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January 19, 2005
Billmon: Sounds Like Victory
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Atrios had some remarks on LTC Tim Ryan, Commander, Task Force 2-12 Cavalry. He cites from Salon story Whitewashing torture?
On June 15, 2003, Sgt. Frank “Greg” Ford, a counterintelligence agent in the California National Guard’s 223rd Military Intelligence (M.I.) Battalion stationed in Samarra, Iraq, told his commanding officer, Capt. Victor Artiga, that he had witnessed five incidents of torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees at his base, and requested a formal investigation. Thirty-six hours later, Ford, a 49-year-old with over 30 years of military service in the Coast Guard, Army and Navy, was ordered by U.S. Army medical personnel to lie down on a gurney, was then strapped down, loaded onto a military plane and medevac’d to a military medical center outside the country.
…
Not long after Marciello left him, Ford said, Madera, accompanied by an unknown male captain, entered Ford’s tent and told him to get ready because he was going to be “medevac’d” to Germany immediately. “What the hell is going on here?” Ford remembered demanding, but Madera told him to “be quiet,” that he “had to leave,” and that she would explain once they were airborne. She escorted him to a waiting Humvee that took them to the base airstrip, where a C-130 was warming up on the tarmac.
“Madera ordered me to lie down on a gurney that had been in the rear of the Humvee so she could strap me down. I again asked what was going on, only this time a lot more pissed off. I said that I was perfectly able to walk.” Ford said Madera insisted, telling him it was the order of “[Lt. Col. Timothy] Ryan and Artiga” that he be “bound and secured” when taken “out of country.” “I saw that I had no choice and finally said OK, anything just to get the fuck out of there,” Ford recalled. With the help of the male captain, who Ford said identified himself as a medical officer, Madera strapped him to the gurney.
Just then, Ford claimed, Ryan, Artiga’s superior officer, pulled up in his Humvee and walked over to where Ford was lying on the gurney. “He looked down at me and said, ‘Don’t worry. We are going to get you the best treatment available.’ I was enraged at that point, and it was a good thing I was strapped down. I just stared back at Ryan with looks that I hoped could kill, but I didn’t say nothing. What was the point? He had won that round.”
Ryan did not respond to interview requests for this story.
LTC Tim Ryan loves the sound of screams in the morning too.
More on LTC Tim Ryan
My team took pictures of the site and all of the weapons and ammunition and filed a report immediately after returning to Anaconda. I also verbally briefed my battalion commander, Lt. Col. Timothy Ryan, as was the policy with any significant event such as this. Upon hearing my report, Lt. Col. Ryan requested that I take him back out to the site the next day, which I did. Ryan toured the facility just as I had done and saw all of the unsecured weaponry and ammunition. Ryan told me that he would talk to EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) and “have the stuff removed.”
It should be noted that after U.S forces moved into Iraq and the Saddam regime fell, the responsibility for securing and disposing weapons and explosives at the many storage sites scattered across Iraq became the instant responsibility of the U.S military. The Iraqi police, or any other local public authority that could have taken responsibility, simply no longer existed.
I do not know whether Ryan relayed my reports about the storage site to the appropriate military officials. I placed calls to his office on Thursday for comment, but received no replies. In all fairness to him, Ryan did not have the authority to either remove the material or to post guards. He would have had to request such action through his chain of command, in this case, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th M.I. Battalion of Abu Ghraib fame. But in any event, no action was taken.
For the next several weeks I continued to receive reports from my sources in the community that the weapons were still at the storage facility, there were still no guards, and the looting was continuing.
If the enemy would have no weapons, how much less fun would LTC Tim Ryan have?
NYT published this translation of a ‘Spiegel’ article. They really must be getting desperate, if they use the kinds of manuals mentioned below.
U.S. Military Personnel Growing Critical of the War in Iraq
Proposals being considered to improve the security situation in Iraq also show signs of desperation. For the first time, regular soldiers are being offered training to fight insurgents. Until now, such special training was reserved for members of the elite forces and for marine infantry troops. Part of the training includes a marines’ training manual written in 1940. Some is helpful, but parts are completely antiquated. For instance, there is a section labeled “working with animals,” (mules, mostly) and another on “mixed-race” companies. According to the manual, such companies are unusually “unmanageable due to a lack of strong character.”
Posted by: Fran | Jan 19 2005 20:41 utc | 3
@b
How does one go, at the rank of lieutenant colonel, from being an MI officer to being a Cav officer?
One doesn’t.
They’re different Tim Ryans, Bernhard.
Posted by: Pat | Jan 19 2005 21:07 utc | 4
the 1940 ed. usmc small wars manual is recommended reading for understanding the “insurgency.” i think it is the only official edition of that manual out there, which is why it’s still in use. there is a draft version for the 21st century update, but not a final copy that i’ve seen.
Posted by: b real | Jan 19 2005 21:10 utc | 5
Ryan is a psy-ops author, nothing less, whose relationship with, and tolerance of, the truth can be discerned by his leeching off the death of C.A.R.E. worker Margaret Hassan to repeat the lie, now long since discredited by reputable journalists and DNA tests, that her ‘disembowelled and mutilated body was dumped in the street in Fallujah’. Ryan’s planting of this lie and other misinformation in US media is a part of his job and he evidently sees no irony in his abusing journalists for ‘not telling the whole story’ while at the same time slipping some black propaganda before his readers. Perhaps US media editors think they are ‘helping the war effort’ by printing Ryan’s lies and spin when in truth they and him are simply perpetuating the deception of the American public some of whom, it must be said, swallow and repeat the garbage Ryan pens quite uncritically. He seems part of an increasingly diminishing group of officers that see Fallujah as a success when in truth senior commanders and intelligence analysts are well aware that this is not so.
A true story that Ryan might not pick up and plant in the American provincial press can be found in this tale of the orphaning of a group of Iraqi children by U.S. troops in Tal Afar. Every picture tells a story.
Posted by: Sic transit gloria USA | Jan 19 2005 23:27 utc | 7
Remember, the mysterious missile that took out an Abrams?
Bet, Moqtada has been stockpiling lately.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jan 19 2005 23:48 utc | 8
obscenity after obscenity. lie after lie. imbecility after imbecility. torture after torture . murder after murder. crime after crime. war after war
sic transit is absolutely correct to call these people garbage. they demean any notion of humanity
we have been told – the abuses are not systemic or systematic but even the blindest amongst us cannot hide from the shameful realities of this most immoral occupation
the torture & abuse are part & parcel of the american occupation of iraq in which the imbecilic british & australian are vvery definitely junior partners – & so are doubly demeaned. demeaned as perpetrators & demeaned as victims of the savagery of u s policy
how well john le carré saw these indecencies long ago in his prophetic novels which outlined the lying morality that creates the bushes & the blairs & their terrible assistants.
there is no moral compass here – it has gone out the window. these are monsters. monsters. as were the police battallions of the nazis that went into the ukraine, estonia lithuania etc & murdered one by one their jewish, gypsy, communist populations. the police battalions & the einsatzgruppen went about their business as the americans are doing. wiping out the intelligentsia – crushing even the most minor forms of resistance with an iron hand – & killing outright in the most unbelieveably pornographic ways – their ‘enemy’
i do not see any difference. none at all. you will say that i harp on with these comparisons with nazi germany & i will respond that the parallels are so chillingly close it is almost impossibler not to compare them. the difference is only in the number & even that is a question of time
& you must understand that the jewish & gypsy populations were mostly killed in this way – more than in the gas chambers of the death camps. of course that systemisation took place – but the murder of millions was often done in a workmanlike manner – one after one , group after group, village after village. & it was done by the same kind of people that are committing these acts by the occupation forces of iraq
& the comparison does not end there – especially in the baltic & to some extent in poland the local population gladly took part in these mass murders on a limited scale. they were festivals of death as they are in iraq today. why the photographs. why the celebration. because it is a festival of death. & we have testimonies of allawis own participation in these celebrations of death
because eros has left us & with live ever more with the degradations of the death instinct administrated by imbeciles & criminals
how can we bear to live knowing our culture is the creator of these most abominable crimes
i feel sick. so sick with it all. will these celebrations of death never end & it clearly will not end in the forseeable future
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 20 2005 0:31 utc | 10
why the celebration. because it is a festival of death.
there has always been that terrifying element in western societies, and I think in many nonwestern societies as well. the crowds who brought their children and a picnic lunch to a public hanging. the lynch mob joking, posing for photographs under the tree, beside the bonfire. the ritual torture of prisoners (not even for information) and animals, all the religions of public human sacrifice…
seems like there’s something spooky and scary somewhere in a lot of human brains that — I dunno — feels more alive, more secure, enjoys its own life and health all the more for watching (or participating in) the wreck and ruin of another life. that doesn’t feel empowered until it sees someone else ground into the dirt, that doesn’t feel truly alive until it sees someone else dying, that doesn’t feel brave or whole until it sees someone else broken and grovelling. as if there were a zero-sum supply of happiness and wellbeing in the world, and these qualities have to be looted by force from another person before they can be securely enjoyed…
it’s difficult to comprehend. and the confluence of this (imho) depraved taste in many hearts at once, in a wave of public enthusiasm for the suffering and death of others, is perhaps even more terrifying than the individual psychopath. that “ordinary people” can gather in mobs (or the inchoate virtual mob of the tv viewing audience) and cheer for death and suffering from a position of relative safety, is one of the scariest things about the species… it gives me the cold shudders and a visceral understanding of the word “Abomination”… what possible purpose — evolutionary, social — can it have for us, this tendency to orgies of cruelty and despoliation?
A fair question – what possible purpose can these tendencies toward orgies of cruelty and despoilation have?
Well, when a new lion takes over a group of lionesses, he kills the cubs – the purpose, to promote the survival of new cubs with his own genes. So, in general, killing others can have the effect of promoting the survival of our own descendents [see the Bible’s depiction of the conquest of Canaan, for example]. So, if mass murder is sometimes adaptive in the evolutionary/group competition sense, then it is also adaptive to have a way to enjoy it. That is how I understand it.
Posted by: mistah charley | Jan 20 2005 3:43 utc | 12
The entire spectacle is intended as a mockery of his enemies.
I was going to write something that exactly captured my mood.
I’m sick of these fuckers. Really.
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 20 2005 3:48 utc | 13
mistah charley. he dead on.
they don’t call it bloodlust for nothing.
Posted by: fauxreal | Jan 20 2005 3:55 utc | 14
There all about shit culture: bad albums, tv, porn with plotlines, kids who just love their parents as their ‘best friends,’ soccer–goddamn soccer–even the big fat kids play soccer now, blue ties, poetry that rhymes, Dr. Phil, Church, Church, Church, The Food Network, NFL, Awards Shows, ‘organic food,’ and comic book movie blockbusters.
This is hell.
Who makes the nazis?
…Longhorn Breed… –The Fall
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 20 2005 4:01 utc | 15
For those with the stomach to read the reality of American military ‘heroics’ in Iraq, try, while keeping a sick bag by you, to wade through Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and the new face of American war, by Evan Wright. The author, while bonded to and supportive of the US Marines with whom he was embedded, makes numerous references to the casual slaughter of Iraqi civilians, the almost universal indifference of the soldiers to such killings, their exhilaration when killing people and destroying towns, villages and hamlets as well as the fact that masturbating after killing men, women and children seemed to be a common and accepted form of winding down among the Marines. And this from a writer who is sympathetic to the creatures he was accompanying on their rampage through Iraq. The revolting behavior of the Marines does not appear to be aberrent, it is who they are and what they do and they seem to revel in their self-image as killers without mercy or conscience. The book makes for sad reading for the numbing of humanity it reveals and I doubt many Americans could read it and ‘support their troops’ with the same blind unequivocal faith that is often manifested. To read talk of ‘collateral damage’ and ‘regrettable loss of civilian lives’ having read of Rules of Engagement being modified on a whim to permit the killing of every living soul in some of the areas the Maines pass through is only slightly less nauseating than the knowledge that US Marines celebrate the slaughter of Iraqis by masturbating in celebration. And note, this is not ‘my propaganda’ but the unchallenged account of an American journalist who travelled with them and was a witness to it.
Posted by: Sic transit gloria USA | Jan 20 2005 4:53 utc | 16
How does one go, at the rank of lieutenant colonel, from being an MI officer to being a Cav officer?
Okay, there’s two crazy motherfuckers over there enjoying the bloodletting.
How comforting.
These people really are insane. “A symphony of destruction”?? Not only is that just frothing at the mouth nuts, it’s the worst prose I’ve ever heard.
And worse, an american paper printed that tripe. The editors were probably saying, “hell, yeah!!”
I fear we are lost.
Posted by: fourlegsgood | Jan 20 2005 4:59 utc | 17
So Slothrop has decimated so-called “pop culture” which is really not pop culture, but a certain segment of the whole… And we have all the rest of the brilliant people here over-intellectualizing the obvious in so many ways every day. I count myself as one of the demi-intellectuals, a minor voice, so that’s why I can see the “others”. It helps to be outside.
You all are so bright and yet I see you all parroting the cultural loudspeakers or decrying them without knowing what to do next. As one of the “demis” I feel some credential for saying so. If you must blast me, then have at it.
You all have the brain power to know that you are trying to patch a fundamentally flawed system. The civilization, as it has been handed down to u,s has the stamp that says: THE ONLY WAY. Bright people with vision know that is a lie or a delusion. I’d be in “idealist heaven” to see you all applying your brains to a solution for the fundamental problems. No programs. No damnit. No damn programs. A solution. A different way.
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Jan 20 2005 6:01 utc | 18
@slothrop an odd list… I kinda like organic food myself, especially if I grow it myself or know the person who did. poetry that rhymes is all right with me also — philip larkin for example… siegfried sassoon… wilfred owen… could definitely skip the Church Church Church bit though. don’t watch TV so I dunno about any Food Channels. I’d add SUVs to my list of weird aberrations of contemporary US culture 🙂 the only comic-book movie blockbuster I liked was Dick Tracy and that was because of the Sondheim songs…
sorry to make trivial conversation, but the Coronation tomorrow is just depressing the hell out of me, all that glitter and silly swagger, and its backdrop is the blood and s**t and terror of Abu Ghraib and all the other hells of the American Gulag Archipelago … I think my head might explode. black armband for me tomorrow. so much I thought was “in the past” — Viet Nam, the colonial era, absolute monarchy, various kinds of Bad Old Days, and now it looks like it’s all in our future. all over again, world without end. beam me up Scotty…
@kate been trying to live a different way all my life. don’t know how to turn that into something contagious enough to make a real difference. the same old memes of blood lust and racism and self-righteousness seem so much more durable than any more benign ones we invent in the hope of displacing ’em.
De: kate been trying to live a different way all my life. don’t know how to turn that into something contagious enough to make a real difference. I’m with you there, DeAndander … but doing it ourselves is the main key. Human beings learn by example… modeling. Finding the right “infective meme” is another thing entirely, eh? We do best with our own… our children and families… and through them, others. It’s how it works. I’m resigned to it being a slower process than my lifespan will allow.
Posted by: Kate_Storm | Jan 20 2005 7:59 utc | 20
I am running way behind the pack here but have gained much by reading in catching up. Thanks to you all. I had hoped to be in D.C. today but have to stay close to home (aging dog needs much care). I am wearing black with a white ribbon for peace and mourning and I have made a display on my board at work of the images posted by sic transit gloria (6:27) Every picture does tell a story. Some of my fellow workers made much the other day of some girl who ate a 5 or 6 pound hamburger so this is my response to what they think is newsworthy. I am so sick of it all.
Posted by: beq | Jan 20 2005 13:05 utc | 21
From the Independent
Blair’s champion draws angry response with account of the war and its aftermath
Fisk may have surprised some in the audience when he said: “The critics of the war have not been vindicated. I never believed the British and American governments would lie to us to much. I never believed that the insurrection would so quickly gather pace and be so disastrous to the occupation, and I never believed the occupation would be so flawed and so brutal.”
Audience members who wanted to know what the experts predicted for the future of Iraq were given a bleak assessment by Fisk, who had flown from Baghdad for the event. He said the upcoming “flawed” elections would be as unrepresentative in their results as polling organised by Saddam Hussein’s regime, “not because the people are forced to vote what they are told to vote, but because the Shiites will indeed vote, and the Kurds will indeed vote, but the Sunni minority will not vote because either they are intimidated or because they don’t want to”.
Asked whether coalition troops should withdraw from Iraq, Fisk called for the Americans to set a pullout date. “They’ve got to talk to the insurgents – and they will – and then they must go.” Glass added that the British presence was “irrelevant”.
Posted by: Fran | Jan 20 2005 14:43 utc | 22
I just watched Monsters Inc. with a 4 year old and am now inpressed that some scraps of our popular culture are worth nibbling.
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 20 2005 19:11 utc | 23
Deanander
The camo-pants American kicking in the head of the arab is an important sign whose “accumulated perceptions,” as Benjamin would say, include myriad cultural references. The god-term, the titular object of consumption inspired by this depository of ideology, as Kenneth Burke might say, is this inauguration. Toby Keith and Classic Rock stations are second-order rhetoric, I think.
I’m reading as much as possible from intellectuals surviving the 30’s Europe, and, as yet, found no reference to the normalization of torture by media, though this must have been the case somewhere.
I said at billmon’s long ago the torture scandal would swiftly be incorporated into the narrative of American exceptionalism. I would not be surprised in three years Mountain Dew will launch a ‘torture to the max’ campaign in which Tony Hawke is shown putting his joint out in the navel of an old veiled woman and then slakes thirst with a cold can of the Dew.
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 20 2005 19:37 utc | 24
If people only read ee cummings and listened to art ensemble of chicago, the world would be fine.
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 20 2005 19:44 utc | 26
@slothrop re the incorporation of torture/sadism openly into popcult cool, I posted over at Collateral Damage thread… the “cooling” of racism and misogyny via the mass popularisation and mainstreaming of sadistic porno imho has prepped the US public pretty well for the Mt Dew commercial you foresee. the escalation of exceptionalism and cruelty never happens in just one sector of the society — note previous post about “new technologies for punishing children,” etc., or the treatment of school age children as max-security prisoners in mass-production schools, or the increasing incidence of scenes of torture and humiliation in mainstream film (cf Goff’s comments on Man on Fire). cruelty of every kind, bullying, humiliation, the infliction of pain, the normalisation of oppressive control-freakery, even the sexual thrills of bullying and humiliation and so on, are becoming quite blandly acceptable in US culture from schools to porno cable channel to Iraq POW camp.
Posted by: beq | Jan 20 2005 20:06 utc | 28
I’m cautious about condemning this or that form of representation like porno as a ’cause’ of power relations. Perhaps, for example pre-meiji japan, erotica served a different kind of discipline other than male domination.
The problem is a certain kind of power oriented to capital accumulation. Porn conveys this ideology, but is not the cause of it.
Isn’t this a key message in Foucault’s History of Sexuality?
Posted by: slothrop | Jan 20 2005 20:26 utc | 29
“Atrios had some remarks on LTC Tim Ryan, Commander, Task Force 2-12 Cavalry.” And “BillMon” quoted same guy.
So, is everyone grasping that they are one & the same. Or is it just a coincidence that both live in Philly & are economists & bloggers? Note “Billmon” doesn’t write anymore, so his handlers can’t object. He’s paid to shepherd the masses to the Soros Party & to keep their politics suitably to the right.
Posted by: jj | Jan 20 2005 21:26 utc | 30
slothrop
lt. calley changed the notion of pornography for the modern man. yopu get your kicks & you sing your song while slaughtering old men women & children. you slaughter like there is no tommoorrow. you slaughter because these people mean less than you. they may not even exist while they are being slaughtered. they are just pulsions expressed by the explosion of blood bone & flesh against earth against buildings against nature, itself. pulsion not explored but exploding; pulsions which have nothing to do with sex but have much more to with father knows best, the flintstones, the endless families of trotured american with their tortured morality being reproduced in the desert of other cultures
foucault understoof a great deal – but he did not understand enough. the work that must be done – must be done now – by scholars worthy of that name & they have to be sscholars of resistance. scholars capable of transgression not of their reputations but of their lives
the instinctive response of a hobshawn & a chomsky to this necessary knowledge is of course fear – because deep in their heart they believe there is a better world – but the scholars of today must assume the worst. the very very worst. they have to go to very dark places. & it is the duty primarily of american scholars & if this work is not done – we will all fall into the seven circles of hell. we may be there already
the old marxist so much wanted to believe – to believe in the impossible but now we are faced with the unimaginabe that not even baudrillard in his darker moments could allow
death to their death
deathh to art that makes a life not worth living possible!
bring the war home – in the streetes & in the libraries
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 20 2005 21:46 utc | 32
look i’m sorry for all the typographic errors but i am so tired of this tide of murder & at the jingoistic self celebration in face of a natural disaster
perhaps jerome & hobbes are correct – men are wolves
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 20 2005 21:57 utc | 33
r-giap – don’t think that this makes me happy.
But, hey – remember who the real Misanthrope is in Molière’s eponymous play?
Posted by: Jérôme | Jan 20 2005 22:46 utc | 34
jérôme
thank you for your gentleness – this war & everything that surrounds it brings a great unhappiness to my life & those close to me – & i can feel here the very real effect that is happening on other posters
we are living in a special time – perhaps even an apocalyptic one. when dylan sd “money doesn’t talk, it swears” – even this most prophetic of americans could see how we would be surrounded by such screaming. the screaming of the horror that is being lived & the screams of these endless nincompoops who pass off their pornographoc ‘information’ as ‘news’ – there is nothing of a kind
we, of course, have lived with their lies before – but as someone cited the other day – the stench of mendacity – is so strong it – has gone past making you want to laugh – but to hysterically scream yourself
people will say we have lived through this before – & i will say no we haven’t & never at this pace – there is a baudriallardian rapidity of events – their discovery – the revelation of what ‘is really happening’ – the quick & talentless lies that are envoyed to cover up the revelation & the event agin itself reappears in its fully fury
& i am convinced we are not experiencing the worst of it – the people of iraq & afghanistan obviouslly are – but our time is coming & it won’t be long – this i can feel in my bones & i think i am at heart an optimistic man. i believe in people. i believe in their capacity to transform
but, but, but….i have just been rereading e m cioran – (unfortunately the entire ouevre) – for my work in my ateliers – his disgust with humanity is very close to be convincing – but then this man – was a weak man – he did not have an ounce of the strength of somebody like paul celan or old walter benjamin who had a thousand times more right to hate this old world – but we live in a world its seems where – the cioranian constructs are in the heads of all elites – that in the end the people do not matter & third world people matter even less – even when we are killing them in a carnival of carnage
& this carnival of carnage – this terrain of torture – this landscape of horror i fear is our future though its is so rooted in the errors of our past
still steel
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 21 2005 0:13 utc | 35
Re: culture – society
I saw in december two distinctly different movies: Collateral (2004) and The Big Sleep (1946). Comparing these movie that are in not totally different genres, I realised something. When Tom Cruise gets a bullet that scratches his head he runs on. When Humprhey Bogart gets kicked in the stomach he folds and is weak for quite some time. In 1946 it might have been impossible not to make the violence realistic because of a more violent-experienced audience (the WW2 for example). Collateral on the other hand is just refering to other movies, not to real experiences of violence. If this holds then unrealistic violence in pop culture is a sign of a less violent society (a society where fewer has experienced violence in real life) and not a cause of violence in society.
So what to look out for is then realistic violence…
Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Jan 21 2005 3:24 utc | 36
You’ll find the LTC Tim Ryan bio on the web to be quite interesting. It’s prettier than the one for the commanding general, but unfortunately it has no link to the Ft. Hood website it’s on, unlike those of the other officers. No way to get to the Ft. Homepage either. An orphan page, but a very nicely done orphan, with lots of meta file words, again unlike the “real” bios’, which have none.
All in all, a very carefully planned and executed “letter from a soldier.”
Posted by: John West | Jan 25 2005 1:33 utc | 37