May 10, 2004
NEW YORK - Just as the Vietnam War was personified by a photo of a terrified, naked girl fleeing a blast of napalm, so George Bush's `liberation' of Iraq will inevitably be remembered by the horrifying photo of a hooded prisoner standing on a box with electric cables attached to his fingers.
Americans are reeling in disgust at the torture, abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons prison by US soldiers and intelligence agents. Their revulsion is genuine: Americans are a decent, humane people who believe themselves well above such medieval abominations.
Outrage across the Islamic World at these crimes is at a fever pitch but, as usual, Muslims can do little but curse the US and shake their fists. Few of the angry Muslims have stopped to think that crimes worse than what occurred in Iraq occur routinely in their own prisons.
Americans, however, should not be surprised their soldiers and intelligence agents are using torture and sexual humiliations to break the will of Iraqis to resist US occupation. That is the nature of colonial warfare and the so-called `war of terror.'
In August, 2003, this column warned about Iraq, `Protracted guerilla warfare eventually turns even the best-disciplined troops into brutes, and corrupts entire governments.' Colonial troops in Kenya, Algeria, Angola, Mozambique, Palestine, Indochina, Kashmir, Aceh, and Chechnya all became infected with brutality and sadism.
Americans, in spite of their respect for law and human rights, are not immune to such corruption. During the 1900-1904 conquest of the Philippines, US forces killed 50,000-100,000 Muslim civilians.
Few recall that US forces in Vietnam routinely threw prisoners from helicopters, burned them alive with white phosphorus, or wiped out entire villages without a second thought. The communist enemy was even more merciless. That was the nature of counter-insurgency warfare fought among a hostile civilian population by demoralized American soldiers who knew the war was lost.
During the invasion of Afghanistan, America ignored evidence US Special Forces troops had watched - or even participated - in the massacre of 3,000 Taliban prisoners in Afghanistan by communist Northern Alliance soldiers.
Persistent reports of prisoners being tortured by US captors in Iraq, Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, Jordan, Egypt and Guantanamo were also ignored- until the Abu Ghraib outrage. Now, we learn of a ghastly new apparition: free-enterprise torturers known, in Pentagon Orwell-speak, as `civilian interrogation contractors.'
When this writer stated last year on American network TV that the US was routinely using torture against terrorism suspects, he was quickly cut off the air. The governments of George Bush and Tony Blair ignored Red Cross reports of torture and abuse in Iraq by their occupation forces.
The US troops sent to Iraq come from the bottom of America's society. Many are from southern states and militant Christian sects steeped in racism against Arab `sand-niggers' and violent hatred of Islam. There is a direct line between the crusading fever whipped up by the Bush Administration and its fundamentalist Christian supporters, and the crimes inflicted on Arabs at Abu Ghraib Prison.
The pictures of gloating US soldiers posing over piled-up, naked Iraqi prisoners recalls Soviet gulag guards who called prisoners, `logs.' They also conjure nightmare images of terrified Jewish prisoners herded by Nazi SS guards, and cowering Bosnian and Albanian Muslim captives about to be murdered by laughing Serb soldiers.
But don't believe the torture and abuse in Iraq was solely the work of a few sadistic hillbillies and miscreants, as the Pentagon is claiming.
The process of inflicting pain, humiliation, and degradation on captives - dehumanizing them - was officially sanctioned by the Bush Administration. The White House's rejection of the Geneva Conventions protecting captives, its creation of legal black holes in Guantanamo and other foreign bases where captives could be deprived of the rule of law, and its claim that anyone branded a `terrorist' or `illegal combatant' could be dealt with my courts martial or presidential fiat opened the gates of Abu Ghraib.
President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld as much as told US soldiers and agents to ignore the laws of war. They are ultimately responsible for the disgraceful acts now being revealed in Iraq.
When I served in the US Army, I was taught that the president was the ultimate military commander. It is time the commander-in-chief take responsibility for these crimes that have so befouled America's once good name.
The tortures and abuse being used were perfected by CIA psychologists and psychiatrists. These tortures, based on Israeli techniques to crush the Palestinians, and taught by Israeli advisors, were designed more to break Iraqi's will than to elicit information. The carefully thought out sexual humiliations were designed to inflict maximum mental punishment on Muslims.
For US occupiers of Iraq, dreaded Abu Ghraib plays the same role it did under Saddam Hussein: terrifying the population into docility. The US now may hold more Iraqi prisoners — 15,000-20,000 — than did Saddam's prisons.
After last week's revelations from Abu Ghraib, the only people likely to still believe President Bush's claims to be fighting in Iraq for `freedom and democracy,' will be brain-numbed American TV viewers.
Foreign Correspondent
