Cortez proceeded to lift her dress up. Around that time I heard shots coming from a room next door.”
“I hated Iraqis, your honor. They can smile at you, then shoot you in your face without even thinking about it.”
And now I am going to tell you that Barker cannot be an aberration, unless we accept the improbable premise that five sociopaths were assigned by Army Personnel Management computers to the exact same team at the exact same time.
This trial is giving us a peek not at the characters of five men, but at the character of masculinity and imperial war.
Consumer:
There were a couple US Marines that trained at a dojo near my house in Okinawa. A common conclusion made by locals was: If you talk to them one on one, they’re alright guys. But when Marines travel in packs, be careful. Especially on a Friday night when they’ve been boozing it up.
Atrocities like this one are no aberration.
16 November 2006, 3:43 pmpeggy:
If you deny the humanity of another, you lose your own humanity, maybe just for a moment, or maybe forever, maybe just partially, or maybe completely.
How are those who remain human deal with those who have lost their humanity? If we approach them as fellow human beings, they are unlikely to regain their humanity just like that. They are more likely simply to kill us, if circumstances permit. If we approach them on their own terms, we become like them. Either way, humanity loses, and inhumanity wins.
Overall, humanity is losing against inhumanity. Enclaves of humanity, whole continents full of humanity, are simply wiped out. It is not improbable that eventually all of humanity will be gone, and those who remain will not even notice, because they never knew humanity in the first place. Maybe it has already happened, almost.
I am ready to believe that I, for one, have only a shred of humanity left. I believe in that shred, because I read this article, and my heart weeps, and I cannot understand how any human being under any circumstances could willingly do what those soldiers did, and I want to stop this from happening.
But how? What is happening in Iraq is not an aberration. Even if we got all of our troops out of Iraq, inhumanity would continue to advance, to grow and spread.
I’m sorry for this rambling post, Stan. You and others keep showing these atrocities, and every time I see what you show, I feel it more, and I feel the more helpless.
16 November 2006, 8:47 pmRedDan:
Imperialism begets war, and imperialist war is rape writ large.
16 November 2006, 9:59 pmMarilyn Farhat:
I do not have a sense of the perception by Americans of the Vietnamese and their culture before the Vietnam War, so I cannot compare with the Iraq war.
Where Iraq is concerned, I think that this occupation was so obviously racist from the beginning because of the decades held perception of Arabs and Muslims as sub-human who were only recognized when a villain was needed to boost our self-image of righteousness and power. Of course, Arab “terrorists” did not possess human qualities that the countless “heroes” who set out into other people’s lands to teach the terrorists a lesson and avenge any transgressions.
I have not heard a single informed statement from most people I know about Arabs or the Iraqis or Islam. I still get people still think Iran is an Arab country and that Hamas are based in Lebanon and Hezbollah based in Palestine (well, after this last fiasco in Lebanon, more people are getting the picture).
The ease with which atrocities were being committed on a large scale since 2003, the fact that the world community allowed the inhuman sanctions to cause the deaths and illness of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis annually, the fact that we are using radioactive munitions to poison the people of the region on large scales, are an indication of the contempt for such people. The fact that most murders committed against Iraqis by soldiers and contractors alike are going unnoticed or unrecognized is also an indication of preexisting racism.
I have a sense that if the US were to occupy a European country with Christian traditions, the degree of racism would not be as broad and oppressive. But I do agree that the longer an occupation lasts, the more violent the resistance, the more brutal the retaliation by the occupiers, and the cycle continues to escalate and racism builds up.
I see no hope for the Arab world or the Middle East as long as Americans continue to choose to remain ignorant about the history of their people and to acknowledge their suffering. What has happened in the past is that all murders against people in the Middle East were justified in the name of security or the survival of the state of Israel or “to protect our allies.”
The unholiest act of this war, after the loss of life, is the degree of contempt that the marauding forces had for the oldest culture of the world. Much of the looting and destruction immediately after the invasion of Baghdad was done with the planning by or under the supervision of the invaders and their collaborators within Iraq and all the spies. There was discussion among US government officials and a number of art dealers regarding what to do with the treasures of Iraq. http://wsws.org/articles/2003/apr2003/loot-a19.shtml
Stealing the culture of the oldest civilization in the world must be up there among the most racist and psychopathic acts any human being or group can inflict.
17 November 2006, 12:42 amLegume Sam:
& don’t forget Stanley Milgram’s experiments… We can denounce the “denying the humanity of another” (which is what happened, of course), or chalk it up to socialization, but we might also benefit from an examination of the logic Milgram revealed behind the process of making ordinary Americans into murderers. One aspect of this process, he suggested, was “tuning”:
Lawyers with a firm understanding of Milgram should suspect, then, that the missing pieces in the puzzle of James Barker’s cruelty are the things which the authority-figures in Barker’s life have been telling him. This and other examples of institutional sadism should be used to implicate the whole command structure. Barker’s acts are clearly the result of an intentional “experiment,” with an outcome understood from that long-ago time when Milgram published his findings.
The whole “just a few bad apples” excuse, an excuse which has been promoted to the rank of ideology by now, needs to be debunked using the best theories social science can offer.
17 November 2006, 12:09 pmMarilyn Farhat:
Psychopaths flourish in war. It is my understanding that, at least Green, had mental problems before he went to Iraq.
Any individual or groups that plan to rape and murder in advance are criminals and are using their rage and the lawlessness as an opportunity to do what they like to do best: prey on the fear of their victims for self-gratification. Psychopaths have no conscience and have no empathy for anyone.
Most people, except in cases of mob violence, will resist the temptation or even the training to kill or rape. Barker, Green and their comrades would still have been individuals with certain character shortfalls and moral deficiencies. The difference is that that personal experiences on the ground in Iraq, their military training, their degree of power over the lives of the civilians, their hatred of or disregard for the human beings they were living with, as well as inability to feel, contributed to the decisions they made. Had they stayed out of the military and back home, there is a pretty good chance they might not have committed rape and murder.
The military, although normally weeding out people with personality disorders, do prefer to have individuals who will kill without remorse and on command. It is a double edged sword. Most people who have to kill do have a conscience and will end up confronting their demons at some point. It usually does not matter how the killing was done.
Professions that give people the physical power over others do tend to attract certain types of personalities. In Lebanon, foreign mercenaries who used to kill unarmed women and children from some building rooftop were often paid by the hour or by the head by the militias hiring them. Locals were usually not hired to do the job because most locals abhorred snipers and they were considered the vilest because they killed for profit. Some of them would have a bottle of alcohol accompanying them throughout their work day to help “steady” their hand and to pass the time. Many of their victims included pregnant women and children, as well as men.
Such men are a large part of any conflict although they may not always be visible like the regular army. Sometimes, they wreak far more havoc than the average soldier. They are, however, part of the problem that contributes to the subjugation of whole cultures through fear. They can paralyze nations into cultural regression by denying people access to the important aspects of culture that make a society functional and that allow that society to transmit its knowledge and morality to its offspring. Things like education, art, jobs, entertainment, become a luxury and the focus become survival. Wheeling and dealing and crime go on the rise. Continual violence becomes part of the culture that is transmitted and forms a new pradigm of a world view. Such facts are difficult to correct and may require generations of healing.
The sexual humiliation of the people of Iraq, whether in their homes (tying up children and females and rape), or at Abu Ghraib (sexually humiliating men using females or female specific paraphernalia), or on the streets (body searches of females) is aimed at the heart of the people and seems to negate the “win the hearts and minds” of the civilians. I think the damage was done when rumors of Abu Ghraib and similar prisons were being circulated, long before the story broke out in the Western media. It is a stab at the heart of a very patriarchal and male-centered society using the female to make the wounds fester.
Arab men are very protective of their women and they are an essential part of the honor of that culture. To be humiliated in such a fashion, by non-Muslims, is the ultimate blasphemy. It is my fear that irreparable damage has been done and people who have lost their honor will not rest until they reclaim it or until they die, and vengeance is usually brutal. THAT is what we are seeing in the insurgency in Iraq and that is the fact that the idiots in government and in the military, with the collaboration of the Israeli experts on the Middle East do not care about. There is much back and forth planning between the Israelis and the Americans that the media does not pay much attention to. General Karpinsky talked about that in her book after she retired from the military.
Iraq is the racist’s dream. We are all talking about Iraq and what is happening there. Our soldiers are beginning to publish their experiences. Who we are not hearing from much are the Iraqis themselves. Sad to say, this turmoil will prove lucrative to many an expert or author, but not to the Iraqi people.
17 November 2006, 2:06 pmStan:
Be very suspicious fo the “personality disorder” diagnosis with the military. If Green was diagnosed wiht a personality disorder, it was probably after the unit got wind of what might be about to get exposed.
The military is now routinely and intentionally misdiagnosing PTSD as “personality disorder.” I have my doubts about both “disorders,” based on my deep mistrust of the DSM-IV, the psyychiatric profession (no, I am not a scientologist), and the medicalization of every-damn-thing.
But the military uses the DSM-IV, and the difference between PTSD and PD is that the latter is considered to have its origins in early childhood or adolescence… BEFORE the military gets them.
PTSD sets the military and the VA up to be responsible for a “service-connected disability,” and that is not only bad PR, it is big bucks later.
The rub, of course, is that the miltiary induction screening process is supposed to identify personality disorders BEFORE personnel are accepted onto active duty.
They are such tricky devils that they often trick themselves.
17 November 2006, 5:14 pmMarilyn Farhat:
PTSD and depression are definitely underdiagnosed in the military. I am not sure how many people with any kind of mental or personality problems are being admitted into the military or sent into combat.
I have read before that the military is underplaying the number of stress casualties due to violence for the reasons you mentioned. I would like to point out though, that in the case mentioned in your article, at least with Green, there were problems of a different kind.
There are those who believe that treating stressed out soldiers after critical incidents and sending them back to the front lines as soon as possible is healthy for them because they need to go back to an environment that is familiar to them and be around their comrades for support. I work with a psychiatrist who recently retired from the National Guard and who did that with troops in Iraq 2003-2004. I disagree with such an approach. I think people who have undergone stressful and abnormal experiences should not go back to an unhealthy and violent environment that will trigger the problems and make them worse, even though they may have the support of their fellow soldiers. It is usually worse the second time.
Many people who survive prolonged violent experiences develop PTSD (which is consistent with a “normal” personality). Psychopaths do not possess the capacity for remorse or compassion that predisposes most of us to feelings of guilt and, therefore, PTSD. Lt. Colonel Grossman wrote about PTSD in “On Killing.” He did mention that it is usually the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness that cause PTSD in soldiers and sometimes that is related to the conflict in their conscience between their values and what they have done. A number of people who killed told him that every time you kill a person, no matter what the reason, they take part of your soul with them. That is what makes us healthy human beings who are capable of compassion and it is the normal way to behave under such conditions. But when you get someone like Green and his friends who kill and rape for the thrill, it is something vastly different and maybe untreatable because the first requirement for change is that the person committing the crime acknowledge that they have done something wrong. If they don’t, it is pointless to do anything.
Rapists are definitely predators who may or may not be psychopathics. In the case of Green and his buddies, PTSD was not the cause of their act. In PTSD and during stressful situations, behavior is usually impulsive and comes on due to some kind of “trigger.” We all know of the cases of soldiers who murdered their wives or of people who kill out of anger or desperation.
Predators who are also psychopaths, on the other hand, are stalkers and hunters. They enjoy the thrill of the hunt and they enjoy “torturing” their victims physically and mentally. They will usually commit the same crime more than once if they can get away with it, unlike the crimes due to PTSD. Psychopaths have no remorse, feel no guilt, and prey on others for self-gratification. They know right from wrong but they could not care less if they inflict pain on others if it is to their advantage. They believe the rules that bind the rest of us do not apply to them and are “personally offended” when they are confronted with their actions. They are incensed that the courts are “targeting” them. Psychopaths will make such comments and those are actual ones I have heard: “He wanted it. It was his fault,” a pedophile responding to a question regarding his raping a 4 year old boy. Another one is: “I am sick and tired of this f—ing a–hole. He couldn’t care less about me” referring to his attorney who canceled an appointment with him because he was receiving treatment for terminal cancer and was too ill to drive 4 hours in a car.
In the case of Abeer and her family, it seems like there was at least one psychopathic instigator and the rest followed along. It takes some cold-blooded person to keep a straight face when talking about the carnage they inflicted.
http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/psychology/psychopath/1.html
I would recommend a book, “Without a Conscience,” by Dr. Robert Hare. It is required reading for all employees and students where I work. http://www.amazon.com/Without-Conscience-Disturbing-Psychopaths-Among/dp/1572304510
and
http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/psychology/robert_hare/index.html
There is also the discussion continuing as to whether psychopaths are “born” or “made.”
Many psychopathic rapists and killers start budding in childhood. One of the hallmarks of such a personality is torturing animals. Psychopathy is still not understood very well but it has proven very difficult to treat or even control at this point in time.
In this ongoing war on “Terrorism” we may see more traumatized and alienated soldiers and vets out there. Add to that the large number op people with severe disabilities who have survived due to good trauma care. This will create a society that is deeply divided: one segment will come back home and will live the rest of their lives reliving that which they are trying to get away from without much support and understanding, and one of “I’m going to shop and party till I drop.”
I think every American, from the time they are little, should be shown actual footage of rape, murder, war, and destruction. They should be shown the actual injuries of soldiers and civilians and should hear their screams as they are calling out for their mothers as they are lying in the mud waiting to bleed to death. Everyone should experience at least those actual events from a distance so that when the time comes that a young person decides to enlist in the military, they at least have been exposed to the pros and cons of it. People who have a healthy respect for life and death and who do not treat violence and death as a video game are less likely to kill easily.
17 November 2006, 11:53 pmSteven Blais:
So tell me again, who are the terrorists?
18 November 2006, 8:24 amMarilyn Farhat:
Terrorists are everywhere and belong to every country in the world, and they can be individuals, groups, or states.
Most countries sponsor some kind of terrorist group or another. Ours have been the Shah and his death squads of Iran (Savak) and Colombia to name a couple. We also supported Saddam and gave him chemical and biological weapons during the time when he used them against the Kurds. We also support Turkey’s oppression of the Kurds while we denounce Saddam’s oppression of the same people (Turks are our friends now. Saddam ceased to be so when oil and geopolitical strategy stood in the way of that friendship).
There have been a number of famous terrorists that we did not view as terrorists: Napoleon Bonaparate, Yitzhak Shamir, Mencahem Begin, Henry Kissinger (the one who said that military men were dumb and were expendable).
http://www.coastalpost.com/06/01/03.html
Western terrorism has inflicted far more damage on the world than Islamic or Arab terrorism starting with:
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anyone who believes that such an act was excusable really needs to revisit their moral beliefs and sense of honesty and fairness, especially since we are not supposed to condemn people to annihilation based on what their parents or descendants might do to our “boys” (those dumb unthinking people).
The mass murder of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, communists, blacks, disabled, and other undesirables under Hitler’s occupation.
The brutal occupation, expulsion, murder and oppression of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians by the European Jews with the help of Britain and the US.
The training of South American government terrorists at what used to be known as the School of the Americas in Georgia in the methods of torture and subversion.
http://www.soaw.org/new/type.php?type=8
Let us not forget the CIA and black ops who were and are currently in the Middle East agitating and causing the deaths, bombing, and torture of large numbers of civilians.
Terrorism on large scales in modern history started with the Western colonial nations. But, most people learn by example and, when they cannot resist using satellites, skyhawks, or daisy cutters because they are not a government, they will use their fists and they will use stones and they will use homemade bombs. What gives the West monopoly over the right to “defend” itself? Israel and the US have had a history of encroaching into other people’s territory long before the first suicide bomber blew himself up in 1982.
Maybe it is about time we treated the Eastern world as more than our crapper and became respectful of other human beings. If you treat people like they do not exist or if you treat them like barbarians, they will start to be that.
If you beat a human being or an animal constantly, they will do one of two things, they will eitgher give up and die or they will become vicious and jump up and bite your head off when you least expect it. That is the nature of humans. What goes around comes around on all sides.
This in no excuses any terrorist but it should not excuse the behavior of the “superpowers” either.
18 November 2006, 8:48 pmNil:
“Arab men are very protective of their women and they are an essential part of the honor of that culture. To be humiliated in such a fashion, by non-Muslims, is the ultimate blasphemy.”
That’s a very odd comment. Are American men less “protective” of “their” women? There’s this weird orientalized stereotype of “Arab” culture that’s so prevalent right now, that some of us end up seeing things through this weird frame while believing ourselves to be otherwise critical. The reasons to be opposed to the brutalization of women that always (always? I think maybe) goes along with war have nothing to do with our weird ideas of what is “essential to the honor of that culture.” Is becoming enraged at brutalization of women unique to Iraq? Is there a culture where that _isn’t_ seen as an insult? Wait, there are: Every patriarchal culture on earth, let’s start with ours. You want to understand this weird obsession with women’s honor from the same people who routinely brutalize women, you don’t need to look to exotic foreign climes to study it.
19 November 2006, 1:38 pm