Policing Iraq by Jesse Wozniak

Author:Jesse Wozniak [Wozniak, Jesse]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Crimes & Criminals, Criminology, History, Middle East, Political Science
ISBN: 9780520975972
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2021-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

“Fight Them Back with the Law of the Jungle”

Police demonstrate a similarly contradictory attitude toward the use of torture, with nearly everyone I spoke to condemning its use in the abstract, but many willing to allow or even endorse its use in some cases, especially for those suspected of being members of the Islamic State. Once again, I found officers in 2017 were just as likely as officers had been in 2011 to explain to me that excessive force such as torture was illegal and forbidden, and that while it may happen occasionally, its use was fading to insignificance. Baban, a mid-level officer in a rural department, explains, “We are allowed to use force when capturing and arresting people, but we don’t support the torture of arrested people to get confessions. This is illegal. Successful inquiry officers should be able to get confessions without torture.” Sharwa, another mid-level officer in a different department, similarly argues that torture is “about to get to the end and we can hardly find such kind of means to be used in the inquiry . . . generally torture has been controlled, restricted.”

However, when it comes to IS, more than a few officers directly advocated the use of torture and other extra-legal means of force in investigating the organization. But rather than simple retribution, most framed their acceptance of torturing suspected IS members as due to the perception only torture will get them to talk. Karwan, a deputy director of a police department, explains that in the case of IS, the use of torture “will be normal. I think there should be torture for them throughout the inquiry because most of those people are trained and have been tortured before as a process of training. So they have been prepared for such a kind of situation.” Bewan, a mid-level officer, makes the same argument, “Those people, they are trained, they will not be giving any information, except when tortured. And they will not tell you who are the others, who are supporting them, where he has come from, and what would be the plans and the next thing . . . so they will not be giving you any information without torture.”

Xebat, a colonel in charge of several units, justifies the torture of IS by arguing they are “a group that would not submit to any kind of law, they don’t respect any kind of law, so you need to struggle against them and fight them back with the law of the jungle.” He goes on to argue, “Working on a legal basis with those people would not be a positive choice.” Indeed, he feels not only that torture of IS members is acceptable, but that all members of the organization should be summarily executed, as a prison sentence would only delay their inevitable next attack. He likens them to a deadly contagion, explaining that if you put a member of IS in prison, “you will be putting a virus-like human being in the prison and they will spread their ideas, even in prison.

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