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Looking Back: Peach Pickers, Stonemasons, and the War on Terror

by John R. Guthrie

Originally published in The Harvard Square Commentary, 2006

Reporter Seymour Hersh once noted in a speech to the the Abu Ghraib scandal included videotape of US soldiers sodomizing Iraqi children in front of their mothers. “The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking,” he stated. The story of the abuse of U.S. detainees has to date also included the series 1,800 pictures from Abu Ghraib shown privately to a small bipartisan group of legislators who watched in “sickened silence” in the Rayburn Building in Washington in mid-May.

This provides a dramatic contrast to the conditions of German and Italian Prisoners of War in 1945, the time of the dawning of this writer’s memory, in the Piedmont of South Carolina. In that year, the peach crop there was harvested by German prisoners of war. The Italian prisoners, under the direction of the stonemasons among them, built stone culverts that still persist. These detainees from the battlefields of Europe were held in a compound at Camp Croft, an army facility in Spartanburg County, S.C. They worked on a voluntary basis and were paid for their labor. Their barracks were comparable to those of the US soldiers who stood guard.

These pickers of peaches were Hitler’s storm troopers, the brothers-in arms of those who ran the death camps. The stonemasons were Benito Mussolini’s soldiers, brothers-in-arms of those who were also complicit in the systematic mistreatment and murder of Jews.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has steadfastly maintained that the abuses in U.S. detention centers are the work of a few rogue soldiers. Yet the tormenting of prisoners at in Iraq, according to “The Roots of Torture,” an article originally published in Newsweek Internationa, was not contrived by a female PFC from West Virginia, but were a matter of White House and Defense Department policy. The Newsweek article asserted that the photos emerging from Abu Ghraib portray, “stress and duress techniques officially approved at the highest levels of government for use against terror suspects.” The photo of the hooded detainee standing on a box with electrical wires attached to his extremities and genitals allegedly portrays a technique used by “professional interrogators,” a “standard torture…called ‘the Vietnam’…ordinary American soldiers did this, but someone taught them.”

U.S. army general Geoffrey Miller had previously been transferred from Cuba to Iraq to, in a perplexing tormenting both of language and humanity, “Gitmoize” Abu Ghraib. This was done to elicit information faster from prisoners by the use of the abusive tactics used at Guantanamo Bay.

Leadership at the highest levels of the current administration asserted early on that neither civil law nor the Geneva Convention applied to persons held captive in Guantanamo because of the War on Terror. Attorneys for the Justice Department are known to have drafted memos redefining torture to justify the mistreatment of those held in U.S. custody.

We live in an era when accountability is a buzzword. It is ironic that senior administration officials, those who apparently set up the conditions for prisoner mistreatment, were quite willing for the relatively weak and powerless, the PFC’s and sergeants, to take the blame for policies they themselves appear to have instituted or facilitated.

Ultimately it is our own military men and women who may pay the greatest price for our own mistreatment of prisoners. The reason for the protection of prisoners by the Geneva Convention and international law is as firmly rooted in pragmatism as well as in any inherent altruism. By treating enemy detainees with decency, we can more reasonably hope that our soldiers will be equally well treated when they are captured.

The war in Iraq is costing this country hundreds of billions of dollars of its treasure. The price in less tangible things, to include the moral capital of this country, is incalculable.

The Chickasaw Plum - Volume V - Number 7 - June 2008

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