ZNet Commentary
Prisoners' Dilemma May 09, 2004
By Mickey Z

"Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power
to make you commit atrocities." -Voltaire

As if it were a force of nature, we're often advised, "war is hell,"
and corporate media spin is designed to hide exactly who puts the hell in
war. On a website dedicated to the 1960s television comedy series
"Hogan's Heroes," one particular episode was described as follows: "Knowing
the Allies won't bomb a POW camp, the Germans stash an experimental
rocket-bomb in Stalag 13. London sends an Allied scientist to photograph
and sabotage the bomb. To distract Klink, the heroes arrange for him to
be named Kommandant of the Year."

"The Allies won't bomb a POW camp."

That statement goes a long way in illustrating the influence of
propaganda. (Then again, so does a popular comedy about a Nazi POW camp.) The
writers of "Hogan's Heroes" took for granted that no one would
challenge the proposition that America and its allies fight fair.

Based on the response to the recent Iraqi prisoner scandal, many today
apparently still take that proposition for granted. Why else would the
photos shown on "60 Minutes II" remotely surprise anyone? (For example,
one need only look at the treatment of the two million behind bars
right here in America to grasp how the "good guys" behave under such
conditions.)

General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assures
us: "It is not systematic. And it's really a shame that just a handful
can besmirch, maybe, the reputations of hundreds of thousands of our
soldiers and sailors, airmen, and Marines."

President (sic) Bush adds: "I share a deep disgust that those prisoners
were treated the way they were treated. Their treatment does not
reflect the nature of the American people. That's not the way we do things in
America."

We (and men like Myers and Bush) are trained to see our (sic) soldiers
as heroes (Pat Tillman, anyone?) and when one of those heroes slips up,
well, we're also taught that in every military intervention, there will
be cases where the good guys are left with no choice but to fight fire
with fire. Perhaps the most notorious example was an unnamed U.S.
major, quoted by Associated Press on February 8, 1968. Asked about the U.S.
assault on the Vietnamese town of Bentre, the major explained, "It
became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it."

Like the reluctant parent who informs their bare-bottomed offspring
that the consequent spanking will hurt them more than the child, the U.S.
is sometimes forced to punish those who simply won't roll over in the
face of superior force. The propaganda machine tells us: During war,
even the U.S. has to sometimes play a little rough and, yes, our heroes
might get their hands a little dirty...in the name of freedom, of course.
How else can we deal with evil? We didn't want things to get out of
hand: the devil made U.S. do it.

The template of dehumanizing enemies and exploiting that subhuman
status to commit atrocities has facilitated a policy of unremitting foreign
entanglements (along with indigenous extermination and ethnic-based
enslavement). Thanks to relentless propaganda, there are now many who
readily accept-and will often encourage-iniquitous U.S. behavior in the
military theater of operations.

General Myers says abuse of prisoners is not systematic. The record
tells us otherwise...and even when Americans fight each other, inhumane
travesties proliferate. During the Civil War, historian Kenneth C. Davis
explains, "prisoner of war camps were among the most tragic and
inhumane disgraces of the war." Of the 45,000 prisoners at one particular
Confederate camp in Andersonville, Georgia, 13,000 died from summer heat,
disease, and inadequate food and medical supplies.

"Hogan's Heroes," it wasn't.

Union soldier Henry Hernbaker was captured at Gettysburg and taken to
Andersonville. He wrote of being kept under a "scorching hot sun"
without cover. "The whole upper surface of our feet would become blistered
and hen would break," Hernbaker reported. "The amputations would average
as many as six per day, and I saw not a single instance of recovery
from them."

Andersonville was overseen by Henry Wirz, who was heard to claim he
killed "more damn Yankees with his treatment" than the army was with
"powder and lead." Wirz later became the only Confederate solider executed
by the Union after the war.

Conditions in the North were no better. The Union camp in Elmira, New
York housed just over 12,000 Confederate prisoners of which nearly 3000
died from inhumane conditions. The camp was nicknamed "Hellmira."

Some 40 years later, in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, the
U.S. fought a brutal war of conquest in the Pacific. By 1900, more than
75,000 American troops-three-quarters of the entire U.S. Army-were sent
to the Philippines. In the face of this overwhelming show of force, the
Filipinos turned to guerrilla warfare. The February 5, 1901 edition of
the New York World shed some light on the U.S. response to guerilla
tactics:


"Our soldiers here and there resort to terrible measures with the
natives. Captains and lieutenants are sometimes judges, sheriffs, and
executioners. 'I don't want any more prisoners sent into Manila' was the
verbal order from the Governor-General three months ago. It is now the
custom to avenge the death of an American soldier by burning to the ground
all the houses, and killing right and left the natives who are only
suspects."

In an eerie presaging of Vietnam's hamlets and of more recent efforts
in Iraq, Filipino villagers were herded into concentration camps called
"reconcentrados."

Captive Filipino soldiers and civilians alike were submitted to the
"water cure." According to the Philippine-American War Centennial
Initiative, this method consisted of "forcing four or five gallons of water
down the throat of the captive whose body becomes an object frightful to
contemplate, and then squeezing it by kneeling on his stomach. The
process was repeated until the 'amigo' talked or died."

If those amigos struck back, the U.S. was ready to up the ante. When a
U.S. platoon was wiped out in an ambush, Brigadier General Jacob W.
Smith, a veteran of the Wounded Knee massacre (when the U.S. Army killed
an estimated 300 Lakota men, women, and children), issued orders to kill
"all persons of 10 years and older."

"I want no prisoners, I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill
and burn the better it will please me," Smith declared. "I want all
persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against
the United States."

A century later, George W. Bush condones war crimes while John Kerry
admits he "committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other
soldiers...committed" in Vietnam.

In other words, this is about a systematic as it gets.

(This article is excerpted from "The Seven Deadly Spins: Exposing the
Lies Behind War Propaganda" by Mickey Z.-to be published by Common
Courage Press in June. Mickey Z. can be reached at mzx2@earthlink.net.)