By Aaron Glantz | Inter-Press Service News
SAN FRANCISCO, Sep 4 – Few people have thought as much about the morality of the U.S. occupation of Iraq than Joshua Casteel, a former U.S. Army interrogator who served at Abu Ghraib prison in the wake of the detainee abuse scandal there.
Once a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and raised in an evangelical Christian home, Casteel became a conscientious objector while he was stationed at the prison.
It wasn’t the kind of abuse shown in the famous graphic images that made him feel morally compelled to leave the military — Casteel says that kind of behaviour had ceased by the time he showed up in June 2004 — but the experience of gleaning information speaking to the detainees in their own language.
Those experiences, and the spiritual awakening Casteel experienced inside the walls of the prison, are contained in “Letters from Abu Ghraib”, a compendium of e-mail messages he sent home from the prison, which was published last month by Iowa’s Essay Press.
The e-mails, compiled in a lean 118-page volume, are less concerned with the details of prison operations than their moral implications. By what right, the former interrogator asks, does one derive the authority to question prisoners as part of a military occupation?
It’s an important question to ask and timely too given the steady growth in the number of Iraqi prisoners in U.S. custody over the course of its occupation of Iraq. Pentagon statistics show the U.S. military now holds over 24,000 “security detainees” in Iraq — more than double the number incarcerated by Coalition at the time of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal four and a half years ago.
U.S. forces are holding nearly all of these persons indefinitely, without an arrest warrant, without charge, and with no right to any type of open legal proceedings. It’s perhaps a mark of the failure of the United States’ political and religious establishments that it falls to a U.S. Army Specialist like Joshua Casteel to wrestle with the moral difficulties of these massive imprisonments. “Letters from Abu Ghraib” shows how the ethical failures of their leaders affect soldiers on the ground.
When he first arrives at Abu Ghraib’s interrogation centre, Casteel tells his family he really loves his work. “I see my job much more as a Father Confessor than an interrogator,” he writes, “As a Confessor you cannot coerce a person to reveal that which they wish to hide. A Confessor’s aim is to help the one confessing to be sincere, to arrive at the kind of contrition that actually desires self-disclosure — and to that end, empathy and understanding go a long way.”
But Casteel, who prays daily and considers “keeping the liturgy with others and taking the Eucharist — Communion” to be “the most important part of the week,” begins to feel uncomfortable after just a few weeks on the ground.
“The weight of the job sometimes is more painfully present to me than at other times,” he writes a month into the deployment. He is uncomfortable “exploiting” prisoners for their “intelligence” value rather then interacting with them as fully equal human beings.
Making matters worse is that many of the detainees he interrogated turned out to be completely innocent.
“I was constantly being asked, ‘Why am I being held here? I want answers!'” Casteel told IPS. “But that was my job. We were supposed to be finding answers to our questions, but we kept being put into situations that were incredibly puzzling because talking to people was like trying to get blood from a turnip. They were the ones that had a greater justification for the need to have answers.”
Faced with such a dilemma, Casteel turns to an army chaplain for help. “We talked, I vexed and I summoned whatever strength we could conclude upon to go back to my interrogation…He prayed me back into combat,” Casteel writes. “I was no longer afraid to demand authority, to play upon certain weaknesses of my detainee, and to question in a most heated fashion — because ultimately, I thought, it would lead me to a more accurate assessment of the veracity of his statements.’
“I transgressed no lines of ‘proper conduct,’ but I certainly, and without hesitation, used a man’s anxieties, weaknesses and fears, and my particular place of power and dominance to assess him according to his word…And I even left with what I thought was a clearer picture of the man I was assessing — perhaps to his benefit. So, why did I feel like a complete failure?”
The answer to his question comes in October 2004, five months into his tour at Abu Ghraib.
“I had an interrogation with a 22-year-old Saudi Arabian who was very straightforward that he had come to Iraq to conduct jihad,” Casteel said. “We started having a conversation about religion and ethics and he told me that I was a very strange man who was a Christian but didn’t follow the teachings of Jesus to love my enemy and pray for the persecuted…I told him that I thought he was right and that there was a massive contradiction involved with me doing my job and being a Christian.”
“I wanted to have a conversation with him about ethics and the cycle of vengeance and how idiotic it was that his people said it was okay for him to come and kill me and my people told me it was okay to kill him,” he said in an interview. “Why is it that we can’t find a different path together?”
Since that type of conversation was not possible as a U.S. Army interrogator, Joshua Casteel filed an application for discharge as a conscientious objector. Much to his surprise, his command endorsed it, and offered to speed his transition out of the Army. He now hopes to serve as a bridge between conservative Christians and the antiwar left.
He hopes “Letters from Abu Ghraib” will “give conservative Christians an unfiltered picture of one Christian’s wrestling with violence and also help the secular world get a backstage pass to the way a conservative Christian operates.”
Since his discharge, Casteel converted to Catholicism, attracted by the Church’s tradition of “social teaching,” and has worked with other like-minded Catholics to push the Church play a more active role in bringing the war to an end.
He’s excited his book has been assigned to students at a number of Catholic high schools in the Midwest and the former interrogator has been invited to speak at religious schools from New Jersey to Colorado.
“Catholics are 30 percent of the military. They’re equally 30 percent of Congress,” he said. “The Vatican had a strong rebuke of the Iraq war but the Iraq war could not have happened were it not for Catholics. Christ has turned up in the people of Iraqi bodies and it’s Iraq that’s getting crucified and it’s largely Christian America that’s allowed to be prosperous in the midst of it.”
*IPS correspondent Aaron Glantz is author of the upcoming book “The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans”.
How the Bush Administration is Helping McCain
September 6, 2008The Fake U.S. Victory in Iraq
By PATRICK COCKBURN | Counterpunch, Sep 3, 2009
Political events in Iraq are seldom what they seem. The hand- over by the US military of control of Anbar province, once the heartland of the Sunni rebellion, to Iraqi forces is a case in point. The US will keep 25,000 American soldiers in Anbar, so the extent to which the Iraqi government will really take over is debatable. But the future of Anbar is a crucial pointer to the fate of Iraq. It is a vast area and one of the few parts of Iraq that is overwhelmingly Sunni.
The Iraqi government is dominated by Shia Islamic parties in alliance with Kurdish nationalists. The vital question now is whether or not this Shia-dominated government can reassure the Sunni minority that they are not going to be overrun as the US withdraws its forces. The Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is in a very confident mood. In the past four months he feels he has successfully faced down the Shia militiamen of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army by taking back control of Basra, Sadr City and Amarah. Then he refused to sign a new security accord with the US which President George Bush wanted to see agreed by August 31.
In the past few weeks he has been confronting his Kurdish allies over the future of the oil city of Kirkuk and the town of Khanaqin.
Mr Maliki may be overplaying his hand but there is no doubt that the Iraqi state is becoming more powerful in Iraq and the Mahdi Army, the Americans and the Kurds less so. The Americans in particular feel that he exaggerates the extent to which his success against the Mahdi Army was because of the new strength of the Iraqi security forces.
These troops were doing badly until they received American support.
Nevertheless, Mr Maliki’s position is strong. He seems to have realized that he may need the US, but the US also cannot do without him and is in no position to replace him as it did with his predecessor, Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
Much of what the White House is now doing is done to help the Republicans in the presidential election. The aim is to give the impression that Iraq has finally come right for the US and victory is finally in its grasp. The surge is promoted as the strategy by which the tide was turned and it is true that the Sunni uprising against the US occupation has largely ended.
But it has done so for reasons that have little to do with the surge or American actions of any kind. Crucial to the success of the government against the Mahdi Army has been the support of Iran. It is they who arranged for the Shia militiamen to go home.
It takes real cheek for Mr Bush to claim yesterday that “Anbar is no longer lost to al-Qa’ida” since during the last presidential election in 2004, he was claiming that the media was exaggerating the success of the insurgents.
Patrick Cockburn is the Ihe author of “Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq.
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Tags:Anbar province, Iraq, Iraqi government, Nuri al-Maliki, presidential election, US forces, US occupation
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