Racism and War: the Dehumanization of the Enemy: Part 2
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Andrew Duffy enlisted as a medic in the Iowa National Guard two days after he turned 17. He testifies to incidents in which Iraqi detainees desperately in need of medical treatment were denied it. One died as Duffy tried to save him. “I lot of people called them ‘Hajis’ and didn’t like them because they were detainees but to me, it was just an old man that could’ve been somebody’s father, grandfather, uncle.” He says the dislike for Iraqis stemmed from attacks on Americans. “I remember a rtime that I treated a marine that had his legs blown off, and he died in our care. Subsequently, about a half an hour later, I had to give a detainee pills for a headache. … As a medic, you need to treat these people the same. They are human beings.”
Mike Prysner describes a mission he took part in which his unit forced Iraqis out of half a dozen homes, with no compensation, so the US military could use them. “One family in particular, a woman with two small girls, very elderly man, and two middle-aged men—we dragged them from their houses and threw them onto the street, and arrested the men because they refused to leave.” Since he left, he has been plagued by guilt “anytime I see a mother with her children, like the one who cried hysterically and screamed that we were worse than Saddam as we forced her from her home, …anytime I see a young girl like the one I grabbed by the arm and dragged into the street.” Prysner also describes the physical abuse of a wounded prisoner, with a sandbag over his head and his hands tied behind his back. “We were told we were fighting terrorists; the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism is this occupation.”
Christopher Arendt, who served at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, describes “how one goes about becoming a concentration camp guard.” His job was to track the movements of detainees. Sometimes when he started his shift at 4:30 am, “there would be a little paper in the wall with a number on it, which represented a detainee inside an interrogation room, which was anywhere from maybe 10, 20 degrees in temperature with loud music playing. … Sometimes that detainee would stay there for my entire 12 to 14-hour shift, shackled to the floor by his hands and his feet.” Arendt also describes a procedure used to punish inmates who become rowdy, which involves spraying them in the face with an extremely painful, long-lasting chemical and then sometimes beating them up. These punishments are taped by the military—he taped several himself, and wants to show them, but he doubts the tapes will be released.
Arendt is followed by a filmed interview with an Iraqi mother named Um Ahmed, who describes a terrifying raid by American soldiers on her home. The raid turned out to be a mistake: they were after a militia member who lived next door. The film is in Arabic with English subtitles.
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Domingo Rosas, an ex-Army sergeant who served in Iraq from April, 2003 to 2004, describes mistreatment of detainees at a site called Tiger Base on the Syrian border. They were crowded into a shipping container, and part of his job was to keep them from sleeping. Later, the site was taken over and rebuilt by men from another (unnamed) government agency. One day he delivered a message there, and when he opened the door, he saw a prisoner being rolled around in the mud while water was poured over his face—a version of waterboarding.
Geoff Millard describes the widespread use of “Hajis” as a derogatory term for Iraqis, including those who worked for the Americans, and even for Pakistani workers. He heard that term used by officers all the way up to General Casey. “These things start at the top, not the bottom,” he says. Millard describes a briefing he attended for a general about an incident in which a young soldier saw a vehicle driving fast toward a check point, decided it was a threat, and fired 200 rounds from his machine gun, killing a mother, father, and their two small children. The response of a colonel at the briefing: “If these f’ing Hajis learned to drive, this ‘s’ wouldn’t happen.”
Christian Appy is a history professor and author of two books on the Vietnam War. He tells the story of Wayne Smith, an African-American medic. Smith promised himself that he would never use the derogatory term “gook” for Vietnamese, but found himself using that term after he saw comrades die in combat. He still lives with guilt for having broken his promise.
Dahlia Wasfi was born in the US to an American-Jewish mother and an Iraqi-Muslim father. She lived in Iraq as a small child but returned to the US at age 5. She has made two trips to Iraq since the invasion. Wafsi supports immediate withdrawal of American forces and maintains a website, www.LiberateThis.com. Wafsi says the inspiration for her activism on Iraq was Rachel Corey, who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer when she tried to stop the demolition of a Palestinian house. Wafsi says anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice keeps many Americans from paying attention to the terrible toll of the war on Iraqis and to the ethnic cleansing waged against Palestinians.
In the closing film, an Iraqi named Muhammed Amer says American soldiers mutilated the bodies of militiamen they killed. He also describes a raid on his house in which soldiers told his mother they would rape the family’s girls unless she gave them a bag with all of their money, about $13,000. A general told them, “choose between your money and your honor,” says Amer, “So we bought our honor.” The target of the raid was Amer’s brother who was an accused insurgent. The brother and Amer’s 60-year-old father were both beaten. “We didn’t see any humanity in them, only cruelty,” says Amer.
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