Torture and Killing of an Iraqi Prisoner of War

The Washington Post this morning carries a detailed account of the torture and killing of Iraqi general Abed Hamed Mowhoush by American forces in November 2003.  General Mowhoush died of suffocation after being stuffed into a sleeping bag and trussed with electrical cord.  Two days earlier he had been beaten with fists and a rubber hose, according to classified military court documents seen by the Post.

The Post report provides a detailed case study of the circumstances surrounding one particularly brutal instance of the abuse of detainees.  As the Post article says, Mowhoush's case shows how "the pressure to produce intelligence for anti-terrorism efforts and the war in Iraq led U.S. military interrogators to improvise and develop abusive measures" across Iraq, in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay.  Soldiers and intelligence agents working in all these locations were continually told that their work was part of a broad struggle against terrorism.  Facing fighters who used irregular and unlawful methods, U.S. forces were continually pressured to extract information from their captives and licensed to use coercive methods to do so.

In the case of Mowhoush, his interrogation followed an email message in August 2003 from joint task force headquarters in Baghdad to field interrogators saying that "the gloves are coming off" because of the need to gain better intelligence to use against the growing Iraqi insurgency.  The use of coercive interrogation on Mowhoush followed a determination that he had "refused to play ball."

One thing that is striking about this story is that it seems to have gone completely unremarked by American forces that Mowhoush as an officer in the Iraqi armed forces was presumably entitled to prisoner of war status.  The third Geneva Convention applies in international armed conflict and in occupied territory.  Under the convention, famously, prisoners of war are required to provide their name, rank and serial number (normally in the form of an identity card).  Beyond that, the Convention states, "No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind." (Article 17)

In other words, the violation of the law in the treatment of Mowhoush consisted not only in the way that he was brutalized and murdered, but in the simple fact that he was coercively interrogated.  And similar provisions in the fourth Geneva Convention protect Iraqi civilians (including those "under definite suspicion of activity hostile to the security of the Occupying Power") -- "No physical or moral coercion shall be exercised against protected persons, in particular to obtain information from them or from third parties." (Article 31).

The unlawfulness of the treatment of detainees in Iraq goes far beyond the most notorious cases such as Abu Ghraib.  It consists also in the way that from senior commanders down, a climate was fostered in which coercive interrogation of anyone suspected to be connected to the insurgency was encouraged, and the clear protections of the Geneva Conventions were never mentioned.  Beyond this, the White House's consistent attempts to portray the war in Iraq as part of the broader "war on terror" clearly obscured the fact that it was in legal terms an international armed conflict governed by the full Geneva Conventions (as US legal officials acknowledged).

The case of General Mowhoush (as a microcosm of the general treatment of detainees in Iraq) shows forcefully the dangers to humane conduct of warfare posed by the rising tide of so-called "asymmetric" conflict.  Not only do those who fight the United States and its allies increasingly rely on guerrilla and terrorist tactics, but it is obviously difficult to get US and allied soldiers to stick to the rules in their response.  The letter of the law does not allow violations by one side in armed conflict to jbe used as justification for violations by the other (with a possible limited exception for reprisals) -- instead it provides that violators may be tried for war crimes after they're captured.  However the emotional force of the laws of war derives from their historical roots as a mutual code of restraint between professional and honourable fighting forces.  To ensure that the law is respected in asymmetric conflicts seems to require a special effort from governments -- reminding their fighting forces that humane treatment of captives is both part of their professional code and a legal obligation.  Instead, the United States seems to have sent the opposite message, obscuring the law and setting the stage for the kinds of abuses we have repeatedly been faced with.

Related Chapters from Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know:

Terrorism

Torture

Related Links:

Documents Tell of Brutal Improvisation by GIs

By Josh White

Washington Post, August 2, 2005

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