Bush’s torturous logic
By Dave Lindorff
May 3 — George Bush is shocked, shocked that there is torture
being used by US forces on Iraqi prisoners of war, in direct violation
not only of basic human rights but of the Geneva Convention on Treatment
of Prisoners of War of which the United States is not only a signatory,
but a founding writer.
So shocked that he had his Pentagon try to get CBS not to show the pictures
of the shocking behavior.
The truth is that if the Commander-in-Chief—remember him? He’s
the guy in charge of the military that was running the Abu Ghraib detention
facility in Baghdad—really did feel the “deep disgust”
he claims he feels, and that such treatment is “not the way we
do things in America,” heads would be rolling at very high levels
of the military.
Instead what we see is six very low level soldiers facing possible court
martials and seven higher-ups at the prison, as well as Brig. Gen. Janis
Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade which was
in charge of running Abu Ghraib, being removed from their duties there.
You can always tell whether prosecutors are serious about a case by
whether they go after the little guys with the big guns, or whether
they start cutting plea bargains with the small fry, in order to get
them to rat on the higher-ups. If they go after the little guys, like
they did in the My Lai Massacre case in Vietnam, you can bet that will
be the end of it. No senior commanders will be called to account.
And so it appears to be going this time. So far the “punishments,”
such as they are, are being strictly limited to the prison command structure,
not to the officers above. This is exactly what was done with the My
Lai case. No one responsible for the policies that led to that sickening
massacre, or the countless others like it that went unpunished, was
ever sanctioned.
Obviously everyone from General John Abezaid, and probably from Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, (who actually visited the prison), on down
knew what was going on, not only in Abu Ghraib, but in the other less
publicly known prison camps where captured Iraqi insurgents are taken
to be softened up for information. There have been enough reports leaking
out about torture not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo,
for us to know that torture is not an aberration but rather is the policy.
It is in fact very much “the way we do things,” maybe not
so much in America (though it certainly goes on routinely in police
stations across the nation also), but wherever American soldiers fight
the empire’s battles.
If anything, what sets America apart from some of its client states
and from Saddam Hussein’s regime is not torture itself, which the
CIA has long endorsed and practiced and taught to client states’
police, and which US soldiers do at least as capably as the next centurion.
It’s that some American soldiers actually believe strongly enough
in the notional values of the American Constitution they ostensibly
are fighting to protect to actually report such evil, even at the risk
of personal loss or punishment. What sets America apart is that its
mainstream media, as compromised and timid as they have become, will
still occasionally, as CBS’s “60 Minutes” has done here,
blow the whistle on such criminality and barbarism.
I suppose President Bush might be forgiven for saying that torture is
not something American soldiers engage in. He wasn’t in Vietnam,
or anywhere more dangerous than a rowdy bar, and probably the guys in
his National Guard unit, at least on those days when he chose to show
up for duty, weren’t into torturing the locals in Texas or Alabama.
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, of course, would know
better. Though he seems to deny having said it these days, he once admitted
to committing atrocities in Vietnam, which he said was something everyone
was doing over there.
Still, if he were genuinely distressed at the images broadcast by CBS
over his Pentagon’s objections, he would be demanding the stripes
and stars of every ranking officer in the chain of command who either
knew what was going on, or should have known and allowed it to happen
on their watch.
Don’t hold your breath.
Source: Counterpunch
The Fallujah mutinies
By Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad, Iraq Apr. 29 — A second unit of the Iraqi armed
forces has mutinied at Fallujah after being involved in heavy fighting
with insurgents Ali Allawi, the Iraqi Defense Minister, said Apr. 28.
Part of the 36th battalion of the paramilitary Iraqi Civil Defense Corps
revolted last week after the unit had been fighting in the besieged
city for 11 days, the minister said. Allawi blamed the mutiny on “a
failure of command. The commanding officer was absent, his deputy ...
was seriously wounded and the number three faltered.”
At the start of the siege of Fallujah three weeks ago, one of the five
battalions of the newly formed Iraqi army refused to go to the city
because many of its soldiers were not prepared to fight fellow Iraqis.
But news of the mutiny of a second Iraqi unit had not been released.
Allawi said US Marines “had to separate those who did want to fight
from those who would not.”
The battalion may have split along ethnic lines. Its soldiers were recruited
from the militiamen of the Iraqi political parties which belong to the
US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, and about half were Kurdish soldiers,
known as peshmerga. The Kurds were prepared to fight but Iraqi Arab
soldiers said they had had enough. Those who refused to fight were withdrawn
from the battlefield for retraining.
Some members of the governing council have said that the performance
of the 36th battalion showed a new Iraqi army should be recruited from
politically committed militiamen and party members.
At the start of the uprisings, after the US moved against the Shia cleric
Muqtada Sadr, 40 per cent of the US-trained Iraqi security forces went
home and 10 per cent changed sides, the US military said.
Allawi, long exiled in London, won a reputation for efficiency while
Iraqi minister of trade, a job he still holds. He is trying to raise
an 80,000-strong Iraqi army, of whom 35,000 will be regulars and 40,000
to 45,000 will be in the paramilitary defense corps.
He says the poor performance of the Iraqi security forces stems from
poor leadership and lack of training. Asked who will command the new
Iraqi army, Allawi said firmly: “I will give the orders.”
He added with a laugh: “I do not mean that in any Napoleonic sense.”
He said the battalion which refused orders to move from Taji north of
Baghdad to Fallujah was not told what it would be doing, and its men
thought, wrongly, they would be thrown into the thick of the fighting.
Priority is being given to creating a 10,000-strong emergency task force
in the army which will deal with sudden crises such as that which has
engulfed Iraq this month. The Interior Ministry is also developing Swat
teams for emergencies. One problem for the Iraqi army is that the men
are being paid only $60 a month, less than garbage collectors in Baghdad,
for a dangerous job. “Somebody wanted an army on the cheap,”
Allawi said.
He believed re-employing officers who used to be Baathists was “something
of a red herring. There are only 30 slots for generals in the new army
and there are 11,000 generals in Iraq [Saddam Hussein promoted men to
the rank for a better pension].”
Allawi said the real problem was that people who were in the Baath party,
and Republican and Special Republican Guard around Baghdad “have
begun to re-coalesce. In a place like Baquba maybe there is a hard core
of 100 or 200 people though they may not have been senior before.”
He believes Islamic militants play a stiffening rather than a central
role.
Fighting continued in the outskirts of Fallujah Apr. 28. US Marines
used helicopter gunships and aircraft to attack lorries carrying ammunition.
Source: CounterPunch
Saddam: of savages and thugs
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
Apr. 6 — It is hard not to read an article, which does
not name the former Iraqi president, without the added adjective, “brutal.”
One popular Black talk show host recently described the former Iraqi
head-of-state as a “thug.”
His comments reminded me of an article I read several years ago, before
the (latest) Iraq War, written by a Jesuit scholar who worked with the
anti-war group, Voices in the Wilderness.
Rev. Dr. G. Simon Harak, writing in the October-November 2002 issue
of BLUEPRINT, a Loyola University bi-monthly journal, wrote tellingly
of the false justifications for the then-upcoming war, and told of a
parade of US officials who came to Baghdad to support the Hussein regime.
Rev. Dr. Harak writes:
“As [Saddam] Hussein’s human rights violations became more
and more flagrant, the US response was to send a parade of US government
representatives to support Hussein — Donald Rumsfeld, Alan Simpson,
James McClure, Robert Dole, Frank Murkowski, together with US Ambassador
April Glaspie. Typical of their statements is one from Senator Howard
Metzenbaum, announcing himself ‘a Jew and a staunch supporter of
Israel.’ He went on to tell Saddam that ‘I have been sitting
here and listening to you for about an hour, and I am aware that you
are a strong and intelligent man and that you want peace.’”
To quote that great American actor, Keanu Reeves, “whoa.”
I think what ‘the Honorable gentleman’ meant was, “as
long as you’re whacking who we want you to whack (meaning the Iranians)
you’re cool with us.”
And Saddam Hussein did want peace; peace through war, which, with the
assistance of American arms dealers on both sides, sent over 800,000
people, perhaps as many as a million men, women and children of both
Iraq and Iran, to the final peace of death. As long as Saddam was wreaking
bloody havoc upon the Islamic Republic of Iran, he had no shortage of
American ‘friends.’
One wonders, if he was a ‘brutal thug,’ what of those who
aided, abetted, and armed him?
Again, this fulsome praise of Saddam came after the horrors of poison
gas dropped on Halabja, the Kurdish town.
Indeed, when Iraq was lobbing chemical warfare against the Iranians,
the US support for Iraq went so far as the altering of US law, to allow
US companies to sell Iraq the resources for his WMDs, and giving him
satellite targeting support for his chemical weapons.
When I hear such references to ‘thugs’, or ‘brutes’,
or ‘savages’, I am reminded of what every American schoolchild
reads by 2nd grade — the Declaration of Independence.
In this declaration, penned by Thomas Jefferson, to state a claim against
the British Crown for “excit(ing)” the “merciless Indian
Savages” against “us,” who adopt a “Rule of Warfare”
of “undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes, and Conditions,”
the US announces its basis for independence from its imperial ruler
— England. This is one reason, Jefferson writes, why King George
was “unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.”
Around the same time as Jefferson was blaming King George for unleashing
the fury of “merciless Indian Savages” upon the white settlers,
a Shawnee warrior named Tecumseh was rapping with Osages in Missouri.
His comments, designed to achieve Indian unity, certainly questions
who were the “savages”:
“Brothers. — When the white men first set foot on our grounds,
they were hungry; they had no place on which to spread their blankets,
or to kindle their fires. They were feeble; they could do nothing for
themselves. Our fathers commiserated their distress, and shared freely
with them whatever the Great Spirit had given his red children. They
gave them food when hungry, medicine when sick, spread skins for them
to sleep on, and gave them grounds, that they might hunt and raise corn.
Brothers, the white people are like poisonous serpents: when chilled,
they are feeble and harmless; but invigorate them with warmth, and they
sting their benefactors to death. The white people came among us feeble;
and now we have made them strong, they wish to kill us, or drive us
back, as they would wolves and panthers.
Brothers. — The white men are not friends to the Indians: at first,
they only asked for land sufficient for a wigwam; now, nothing will
satisfy them but the whole of our hunting grounds, from the rising to
the setting sun. Brothers. — The white men want more than our hunting
grounds; they wish to kill our warriors; they would even kill our old
men, women, and little ones...”
Who, one wonders, were the real ‘merciless Savages?’
