Iraq:
A Cluster Of Torture Prisons
By Ghali Hassan
13 March, 2006
Countercurrents.org
After the US's deliberate and
unprovoked war on Iraq, “reconstruction” becomes one of
the US's moral clichés to justify crimes against the Iraqi people
and ongoing Occupation. In reality, the “reconstruction”
of Iraq is the continuation of the destruction of Iraq and humiliation
of Iraqi society.
Countless prisons have been
built where the practice of humiliation, sadistic torture, sexual abuse
and rape of Iraqi men, women and children are used on daily basis to
force the entire Iraqi population into submission.
The $20 billion initially
appropriated by the US administration to “reconstruct” Iraq
were a gift to US corporations and the Bush cronies. The only visible
construction in Iraq today is the rise in the construction of prisons.
According to Reuters; “The U.S. State Department is winding down
its $20 billion reconstruction program in Iraq and the only new rebuilding
money in its latest budget request is for prisons . . . State Department
Iraq coordinator James Jeffrey told reporters he was asking Congress
for $100 million for prisons but no other big building projects were
in the pipeline."
We constantly hear about
Abu Ghraib (US-run) and Camp Buucca (British-run), but there are countless
numbers of prisons. Many of these new prisons have been established
at military bases and airports, such as the US Military compound at
Al-Dhiloeia, north of Baghdad, Camp Cropper Centre at Baghdad International
Airport, the Hilla military compound, a joint US-Polish base, old Iraqi
military barracks, and public buildings across Iraq. Many of Iraq’s
schools and colleges have been converted into detention centres and
barracks for the occupying forces.
In August 2004, a Michigan
a legal team headed by Mohammed Alomari, Media Director of Focus on
American & Arab Interests & Relations (FAAIR) -- an American
non-profit, non-governmental organization -- met with former Iraqi prisoners
in Baghdad and found that Iraqi prisoners were mistreated, abused, tortured
and raped on daily basis at some 38 U.S. military-run detention centers
in Iraq. The “list includes everything from resort islands to
aircraft hangars to college student housing facilities converted to
U.S. military bases with military detention centers. Most of the airports
have detention centers, including Baghdad International Airport, Mosul
Airport, Baquba Airport, etc.”
Today, Iraq is a cluster
of countless prisons and detention centres. Many Iraqi towns and villages
have been walled in with sand and razor-wire barriers, and turn into
large prisons.
In addition, different militias
and death squads created, trained and armed by the US forces and their
allies have their own torture chambers in prisons hidden inside bunkers
in the Interior and Defence ministries, police stations and clandestine
locations across Iraq. This allows the US, Britain and now Amnesty International
(AI) to shift the blame of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US
and British soldiers solely on the thugs of the Interior and Defence
ministries, as if they are really independent ministries in a sovereign
(not brutally occupied) country. Furthermore, many Iraqi prisoners are
also held in secret facilities or “black sites” as part
of a large covert prison system set up by the CIA in 2001 outside legal
and international laws, and are known to only a handful of US officials
and President Bush.
Once in prisons, the prisoners
are routinely abused, tortured, sexually abused and, in many cases,
murdered in gross violations of the Geneva Conventions and international
law. The Bush administration and the military are trying to find ways
to avoid the jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions in order to normalise
the use of torture on Iraqi prisoners and other foreign nationals held
in US-run prisons in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and other “black
sites” around the world.
The official number of Iraqi
men, women and children in US-run prisons in Iraq is said to be around
16,000, reported ABC News in June 2005. The number has since rocketed,
and Iraqi sources put the number as high as “hundreds of thousands”
prisoners languishing in prisons across Iraq. FAAIR estimated the number
of Iraqis who have been detained by US and British forces (from March
2003 to October 2004) to be over 156,000. The majority of these prisoners
are innocent civilians rounded up from their homes and businesses during
random raids by US forces and their collaborators. There is no justice
or legal process and there is no law to certify and register prisoners.
Families and relatives of prisoners are left in the dark about their
loved one. Hundreds of Iraqis have simply disappeared after they were
taken prisoners.
John Pace of the UN Human
Rights in Iraq, a pro-Occupation propaganda mouthpiece, said recently
that; between “80 percent to 90 percent were innocent people”
rounded up “quite blindly," and taken to prisons. They are
abused, tortured and often murdered by occupying forces and their collaborators.
Furthermore, in an op-ed in the New York Times on 28 February, Anthony
Lagouranis, a former US army interrogator (aka torturer), admitted,
“From January 2004 to January 2005, I served in various places
in Iraq (including Abu Ghraib) as an Army interrogator. Following orders
that I believed were legal, I used military working dogs during interrogations.
I terrified my interrogation subjects, but I never got intelligence
(mostly because 90 percent of them were probably innocent, but that's
another story)." He added, “Perhaps, I have thought for a
long time, I also deserve to be prosecuted."
Janis Karpinski, the former
brigadier general in charge of the 800th Military Police Brigade in
Iraq, where she supervised detention operations at Abu Ghraib and prisons
elsewhere told FRONTLINE, “About 90 percent of them [prisoners]
were innocent of any terrorism or related activity."
Karpinski blamed the practices
of abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners on the top Pentagon officials
and the US administration. “The secretary of defence would not
have authorized [it] without the approval of the vice president,"
she said. “They could make it appear any way they want. I will
not be silenced, and I will continue to tell the truth. And I will continue
to ask how they can continue to blame seven rogue soldiers on the night
shift, when there is the preponderance of hard information from a variety
of sources [that] says otherwise," added Karpinski. She also rightly,
pointed the finger at the role of the Israeli Mossad in the abuses,
torture and murder of Iraqi prisoners.
Indeed, some of those Americans
involved in torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib have attended training courses
in Israel, where torture, abuse and murder of Palestinians have been
part of Israel’s brutal policy since its creation on Palestinian
land. “In January and February of 2003, Israeli and American troops
trained together in southern Israel's Negev desert . . . Israel has
also hosted senior law enforcement officials from the United States
for a seminar on counter-terrorism," reported the Associated Press.
Furthermore, the top echelon
at the Pentagon -- Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Douglas
Feith and Abram Shulsky -- who made the policies are the same hardcore
Zionists who fed George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld fabricated lies
-- WMD and “terrorism” -- to justify an illegal war of aggression
on Iraq in defiance of the UN Charter. The US invaded and occupies Iraq
to enhance US imperialist domination and to expand Israel’s Zionism,
not for “democracy” and for the sake of the Iraqi people.
As the Iraqi people continue
to endure the brutality of the Occupation, the UN, the Red Cross, countless
Western NGOs and human rights organisations have been unwilling to intervene
in the ongoing gross human rights violations, including daily arbitrary
arrests, indefinite detentions, abuse and torture of innocent Iraqi
civilians by the occupying forces and their collaborators. The ruling
elites and their propaganda rants in the West who are “protesting”
the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners are protesting out of concern
for the safety of US and British soldiers, and “images”
of Western imperialism. Their concerns have nothing to do with human
rights of Iraqis and other foreign national prisoners languishing in
US-run prisons.
Prior to the invasion and
occupation of Iraq, Western NGOs and human rights groups were fanning
out across Iraq, sniffing for clues to demonise the regime of Saddam
Hussein. However, since Iraq was illegally invaded, destroyed and forced
under US-British Occupation, these “defenders” of human
rights remain silent despite the greater level of human rights violations
and crimes committed by the occupying forces. For example, in one of
its reports, AI, said; “Conditions of detention at the Camp Cropper
Centre and at Abu Ghraib prison may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment." Notice the word “may” and the deliberate
vagueness of the language. In fact if one reads AI’s new report,
one is convinced that the US and British occupying forces (not “US-led
Multinational Force” as AI called the Occupation) are not guilty
of any wrongdoing. AI's figure of 14,000 Iraqi prisoners is the lowest
by any estimate. Given AI's interest in the treatment of prisoners and
prison conditions, one would expect AI to be the guardian of US-run
prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The opposite is true. Powers
are protected, and only criticised for their own good.
Those who committed these
heinous crimes against the Iraqi people, including the murder of hundreds
of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, mostly women and children,
remain at large. They are protected by a variety of new draconian laws
that criminalise dissent, and strip ordinary citizens of their democratic
rights and civil liberties. Their roles in the war and the crimes of
torture are deliberately omitted by the mass media. Instead, their crimes
are blamed on a “few bad apples” in the military, as if
the “few bad apples” are not the product of imperialist
racist policies made at the top echelon of the Pentagon and the Bush
administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney.
This is also true for the
British government and its role in the crimes committed by British soldiers
against Iraqi civilians. The bellicose British Defence Secretary John
Reid was very clear about his government role in torture. Reid said
recently that; we need to “re-assure” British soldiers against
the “perception that human rights lawyers and international bodies
such as the International Criminal Court [in The Hague] are waiting
in the wings to step in and act against them." He added; “The
reality is that they operate under British law." Indeed, none of
the British soldiers involved in the abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi
prisoners have been convicted for crimes.
From the outset, the US war
on Iraq was an illegal and unprovoked act of aggression. Instead of
building Iraq, the US has converted Iraq into a large cluster of torture
prisons, and has deprived the Iraqi people of their liberty and their
human rights in gross violations of international law and human decency.
An occupying power is obliged -- under the Geneva Conventions -- to
protect the civilian population and provide them with security.
What this adds to is the
use of murder, sadistic torture, humiliation, sexual abuse and rape
as a campaign strategy to force the entire Iraqi population into submission
and obedience. Since March 2003, the occupying forces and their collaborators
are killing, arresting, imprisoning and torturing Iraqi civilians, and
destroying Iraqi properties with impunity. The deliberate and uncontrolled
daily bloodshed and terror of all kinds generate chaos, dehumanise the
Iraqi people and label them as violent savages, and in the process focus
people’s attention away from the Occupation. This way, the enemy
is always reduced to a stereotype that is easier to demonise and kill.
Anyone buying into such imperialist distortion is denying the Iraqi
people their rights to resistance and national liberation.
How could US citizens be
fooled and continue to support a criminal war against defenceless people?
Instead, they should demand that those who instigated the war be held
accountable for their crimes.
Almost all Iraqis have rejected
the presence of foreign troops and have long called for the withdrawal
of US forces from Iraq. Only an immediate and a full withdrawal of US
forces from Iraq will provide the chance for a peaceful solution and
a return to normality.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth
Western Australia.