The Resort To
Torture
By Ghali Hassan
11 March, 2005
Countercurrents.org
In
his February diplomatic offensive tour of Europe, George
Bush and his media entourage were more interested in fiction and hypocrisy
than reality and respect for the rules of law. The tour was designed
to garner support for Americas unending wars and imperial conquest
sold as democracy and freedom. Mr Bush most
obedient representative in Europe, PM Tony Blair of Britain urged Europeans
to remember our shared values with Americans.
A recently released
army documents detail ongoing sadistic abuse, torture and murder of
Iraqi Prisoners of War (POW) and Iraqi detainees by US and British forces
in occupied Iraq. The documents of more than 24,000 pages were released
on behalf of the American Civil Liberty Union (ACLU); the Centre for
Constitutional Rights (CCR), Physician for Human Rights (PHR), Veterans
for Common Sense (VCS) and Veterans for Peace (VP) under the Freedom
of Information Act in response to a Federal Court Order directed the
Pentagon and other agencies to comply with the year old request [1].
The new documents
and other documents received by the ACLU revealed that the illegal practice
of abuse and torture of Iraqi men, women and children took place immediately
after the US-led invasion of Iraq. Iraqi POW and Iraqi detainees not
only at Abu Ghraib, the Wests convenient propaganda, but also
throughout Iraq were imprisoned, abused, tortured and murdered by British
and US soldiers. The practice, which started in Iraq immediately after
the invasion, was secret until Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker magazines
broke the silence on the complicity of Western media in the crimes against
the Iraqi people.
In todays
Iraq, the Occupation forces and their surrogates imprison more than
a million Iraqi men, women and children. According to the Occupation
mouthpiece, The New York Times, in just two major prisons in Iraq, US
military is holding at least 8,900 detainees. At Abu Ghraib there are
3,160 Iraqi prisoners, 660 more than the military's own recommended
level of 2,500 prisoners. The largest US prison, Camp Bucca in the south,
has at least 5,600 detainees. There are hundreds of other prisons throughout
Iraq. The British occupying forces built their own prisons.
The army documents
show that Iraqi POW and detainees were/are subjected to systematic interrogation
by Occupation forces that included physical, sexual and psychological
abuse and torture. The so-called interrogative techniques
used by Occupation forces in Iraq and in US prisons around the world
draw heavily on the internal report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, providing
a long list of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses
which include: pointing loaded guns at prisoners; pouring cold water
on detainees; bashing detainees with chairs and broom handles; threatening
male detainees with anal rape; slamming detainees against cell walls;
sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light; using guard dogs to intimidate
detainees and, in one instance, setting a dog onto a detainee; videotaping
naked male and female detainees; forcibly arranging detainees into various
sexually explicit positions and photographing them; forcing detainees
to remain naked for days; forcing naked male detainees to wear women's
underwear; forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate whilst being
videotaped and photographed; arranging detainees in piles and then jumping
on them; writing I am a rapest [sic] on a detainee and then
forcing him to rape a 15 year old fellow detainee; and placing a dog
collar around the neck of naked detainee and then having a female soldier
pose with him for a photograph. This makes a precise fit with the official
policy that anything short of killing and decapitating is a legitimate
way of breaking people down for interrogation [2].
The Australian Broadcasting
Corporation (ABC) reported on 13 May 2004, that an Australian man who
is contracted to rebuild oil pipelines in Iraq witnessed terrible abuse
of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers. The man, who identified as Harry,
said recent pictures of American soldiers torturing prisoners are just
the tip of the iceberg. What you're seeing in the
photographs now really is tame, he said. You think about
it, these pictures [are ones] that they've published on the net to send
to their friends, the real stuff that's going on there is far, far beyond
this. He said that he has seen far worse while working in
Tikrit, Iraq.
In an interview
with an Iraqi women prisoner at Abu Ghraib, Giuliana Sgrena, of Il manifesto,
the Italian daily Newspaper, reported on 01 July 2004, Iraqis
females are arrested at random by US forces. One Iraqi female
prisoner told Sgrena, without warning, American soldiers broke
into [their homes] in the middle of the night abuse them in front of
their children, ransacked the place, and then they arrested me. They
also took all their papers and keys, and stole their savings.
At Abu Ghraib women
were abused and tortured continuously. One of the prisoners had
been forced to walk on all fours and her knees and elbows were in a
terrible state. Another woman had been forced to separate faeces from
urine, using her own hands. The soldiers frequently forced us to drink
water from the toilet bowl. A woman of sixty, who had said she was a
virgin, was continually threatened with rape. Sometimes they made
a hundred or more prisoners lie on the ground and then trampled them
underfoot reported Il manifesto.
In addition to Abu
Ghraib where the British are part of the military chain of command
when the abuse and torture of Iraqi civilians occurred, British forces
have been involved at all levels in the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners
and civilians throughout Iraq. In Basra, the British have constructed
their own Abu Ghraib, and named it Camp Bread Basket. Despite
the high level of crimes committed against the Iraqi people, the British
occupiers managed to conceal their crimes until very recently. British
media, which has a history of deception and imperialist propaganda,
performed its usual duty in keeping the British people well entertained
and poorly informed of their government war crimes. Recent pictures
smuggled from inside Camp Bread Basket graphically show
how Iraqi prisoners are abused tortured and murdered by British soldiers
who have shared values with US soldiers. The policy of torture
is consistent with Britains colonial racism in which non-westerners
are regarded as unpeople. It is the British who refined
these methods, and who provided the precedent for this legalised
torture.
This sadistic torture
is deeply rooted in Western racism against Muslims, particularly Arabs.
Its origin is scholarly invented by hardcore Orientalists (imperialists)
who saw the Orient as sexual. The Middle East is resistant,
wrote the late Edward Said, as any virgin would be, whoever
conquers her win the prize. Those in power easily adopt this distorted
picture of the Middle East, which is artificially constructed by Western
scholars and pundits.
As Seymour Hersh
writes in his Chain of Command, The notion that Arabs are particularly
vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war
Washington conservatives in the months before the March 2003 invasion
of Iraq. He continues; One book that was frequently cited
was The Arab Mind ... the book includes a 25-page chapter on Arabs and
sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression.
The book as I know it, is a piece of collected old imperial rubbish
about the Arab peoples by the racist American anthropologist, Raphael
Patai. It is the Bush administrations bible on the Arab peoples
is of great concern. Patai described the Middle East as a culture
area with no plurality of differences readily available for generalisation
of nonsense.
From a piece of
rubbish, the book is resurrected to become the textbook for the US military
on the Middle East. None of the academics I contacted thought
the book suitable for serious study, although Georgetown University
once invited students to analyse it as an example of bad, biased
social science, writes Brian Whitaker of the Guardian of
London. There is a lot wrong with The Arab Mind apart from its
racism: the title, for a start. Although the Arab countries certainly
have their distinctive characteristics, the idea that 200 million people,
from Morocco to the Gulf, living in rural villages, urban metropolises
and (very rarely these days) desert tents, think with some sort of single,
collective mind is utterly ridiculous, he added.
Alfred McCoy, a
professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, analysed
the CIA practice of torture in over half-century in Vietnam, Latin America
and Iran, and marvelled at the recklessness of Western media commentators
and pundits. He writes; In weighing personal liberty versus public
safety, all those pro-pain pundits were ignorant of tortures complexity
perverse psychopathology, that leads to both uncontrolled proliferation
of the practice [of torture] and long-term damage to the perpetrator
society[3]. The practice is morally repugnant in any civilised
society.
The documents released
by the ACLU reveal that the practice of abuse and torture, which is
now an established process of the US and British administrations, has
been facilitated and approved by the White House and Whitehall. It is
not an isolated behaviour of a few bad apples suddenly appeared
in the US-British military in Iraq, as propagandised by the mainstream
media. The documents shows that the US administration is guilty of gross
violations of human rights and of a systematic decision to alter
the use of methods of coercion and torture that lay outside of accepted
and legal norms.
In April 2003, the
Defence Department approved interrogation techniques for
use at Guantanamo Bay prison, and then passed them to Iraq, The Washington
Post reported on May 09, 2004. Further, [p]erhaps the strongest
evidence that the abuse of prisoners in US hands has been systemic,
not aberrant, is the simplest: it is the fact that those involved felt
it was quite safe to be photographed repeatedly while committing it,
writes Stephen Sedley, a judge of the court of appeal for England and
Wales.
Kenneth Roth, executive
director of the US-based Human Rights Watch, said these techniques outlined
in the US document and approved by the Pentagon amount to cruel and
inhumane treatment. The courts have ruled most of these techniques
illegal, he said. If it's illegal here under the U.S. Constitution,
it's illegal abroad . . . . This isn't even close. The fact that
the Bush administration used fake torture stories to influence public
opinion to support the war on Iraq constitutes abuse of public trust.
For example, the faked story of Jumana Hanna, a prostitute, of torture
and rape was amplified in The Washington Post in July 2003, and used
by the war-hungry Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in his testimony
to the US Senate to justify his moral war on Iraq.
Alberto Gonzales,
the new US Attorney, was the White House Legal Council before the invasion
of Iraq. In his memorandum on January 25, 2002, Mr. Gonzales advised
the Bush administration, that the Geneva Convention does not cover POW
and detainees of Americas war on terror or the new
paradigm as Mr. Gonzales called it. In my judgement
he writes, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict
limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some
of its provisions.
Gonzales advice
amount to war crimes under Title 18 U.S.C. section 2441 (The War Crimes
Act). The War Crimes Act defines as war crimes: grave breaches of the
Geneva Conventions, and violations of Article 3 common to the Geneva
Conventions. Section 130 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment
of Prisoners of War (Third Geneva Convention) defines as grave breaches
of that Convention: wilful killing, torture or inhuman treatment,
and wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body
or health. Those who followed Mr Gonzales advice are equally guilty
of war crimes against the Iraqi people. A detailed case against Mr Gonzales
provides by Marjorie Cohn, professor of Law at Thomas Jefferson School
of Law [4].
Its
difficult for me to understand why nobody was held accountable for the
abuse of detainees here. There's no justification for kicking an enemy
[POW] when hes wounded on the ground in front of you and about
to die, said Jamil Jaffer, one of the ACLU lawyers.
Furthermore, in
early June 2004, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva condemned
the willful killing, torture and inhuman treatment of Iraqis,
calling it a grave breach of international law that might
be designated as war crimes by a competent tribunal. The scandal
was, the Commissioner added, recognised by even Coalition leaders
as a stain upon the effort to bring freedom to Iraq.
The West shared
values have never stood lower in the eyes of Arabs and Muslims
in general. Americans and British at home should know that their governments
are isolated in their old-style adventure of colonialism, and that the
resort to torture is a criminal practice. They can join the international
community in repudiating a practice that constitute gross violation
of human rights and dignity.
The systematic policy
of abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi POW and Iraqi civilians by the
US and British forces has exposed the lie that the war was to liberate
the Iraqi people and to spread freedom and democracy.
The new tyranny is an old tyranny in every aspect of life. The only
way to end the abuse, torture and murder of the Iraqi people is the
end of the Occupation of Iraq.
Ghali Hassan lives
in Perth, Western Australia. He can be contacted by: [email protected]
Further Reading:
[1]. http://www.aclu.org/
[2]. The Taguba
Report, http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/iraq/tagubarpt.html
[3]. Alfred W. McCoy,
Cruel Science: CIA Torture & U.S. Foreign Policy, NEJPP, 2005.
[3]. Marjorie Cohn,
The Gonzales Indictment, t r u t h o u t, 19 January 2005.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/011905A.shtml