FM 34-52 Table of Contents

Reference Material:

US Army Field Manual 34-52, "Intelligence Interrogation," can be found here. It seems to be the governing publication for the operations in Abu Ghraib that led to the questionable practices, although it appears to be undergoing 'field modifications' under the strain of the new war. If you are following the story, you may wish to make reference to it now and again.

Instapundit, on holiday for health reasons (get well, sir), links to this article by the Belmont Club.

My first thoughts at the news of the Abu Ghraib abuses, the Taguba Report and the Presidential mea culpa which followed was whether posterity would recall the incident in the same way the Christmas Truce in the first year of the Great War is remembered today. The last grasp at enforcing civilized standards of conduct before the brutality of the trenches coarsened men completely....

And in a small late-night restaurant in a back street, a small man in steel rimmed glasses told me, over fifteen cent beer, how he had attended a party given by some academic types the night before. They turned the evening into Commie-fest and gathered round someone he knew slightly as a minor functionary in the Red guerilla army in the expectation of edifying stories from the dark years. He was an ex-seminarian, quiet and softly spoken, who told them about his first mission to eliminate a Marcos informer somewhere in a village in southern Luzon. They forced the informer down from his thatch hut one evening, and to save money and avoid the noise of gunfire, cut his throat at the doorstep of his own home. The seminarian was given the honors and he remembered sawing the knife against the informer's windpipe. What struck him most of all, was the rubbery resistance of the cartilage and cries of the informer's children. 'Papa! Papa!' It took a long time to cut though his throat. Before the story was over all the academic bravos had slunk off, retreating like Daisy Buchanan into the 'vast carelessness' of their fantasy world, leaving the man in steel rimmed glasses to drink with the ex-seminarian, ironically improving the company.

One day Ted Koppel will read, in addition to the names of American soldiers who died in Iraq, the names of friends who will have died in another attack on New York. One day Nicholas de Genovea, the Columbia professor who called for a "million Mogadishus" will understand that it means a billion dead Muslims. And then for the first time, perhaps, they will understand the horror of Abu Ghraib while we all raise our glasses, sardonically like Robert Graves, "with affection, to the men we used to be".

This thought crosses my mind from time to time. As much as I respect the Belmont Club, however, I must disagree with the conclusion here. The Geneva Conventions (Appendix J of the 34-52 lists the relevant ones) were written by men who were thinking of 'the men we used to be.' They were adopted in 1949. For the men who wrote them, the Second World War was their background and the Third World War seemed increasingly likely. It is no utopian text.

We'll do what we have to do in order to win, and I'll be right there with you doing it as long as I live and have strength. Yet, we ought not to throw away our heritage so freely. If we are indeed looking toward the horrors of war, let us heed the warning of our fathers. They knew of what they spoke. What is coming may be awful, but we have in their counsel a shield. When a shield breaks, you cast it away: but not before.