Nothing unusual happened in Iraq

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Andreas
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Joined: Feb 27, 2004
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Posted: May 17, 2004 - 01:05 AM
Post subject: Nothing unusual happened in Iraq

From Asia Times:

Brutality starts at home
By Ritt Goldstein

On April 30, US President George W Bush condemned the incidents of Iraq prison abuse and those who perpetrated them, saying: "That's not the way we do things in America." Administration officials have launched a campaign to portray the incidents as isolated aberrations; though, "systemic" abuse has been charged by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Amnesty International claims a "pattern of torture". But while an army report has described the "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" of Iraqi prisoners - including sodomy and other physical assaults - no one has yet dared compare this to America's well documented abuse of its own citizens, and the factors driving abuse at home and abroad.

"Five years ago, after prison scandals gripped California with tales of guards setting up inmates in human cockfights and then shooting them dead, the state Department of Corrections vowed to change its ways," read a December 28, 2003 article from the Los Angeles Times. Notably, the article was entitled "Despite State Promises, Reform Eludes Prisons", illustrating a well-established official pattern of effectively condoning abuse, then paying lip-service to outrage and reform when a scandal breaks.

The Army Times - an independent paper read widely in military circles - called for the removal of America's top Pentagon mangers, saying that "while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership". Paralleling this question, the Los Angeles Times article had noted that a US federal court was examining allegations that both California's corrections commissioner and the highest levels of his staff had "stopped internal investigators", the case involving the suppression of evidence against "brutal guards".

While most officials say rights are important, the status quo appears sacred, and a well-tread path of political expediency goes to and from it. US rights groups and civil-rights attorneys have long described abuses within the US criminal justice system as part of a widely entrenched "culture" of official misconduct. When Oklahoma's Republican Senator James Inhofe declared that he was "more outraged by the outrage" over the Iraq abuse than by the abuse itself, he aptly demonstrated a perspective held by many, one which "justifies" abuse.

At the core of this logic lies the assumption that those abused have done something to deserve their illegal and inhumane treatment. And misconduct critics have long charged that many victims of US law enforcement abuse are routinely perceived in a manner similar to that in which rape victims once were - the victims viewed as having done something to "deserve it".

A December 19, 2003 article by the Washington Post revealed that a report by the US Justice Department's Inspector General revealed foreign detainees rounded up in the wake of September 11 had their guards "ram them into a wall". The report concurrently noted that from videotape of the incidents, "there was no evidence that the detainees had provoked or attacked the guards".

In 1998, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report on systemic, coast-to-coast abuse by US law enforcement, "Shielded from Justice". The report found a pervasive violation of "the public's trust", coupled with "defective" accountability systems and a "tolerant" leadership, allowing US law enforcement to commit crimes with "impunity" nationwide. As regards what the effective acceptance of the abuse of such authority has meant in the United States:

A November 10, 2003 report by Houston's 11 News began: "Where can you lie, cheat or steal and still keep your job? Or how about repeatedly getting drunk and getting behind the wheel? Or assaulting your wife or girlfriend? The answer in dozens of cases is the Houston Police Department."

Paralleling Iraqi charges of sodomizing prisoners, the most famous case in the US was that of Abner Louima in 1997, sodomized with a toilet plunger, with the blood and feces-covered plunger then used to break out his front teeth. When initially investigated by New York City police, the incident was reported as "self-inflicted"; though officer Justin Volpe later pleaded guilty to the crime. The latest major news report of similar conduct was provided in the November 7, 2003 Minneapolis Star Tribune, with Stephen Porter alleging that "police sexually assaulted him with the handle of a toilet plunger", the paper reported, noting a witness account appeared to corroborate Porter's story.

HRW's report also addressed the "repeated practice of torture by Chicago police", with electric shock being the favored technique, supplemented by burning prisoners. "Shielded from Justice" specifically cites a report of electric shock applied to the "head and genitals". The group notes that after the city "settled the claim of 13-year-old Marcus Wiggins", the attorneys representing the boy in his torture suit were able to secure internal police documents, providing further evidence to support torture claims. The City of Chicago did eventually acknowledge that "planned torture" occurred.

While US media have reported the use of dogs and armed threat against Iraqi detainees, a November 7, 2003 report by CBS News detailed a police drug raid on Stratford High School in Goose Creek, South Carolina. There, students were forced to "lie on the floor", while they endured "guns put to their head and a K9 dog". Notably, no drugs were found in the "commando-style raid", according to CBS, but the "school's principal defends the dramatic sweep", they reported.

As regards charges that chemicals from broken light fixtures were poured on some Iraqi detainees, the March 20, 2004 New York Times reported on a police officer "spraying pepper spray (a powerful chemical irritant used by police) into the mouth of a man who died in custody after being wrongly picked up". Lesser incidents of pepper spray abuse are widely reported as virtually commonplace.

Regarding the alleged rape of a young Iraqi man in custody, reports of sexual assault by US law enforcement frequently surface; notably, a number of these have been alleged incidents of a male officer attacking a female officer. As regards the sexual violation of young people, a June 25, 2003 report by the Associated Press began by noting that "at least a dozen teenagers assigned to work with police departments as part of the Boy Scouts' Law Enforcement Explorers program have allegedly been sexually abused by officers during the past year", with the incidents reported from coast-to-coast. The article mentioned some specific cases, including a Texas case where "former police officer John Ross Ewing, 28, was indicted by a grand jury in March on charges that he sexually assaulted two male Explorer scouts, ages 15 and 16".

Echoing the Iraq accusations made by Army Times, HRW highlighted that domestic US abuse stems from a "problem of supervision, management and leadership". The human rights group also noted that "shortcomings in recruiting, training and management" extended across the US law enforcement abuse spectrum. And "Shielded From Justice" also provides insight as to why early reports of Iraqi prisoner abuse were ignored, demonstrating a pattern which HRW domestically termed "federal passivity".

Addressing the results of domestic allegations made to the Civil Rights Division of the US Justice Department, HRW found that of 10,129 civil rights cases that were reviewed, approximately 1 in 500 resulted in a Justice Department attempt to prosecute. More disturbing, HRW found that in some US police departments the particularly abusive officers are "often rewarded", being given "positive evaluations and promotions".

In their criticism of Pentagon leadership, Army Times noted: "The message to the troops: anything goes." And a 1997 Time Magazine article by former US police chief Joseph McNamara provided the precise parallel, saying: "This wouldn't happen if some cops didn't believe they had a mandate for such behavior."

A belief in such a "mandate" would explain Iraq pictures with smiling torturers.

McNamara noted that most contemporary police misconduct has "an element of police gangsterism. Small groups of police officers share a fermenting contempt for the people they encounter." He added: "Rogue cops band together and cover up one another's crimes." And the most readily seen aspect of the Iraqi abuse has been the obvious contempt those perpetrating it have had for their victims.

While it is widely accepted that most of the US military, US law enforcement and US citizenry are good and decent people, many elements within American society have long voiced increasing concern over the disparity between the way the US sees itself, and the way others are increasingly seeing it.

Notably, it was a US military police officer who finally broke the Iraq scandal by courageously providing a CD of abuse's gruesome imagery. In the US it has been well documented that many good and decent police officers have attempted to address abuse, only to be badly abused themselves. But in both Iraq and the US, patterns of nightmarish abuse have grown which have been documented as "systemic".

In 1941, famed social psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in Escape From Freedom of how those who are sadistic rationalize their behavior in two ways: the first being retaliation for a perceived injury; the second is that "by striking first I am defending myself or my friends against the danger of being hurt". Fromm reflected: "Man's brain lives in the 20th century; the heart of most men still live in the Stone Age."

Footnoting domestic US police violence, there was a time when this American journalist wrote laws instead of articles. A January 10, 1997 editorial written by the staff of America's oldest newspaper, The Hartford Courant, was entitled "Consider a statewide review board", and advocated the pursuit of the police accountability legislation I had once authored.

On December 6, 1996 I had chaired the Senator Tim Upson-Ritt Goldstein, SCOLED Informational Hearing on Police Accountability in Connecticut's legislature. But after spreading my legislative proposal on the national level, by July 1997 I was forced to flee the US for my life, seeking political asylum in Sweden.

While life-threatening harassment (I was shot at, had the steering unscrewed on my car, was assaulted multiple times daily, etc) was determined, I am yet forced to live underground. A February 10, 1998 Reuters article explained the reason as "it was by individual police and not authorized by police authorities". Amnesty International's Swedish section noted that this violated Swedish legislation. Later, a June 21, 2001 article in the United Kingdom's Guardian was entitled "European parliament committee urges Swedes to rethink".

Martin Luther King Jr once observed that "we live in an age of guided missiles and misguided men".

Cutting to what many see as the heart of America's problems, the Army Times entitled its article "A Failure of Leadership at the Highest Levels". As the father of recently deceased Nick Berg said in criticism of the administration: "It's not the same America I grew up in."

In the spring of 2002, this journalist interviewed the Reverend Robert Bosse, SCJ, of the Chicago-based 8th Day Center for Justice, a global-justice non-governmental organization whose 4,000 members are primarily Catholic clergy. Bosse expressed a profound concern as to America's future, and that of the structures and values which had once made the country.

In considering the end of the road, he saw the Bush administration as taking, he solemnly noted, a parallel to World War II Germany, saying: "I thought of those good people who gradually became collaborators in an unthinkable crime, all in the name of security."

Ritt Goldstein is an American investigative political journalist based in Stockholm. His work has appeared in broadsheets such as Australia's Sydney Morning Herald, Spain's El Mundo and Denmark's Politiken, as well as with the Inter Press Service (IPS), a global news agency.

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Andreas
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Joined: Feb 27, 2004
Posts: 6221
Location: 31 N 121 E

Posted: May 17, 2004 - 01:10 AM

Torture as an export commodity, from Asia Times:

Abuse travels very well
By Jack A Smith

There are many differences between the United States war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam. But there are some obvious similarities. Both conflicts, for one example, involved widespread brutality by the American armed forces toward civilians and the torture of "suspected" enemies.

Thirty-five years ago, commenting on the American massacre in My Lai, Vietnam, this author wrote an editorial in the Guardian weekly (US) that contained the following paragraph: "This calculated slaughter of the innocents is neither a mistake nor an aberration, neither a temporary moral lapse on the part of weary GIs nor the debased sadism of a few perverts. The murder of more than 500 civilian residents of My Lai - children in arms, women and men - is the quintessential expression of American imperialism and racism directed toward one hamlet in ravaged South Vietnam."

The murder, rape and torture of My Lai came to mind recently when President George W Bush insisted that the shattering revelations of the use of torture by the US military against inmates in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison were the product of a "few people who have stained the honor of this country". He argued, "that's not the way we do things in America".

The history of the US is nothing if not contradictory. Its extraordinarily productive economy has transformed the US into the world's most powerful state, and its society offers a certain degree of liberty, opportunity and benefit to some - though hardly all - of its citizens. As such, those who promote America depict the country as the apex of civilized development and the beacon of freedom and democracy.

In this connection, of course, it must be noted that the history of the US has been punctuated frequently by episodes of extreme barbarism, oppression and torture toward largely non-European peoples since it was colonized nearly 400 years ago. Our vast continental configuration is the product of a long campaign of genocide and displacement of the indigenous population; our economic growth was assisted until 1865 by over 200 years of slave labor from kidnapped and brutalized Africans who were tortured at the whim of their masters.

Aside from the deplorable and violent conditions that exist in many American prisons and the brutality and racism evident in some police departments, torture in the conventional sense is not a routine practice within the US proper, except for inhumane treatment in particular cases such as that of Muslims rounded up in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

In our view, however, the events in Abu Ghraib prison constitute a metaphor not only for the Bush administration's unjust war against Iraq, but for Washington's frequent use of violence to extend and secure its economic and political interests, in Latin America for over a century, and throughout the globe after World War II. In a sense, the stunning new revelations were the equivalent of Washington's swaggering deployment of overwhelming force to subdue a virtually defenseless country - writ small in the grotesque "thumbs up" jocularity that accompanied the enforced humiliation of terrorized inmates.

It may come as a surprise to some readers, but while a number of the cruelties devised by the guards go beyond Bush administration guidelines, many of their actions - once defined as "cruel and unusual" - are now considered within bounds. The types of punishment approved by the present US government include stripping detainees naked; the use of cameras to take pictures of naked detainees; hooding for interrogation and for long periods of time; requiring detainees to assume painful "stress" positions for long periods of time; prolonged sleep deprivation; use of dogs to intimidate prisoners during interrogation and elsewise; exposure to heat or cold or cold water; sensory assault, including exposure to loud music and bright lights; isolation longer than 30 days; and threatening prisoners with abuse.

The members of the US Military Police who joyfully perpetrated sadistic outrages against Iraqi prisoners were undoubtedly under the impression, albeit distorted, that they too were promoting America's interests. They may have been poorly trained reservists resentful of prolonged service amid the chaos and confusion of a bungled occupation, but they are also volunteers who are continuously exposed to the full brunt of the Pentagon's "patriotic" propaganda about Iraq constituting the very epicenter of a "war on terrorism" that threatens to destroy their families and home towns. The Abu Ghraib prisoners they tormented may well have been innocent civilians swept up in mass arrests, but to the MPs they were probable terrorists who might even be connected to September 11.

It is also likely that the seven prison guards (none of whom are officers) soon to face trial on charges of brutalizing inmates believed it was their responsibility to break the emotional and psychological will of their victims in order ease the task of Military Intelligence interrogators seeking information about the resistance forces. Their chosen means of accomplishing this assignment was to contrive circumstances grossly humiliating and disgraceful to Arab and Muslim men: public nakedness, enforced masturbation and feigned homosexual acts in front of an audience that included mocking young women soldiers. The photographs that so shocked the world were taken to exacerbate this humiliation, but judging by the smiles of several MPs posing in the background they were also intended to function as mementos in later years when the former guards reminisce about their wild and crazy year fighting for the freedom of Iraq and in defense of the homeland.

Obviously, the suggestion to force selected inmates to undergo sexual humiliation came from the military and "contract" interrogators experienced in techniques to expedite the acquisition of information from possibly reluctant individuals. The willingness of these prison guards to comply with such suggestions and to make sport of them as well bespeaks a deep-seated racism toward Arabs and contempt for the religion of Muslims that found its outlet in sexual degradation.

Fortunately, several of the Abu Ghraib guards disapproved of these practices, which were widely known throughout the prison because the photos had been circulated. One of the MPs, specialist Joseph M Darby, was sufficiently upset enough to report the matter to the Army's Criminal Investigation Division in January. Now back at their base in California, three of the MPs who were also disgusted by the actions of their fellow guards spoke to the press in early May. Said one: "They think that because we're Americans you can do whatever you want." Another commented, "I went to my superiors and said people were forgetting they're American soldiers," but they did nothing about it. And another: "I don't understand why we had to be so rude with these prisoners and beat the crap out of these guys."

Darby's revelation led to the late-February 53-page report on the situation by Major General Antonio M Taguba, who detailed what he termed the "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" at the prison. He also implied that Military Intelligence, which had acquired control over the prison section in question, sought to have the MPs participate in pre-interrogation torments.

The report was immediately provided to top Pentagon brass, but it was not intended to become public. The New Yorker magazine and author Seymour M Hersh somehow "obtained" a copy and it became the subject of a two-part article in early May. At around the same time, copies of several of the incriminating photographs found their way to CBS News. General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, personally requested that the TV network delay showing the pictures, which it did for two weeks. Interestingly, although Myers and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, possessed copies of the Taguba report for two months and had been briefed about its contents, neither as of last week had actually read it.

Six of the MPs were charged with abuse of prisoners on March 20, but were it not for the later leaked text of the report and especially the photos, it is improbable that the full extent of these war crimes would have been publicly revealed. Respected human rights agencies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch repeatedly charged the Pentagon with abuse and torture since Iraq was invaded some 14 months ago, but their complaints were largely ignored by the corporate mass media and the government until the photographs made it impossible to suppress the extent of the abuse any longer.

The revelations have seriously compromised the Bush administration, particularly abroad, but at home as well, coming at a time when US strategy in Iraq has degenerated to a shambles due to the unanticipated resistance movement and the ineptitude of the "coalition" occupation. Bush had been expecting the impending trial of former president Saddam Hussein to help pave the way for his reelection in November, based on his "liberation" of Iraq from "Saddam's torture chambers". At this stage such a comparison would be counterproductive, although by election day American voters may have forgotten all about it. (A CNN poll not long ago resulted in 47 percent of respondents agreeing that torture may be justified during interrogation.)

Bush's politically centrist Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry - who supports the war but insists he can "manage" it better than the present administration by attracting troops and money from presently aloof allies - criticized the president for a failure of leadership that helped lead to the prison abuses. On May 12 he specifically mentioned the administration's demonstrated indifference to the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners: "This is something that comes out of an attitude about the rights of prisoners of war; it's an attitude that comes out of America's overall arrogance in its policy that is alienating countries around the world."

Bush and Kerry agree, however, that it is in imperial Washington's interests to depict the incidents at Abu Ghraib as the work of just a few US soldiers and not an outgrowth of America's actions over the years. Kerry stated that "what happened over there is not the behavior of 99.9 percent of our troops". A few days earlier, Myers declared that that "just a handful" of soldiers are guilty of mistreating Iraqi prisoners." On a surprise visit to Abu Ghraib May 13, Rumsfeld pronounced the misdeeds to be an aberration. Clearly, those who rule America are united in fighting the not unreasonable notion that the use of torture by the US military is systemic.

The same attempts to reduce the scope of US misdeeds to the actions of a "few bad apples" is another reminder of official attitudes when particularly heinous war crimes were uncovered in Vietnam. A certain army major working in Vietnam as a staff officer with the Americal Division (a unit of which was responsible for the My Lai Massacre) wrote the following response to allegations from an enlisted man that the division was engaging in the murder and torture of Vietnamese civilians: "There may be isolated cases of mistreatment of civilians and POWs," the major wrote on December 13, 1968, nine months after My Lai but before the incident became public knowledge in the US "[But] this by no means reflects the general attitude throughout the division ... In direct refutation of this portrayal [from the whistle-blowing GI] is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." It took almost another year for the truth about My Lai to become published. The major's attempted coverup did him no harm, however. He was ultimately promoted to general and, in January 2001, Colin Powell became the US Secretary of State.

Actually, torture is not uncommon in terms of Washington's interaction with many other countries and in the overall "war on terrorism". Let's look at a few of Washington's experiences with torture in modern times.

After organizing the overthrow of the elected government of Iran in 1953 in order to install a puppet monarchy in Teheran - a political catastrophe resulting in the torture and deaths of thousands of defenders of democracy - the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) created SAVIC, one of the most vicious secret police agencies in the world. To protect its investment, the CIA trained SAVIC in the most up-to-day varieties of torture, which it deployed with abandon until the Shah of Iran was ousted a quarter-century later.

Starting in the mid-1960s, various US government agencies trained the right-wing regime in Uruguay in the refinements of torture. In addition to providing lessons, and taking part in the torture of dissidents and suspected communists in Uruguay, the CIA offered two-month training courses in the US. Over the years the same instructions were provided to the governments of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and other Latin American regimes, leading to the mass use of torture in Latin America and to the creation of the notorious death squads.

America's most well documented direct participation in mass torture took place during the Vietnam War years when the CIA and US soldiers subjected tens of thousands of poor peasants and "Viet Cong" suspects to the most painful punishments devised since the Inquisition. My Lai was not unique. Nearly 30 years after Vietnam was liberated, the hidden horrors perpetuated by the US are still emerging. The Toledo (Ohio) Blade newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize last month for exposing the atrocities and tortures conducted by the so-called Tiger Force unit.

The US involvement with torture has increased measurably since the Bush administration launched its "war on terrorism" in September 2001, but most of it is conducted outside the country in various concentration camps operated by the Pentagon in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay (Cuba); in smaller secret facilities run by the CIA in unnamed locations in order to interrogate alleged top al-Qaeda suspects; and in foreign countries within Washington's orbit which engage in torture themselves.

This latter practice is known as "rendering," and it consists of turning alleged "terror suspects" over to foreign intelligence services for torture, usually with an agent of the US in attendance. According to the Washington Post of May 11, "Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are well-known destinations for suspected terrorists" identified by the American government. The article revealed that "the Saudis currently are detaining and interrogating [torturing] about 800 terrorism suspects, said a senior Saudi official. Their fate is largely controlled by Saudi-based joint intelligence tasks forces, whose members include officers form the CIA, FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] and other US law enforcement agencies."

All told, over 43,000 Iraqis have been arrested by the US occupation army, up to 90 percent of whom, according to a February report by the usually reticent International Red Cross, had been "arrested by mistake". Many have been subjected to brutality by American troops. Many have been injured or tortured. Many were incarcerated for months without the knowledge of their families. None had legal representation. Some were killed. Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross have identified hundreds of such incidents since the invasion began in March, 2003. The Red Cross concluded that US arrest and detention policies in Iraq "are prohibited under international humanitarian law". Even Washington's hand-picked and usually pliant Iraqi Governing Council several months ago bitterly complained to the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority about arrest and incarceration abuses, to no avail.

So far, 34,000 of the apprehended Iraqis have been released without charges. Most of the rest will be released in time - a process that has been accelerated since the Abu Ghraib crimes became publicly known. Only 600 have ever been charged with a crime, mostly of a civil nature. And nearly all of those arrested, including opponents of Saddam, now despise the US for portraying itself as a "liberator" while acting in the fashion of an overlord.

The Abu Ghraib episode is not a question of a few GIs "staining the honor of their country". It's a matter of the Bush administration undermining what remains of America's honor by engaging in brutal tactics against a civilian population after killing 10,000 other non-combatants in an unjust and illegal war.

Jack A Smith was the former chief editor of the now defunct US progressive newsweekly The Guardian, and presently the editor of a newsletter devoted to political activism. He resides in the Hudson Valley region of New York in the USA.

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If it has tits, tires, or a transom, there's gonna be issues!