There is something in the way armies are designed that ensures that such violations would occur. The lack of local civilian control over any army in its theatre of operations (pretty obvious, since armies usually operate in enemy territory or de-populated borders) makes a soldier fundamentally different in mindset from a policeman: One purveys over a hostile territory while the other maintains order in what is essentially his neighborhood.
A virulent, obsessive need for secretiveness and a separate military court that sentences its own are natural for an army that does what it is designed to do, protect one’s borders from external threats and invade when it is in one’s interest to do so (extremely debatable, I suppose).
This crucial combination of factors (lack of civilian control and difference in training and incentive-system) is exactly why armies are not meant to perform police functions inside one’s own borders, and when they do, as in Manipur or Ramallah or Kashmir, such excesses are perhaps unavoidable. The army alienates by definition, and could never fight an elusive enemy the way a local police force steeped in the socio-cultural ethos of a place can.
The visionary 1878 US law, the Posse Comitatus, which banned the army from performing police functions inside American borders, was enacted to ensure that the centre would not impinge upon Federal rights, especially by deploying the army during elections. Of course, in a nation with no significant separatist movements or violent insurrections, such a principled stand is easy to take; and already, within just a decade or so of the prospect of terrorist threats in American soil, the law is being questioned and circumvented with alarming regularity.
If we do enact such a law, or at least try to uphold the spirit of it, how could our resource-starved, ill-equipped, barely-trained police force fight violent insurrections and sophisticated terrorist threats? How much of our essential freedoms would they require to protect us?
