An Empire Of Torture
By Pelayo Mella
01 August, 2004
Countercurrents.org
The scandal of British and United States soldiers torturing Iraqi people is growing and is getting worse by the minute and it won’t go away. Torture is not inflicted to individuals only, but it is also inflicted upon their families, their friends, and their communities and to society as a whole. It is a mark and a scar, which will stay there for many years, if not forever.
The pictures of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners made me relive what I, and many thousands of other Chileans suffered under the Pinochet’s dictatorship. What they did and do with Iraqis is exactly the same as they did with Chileans, Argentineans, and its is the same that occupying Zionists do with the Palestinians: bags over their heads, electricity, rape of men and women, sleep privation, isolation for long periods, and degradation at every level.
For a year and half now, Iraq bleeds itself to death witnessing its destruction at the hands of the invaders who call themselves ‘The Liberating Army’. Iraq today, a year and half after Bush declared the end of their war, is a country almost totally destroyed, violated, raped, where most building and houses have been and are demolished, except that is, the oil wells, oil pipes and oil-ducts which with so much efficiency the invaders look after.
The landscape that Iraqi cities offer to anyone who watches the news, starting from Baghdad, is that of a crude vision of ruins and devastation. Just like Kabul in Afghanistan after their previous invasion in their ridiculous and desperate pursuit of Osama bin Laden. Just like the Palestinian cities, towns, and villages permanently exposed to the bombardments of the Israeli-American controlled puppets in occupied Palestine, under the butcher Sharon who openly violates every single norm of human behaviour, international law, and elemental human rights.
This perpetual genocide of the Palestinian people is backed not only with an implicit silence by the Western powers – so-called carers of Western and universal democracy – but often publicly blessed by Bush and his followers, especially the docile puppy Blair.
If there is something that resembles an apocalyptic image on this earth, is that of cities, towns, villages, peoples reduced to dust. If there is a living metaphor which represents the end of the world is that of peoples’ lives and hopes being taken away. It is the desperate screaming of mothers and widows demanding the return of their sons and husbands. It is the inconsolable look of the child walking over the ruins of what minutes before had been his home. It is the wounded that dies without help. It is the dead that we count by the thousands.
For very prosaic reasons, the United Nations has intervened in some countries, and the United States has disembarked its marines in small states without an apparent valid reason. We can mention many, but as a small token we can point that of the tiny island of Grenada in the Caribbean, which, perhaps, people already forgot for its insignificance. The United States invaded it in 1983 nobody knowing exactly why. I suspect it was because there were several Cuban doctors, teachers, engineers, and many more professionals from this island helping to improve the living conditions of the Grenadines. The United States forces, with typical gentleness and care, bombarded a hospital occupied by mentally ill patients killing over twenty of them and an unspecified number of civilians.
They also did the same in Panama, another small country in Central America, which was governed by general Noriega, an old collaborator and friend of the CIA who had helped (the CIA) with drugs and arms trafficking to finance the Contras in Nicaragua against the progressive Sandinista government. The Panama invasion in 1989, just to capture an unfaithful friend, left over 2.000 dead, and the capital, Panama City almost totally destroyed. After their departure, Panama has been governed with dictators as corrupt or worse than the one deposed; all of them appointed by Washington, of course. Do these stories sound familiar?
For much more humanitarian and urgent reasons, the United Nations/United States did not intervene in Rwanda, allowing the death of over 800.000 Tutsis by the Hutus, and the expulsion of over two million refugees who did not deserve the Messianic attention of the Empire. [Guess now the evil plan of US/UN move to Darfur, Sudan]
We could go on, but the reality is there for all to be seen, but United States international policy is not the humanitarian and democratic panacea that Bush, Blair and others preach, but the facade with which they hide and justify their brutal wars in the country of the moment and the economic gains they take from them. This is what they do today and that is what our grandfathers also saw over one hundred years ago. The means with which they achieve this is not new either. Torture, so fashionable today because of television and cameras, which everyday people are able to see cause surprise, gasp and repulsion in the world, is not the isolated action of a few ‘rotten apples’ in the United States army as Donald ‘Duck’ Rumsfeld stated, but a carefully designed formulae developed and used for many years and in many countries. Abu Ghraib is only the tip of the iceberg with a higher degree of what is obscene and aberration, and with a retroactive degree of an amazing barbarism. The School of the Americas, which was built and functioned in Panama for several decades, - Georgia based today - has for a long time been the school where the torturers from all the world specialise. Through it, thousands of Latin American torturers graduated, many with shining colours: Somosa, Videla, Galtieri, Pinochet, etc, etc. This is where they were taught to do what they do today with the Iraqis. This is what United States and British soldiers have done to Iraqi soldiers: they are just putting into practice what they learnt to do.
How do they dare to talk about terrorism when their war against Islam is based on the use of terror, just like they did before in their efforts to suffocate and annihilate liberation movements. Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, and any other nation and movement who stand against these imperialist invaders, have the right to defend themselves with all their means at hand.