Behind the US Army’s Abuse of Prisoners and Corpses

The American army abusing prisoners stopped being news long ago. However, the recently exposed video of American soldiers abusing corpses is still shocking. In the video, four soldiers wearing U.S. Marine Corps uniforms urinate on the bodies of three armed men suspected of being Taliban members, who were lying on the ground. The bodies are streaked with blood, but the American soldiers are making jokes while they pee.

Condemnation from all sides was inevitable. The Afghan presidential palace issued a statement saying that dishonoring corpses is a despicable kind of behavior. The American defense secretary Leon Panetta instructed the U.S. Army commanding officer in Afghanistan, John Allen, to immediately launch a full investigation. The American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also stated that the video is extremely shocking.

However, what is even more important is what is behind this behavior.

There is a line from “Schindler’s List” that can be summarized as: War is evil. During war, the nastiest parts of humanity are aroused. During the carnage, maintaining humanity’s warmth and glory is extremely difficult. An article in The New York Times reported that America’s veterans and military experts all say that given the months that those young soldiers in their teens and twenties have spent on the battlefield, the probability of horrible behavior such as corpse abuse is extremely high. However, in explaining American forces abusing prisoners and corpses, the horror of war doesn’t cover the entire picture.

Just before the video of U.S. soldiers abusing bodies was transferred rapidly around the internet, there were groups of Americans holding demonstrations in Washington and other cities to protest the prison established at the Guantanamo naval base 10 years ago, which to this day holds suspected terrorists. After the events of 9/11, in Jan. 2002, the American army established a prison at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba, in preparation for temporarily holding terrorist suspects apprehended in Afghanistan. However, this kind of temporary imprisonment gradually changed into “permanent imprisonment”. One after another, Guantanamo locked up 779 al-Qaida and Taliban members and suspected terrorists, among whom the majority had never received a hearing or been prosecuted, and some died while imprisoned. America classified them as “enemy combatants,” but refused to give them the rights accorded to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. Following the exposure of a series of prisoner abuse incidents, the vile conditions of the Guantanamo prison received the attention of the international community. However, 10 years have passed, and at present the Guantanamo prison still holds 171 people. For a long time now, America has been unable to honor its commitment to close the prison.

Besides the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison, there is also the Abu Grayb prison in Iraq, and Afghanistan’s Bagram prison where suspected abuse was recently exposed. This kind of nasty behavior has brought shame upon the American army, and also discredited an American government that always considers itself to be the “guardian of human rights”. Here we see not just the evil of war itself, but also the shadow of international hegemony. How can you expect a country that wantonly tramples on the sovereignty of other countries to respect the rights of the populations of other countries? Who can guarantee that behind the U.S. Army’s prisoner abuse and corpse abuse, there isn’t a sense of being more civilized and culturally superior that is causing trouble? Who has seen America exercise restraint in their treatment of prisoners of war and in their treatment of international law? Facing case after case of exposed prisoner and corpse abuse, facing round after round of collective condemnation from the global community, how has America actually responded?

What kind of America is actually behind the American army’s prisoner and corpse abuse? And what kind of world?