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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Crime & Police : Government Secrecy : International Relations : Iraq : Regime |
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(Some of) The Pictures That Lost The War |
Current rating: 3 |
by Neil Mackay
(No verified email address) |
02 May 2004
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Grim images of American and British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners have not only caused disgust and revulsion in the West, but have forever lost Bush and Blair the moral high ground that they claimed to justify the invasion of Iraq |
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US soldiers force Iraqi prisoners to pose naked and wired for execution at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison.
It's an image that would do Saddam proud. A terrified prisoner, hooded and dressed in rags, his hands out-stretched on either side of him, electrodes attached to his fingers and genitals. He's been forced to stand on a box about one-foot square. His captors have told him that, if he falls off the box, he'll be electrocuted.
The torture victim was an Iraqi and his torturers were American soldiers. The picture captures the moment when members of the coalition forces, who styled themselves liberators, were exposed as torturers. The image of the wired and hooded Iraqi was one of a series of photographs, leaked by a horrified US soldier inside Saddam's old punishment center, Abu Ghraib - now a US PoW camp.
When the images were flashed around the world by America's CBS television network last Wednesday, there was a smug feeling within the UK that British troops would never behave like that to their prisoners. But on Friday night, the UK was treated to images - courtesy of the Daily Mirror - of British soldiers urinating on a blood-stained Iraqi captive, holding guns against the man's head, stamping on his face, kicking him in the mouth and beating him in the groin with a rifle butt.
The pictures of US soldiers torturing their captives have the added horror of sexual abuse. In five of the 14 images that the Sunday Herald has seen, a female soldier - identified as Lynndie England, a 21-year-old from a West Virginia trailer park - is playing up to the camera while her captives are tortured. In one picture, she's smiling and giving the thumbs-up. Her hand rests on the buttocks of a naked and hooded Iraqi who has been forced to sit on the shoulders of another Iraqi prisoner.
In another, she is sprawled laughing over a pyramid of naked Iraqis. A male colleague stands behind her grinning. Later, she's got a cigarette clenched between grinning lips and is pointing at the genitals of a line of naked, hooded Iraqis. A third snap shows her embracing a colleague as a naked Iraqi lies before them.
In other pictures, two naked Iraqis are forced to simulate oral sex and a group of naked Iraqi men are made to clamber on to each other's backs. One dreadful picture features nothing but the bloated face of an Iraqi who has been beaten to death. His body is wrapped in plastic.
Other pictures, which the world has not seen, but which are in the hands of the US military, include shots of a dog attacking a prisoner. An accused soldier says dogs are "used for intimidation factors".
There are also pictures of an apparent male rape. An Iraqi PoW claims that a civilian translator, hired to work in the prison, raped a male juvenile prisoner. He said: "They covered all the doors with sheets. I heard the screaming ... and the female soldier was taking pictures."
The British pictures show a hooded Iraqi aged between 18-20 on the floor of a military truck being brutalized. According to two squaddies who took part in the torture, but later blew the whistle, the Iraqi's ordeal lasted eight hours and he was left with a broken jaw and missing teeth. He was bleeding and vomited when his captors threw him out of a speeding truck. No-one knows if he lived or died.
One of the British soldiers said: "Basically this guy was dying as he couldn't take any more. An officer came down. It was "Get rid of him - I haven't seen him'." The other whistle-blower said he had witnessed a prisoner being beaten senseless by troops. "You could hear your mate's boots hitting this lad's spine ... One of the lads broke his wrist off a prisoner's head. Another nearly broke his foot kicking him."
According to the British soldiers, the military police have found a video of prisoners being thrown from a bridge, and a prisoner was allegedly beaten to death in custody by men from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment. Although there is a debate about the veracity of the images, Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram said that if the pictures were real, they were "appalling". A Downing Street spokesman said Tony Blair expected "the highest standards of conduct from our forces in Iraq". The UK's most senior army officer, General Mike Jackson, said that if the allegations were true then those involved were "not fit to wear the Queen's uniform". The Defense Ministry is in crisis over the pictures as top brass know they ruin any hope of UK forces winning Iraqi hearts and minds.
The US torture pictures were taken by members of the American 800th Military Police Brigade sometime late last year. Following an investigation, 17 soldiers were removed from duty for mistreating captives. Six face court martial. Brigadier General Janice Karpinski, who ran Abu Ghraib and three other US military jails, is suspended and faces court martial. Prior to the revelations, Karpinski assured the US media that Abu Ghraib was run according to "international standards".
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of coalition operations in Iraq, said he was "appalled". He added: "These are our fellow soldiers. They wear the same uniform as us, and they let their fellow soldiers down. Our soldiers could be taken prisoner as well - and we expect our soldiers to be treated well by the adversary, by the enemy - and if we can't hold ourselves up as an example of how to treat people with dignity and respect ... we can't ask that other nations do that to our soldiers as well. This is wrong. This is reprehensible. But this is not representative of the 150,000 soldiers over here."
But these soldiers aren't simply mavericks. Some accused claim they acted on the orders of military intelligence and the CIA, and that some of the torture sessions were under the control of mercenaries hired by the US to conduct interrogations. Two "civilian contract" organizations taking part in interrogations at Abu Ghraib are linked to the Bush administration.
California-based Titan Corporation says it is "a leading provider of solutions and services for national security". Between 2003-04, it gave nearly $40,000 to George W Bush's Republican Party. Titan supplied translators to the military.
CACI International Inc. describes its aim as helping "America's intelligence community in the war on terrorism". Richard Armitage, the current deputy US secretary of state, sat on CACI's board.
No civilians, however, are facing charges as military law does not apply to them. Colonel Jill Morgenthaler, from CentCom, said that one civilian contractor was accused along with six soldiers of mistreating prisoners. However, it was left to the contractor to "deal with him". One civilian interrogator told army investigators that he had "unintentionally" broken several tables during interrogations as he was trying to "fear-up" detainees.
Lawyers for some accused say their clients are scapegoats for a rogue prison system, which allowed mercenaries to give orders to serving soldiers. A military report said private contractors were at times supervising the interrogations.
Kimmitt said: "I hope the investigation is including not only the people who committed the crimes, but some of the people who might have encouraged the crimes as well because they certainly share some responsibility."
Last night, CACI vice-president Jody Brown said: "The company supports the Army's investigation and acknowledges that CACI personnel in Iraq volunteered to be interviewed by army officials in connection with the investigation. The company has received no indication that any CACI employee was involved in any alleged improper conduct with Iraqi prisoners. Nonetheless, CACI has initiated an independent investigation."
However, military investigators said: "A CACI investigator's contract was terminated because he allowed and/or instructed military police officers who were not trained in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations which were neither authorized nor in accordance with regulations."
One of the US soldiers facing court martial is reservist Staff Sergeant Chip Frederick - the equivalent of a part-time territorial army squaddie. In civvy street, he was a prison warder in Virginia. Frederick has said he will plead not guilty and blame the army for the torture at Abu Ghraib. "We had no support, no training whatsoever," he said, claiming he had never been shown the Geneva Convention. "I kept asking my chain of command for certain things like rules and regulations and it just wasn't happening."
Frederick also blamed the intelligence services for encouraging the brutality. Among the agencies coming to the prison were "military intelligence", says Frederick, adding: "We had all kinds of other government agencies, FBI, CIA."
In letters and e-mails home, he wrote: "Military intelligence has encouraged and told us "Great job'." He added: "They usually don't allow others to watch them interrogate. But since they like the way I run the prison, they have made an exception ... We help getting [the PoWs] to talk with the way we handle them ... We've had a very high rate with our style of getting them to break. They usually end up breaking within hours."
Frederick said prisoners were made to live in cramped windowless cells with no clothes, running water or toilet for up to three days. Others were held for 60 days before interrogation. He said one prisoner with a mental health condition was "shot with non-lethal rounds". An interrogator told soldiers to "stress one prisoner out as much as possible [as] he wanted to talk to him the next day". Frederick also said one prisoner was "stressed so bad that the man passed away". Prisoners were covered in lice and some had tuberculosis. None were allowed to pray. Frederick said his commander sanctioned all this.
The former commander of Guantanamo Bay prison, Major General Geoffrey Miller, has now been made deputy commander for containment operations to overhaul the Iraqi detention centers.
Frederick, unlike mercenaries, faces jail and being thrown out of the army. His lawyer, Gary Myers, said: "The elixir of power, the elixir of believing that you're helping the CIA, for God's sake, when you're from a small town in Virginia, that's intoxicating. And so, good guys sometimes do things believing that they are being of assistance and helping a just cause ... and helping people they view as important."
Kimmitt admitted: "I'd like to sit here and say that these are the only prisoner abuse cases that we're aware of, but we know that there have been others."
This also applies to Britain. A Sunday Herald investigation has found that at least seven civilians have died in British custody in Iraq.
Describing the images of abuse as an "atrocity", Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, said: "The liberators are worse than the dictators." His sentiments have been echoed around the world. It is hard to find a country or agency that hasn't condemned the torture of Iraqi prisoners. From the Red Cross to the UN and from Amnesty to the coalition's loyal "deputy in the Pacific", the Australian premier John Howard, the world is united in horror against the actions of the US and UK forces.
The awful cost of these acts of barbarism by Britain and America is summed up by ex-US Marine Lieutenant Colonel Bill Cowan: "We went to Iraq to stop things like this from happening, and indeed, here they are happening under our tutelage ... If we don't tell this story, these kind of things will continue, and we'll end up getting paid back 100 or 1000 times over."
© 2004 newsquest (sunday herald) limited
http://www.sundayherald.com/41693 |
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Army Reserve general confirms US torture of Iraq prisoners was systemic
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More Atrocities |
by repost
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Current rating: 0
02 May 2004
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US soldiers force Iraqi prisoners to pose naked and wired for execution at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. |
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A year on from 'Mission Accomplished', an Army in Disgrace, a Policy in Tatters and the Real Prospect of Defeat |
by Patrick Cockburn
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 3
02 May 2004
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Against the odds, America has earned the hatred of ordinary Iraqis. In Baghdad Patrick Cockburn sees the battle for hearts and minds comprehensively lost.
Wisps of gray smoke were still rising from the wreckage of four Humvees caught by the blast of a bomb which had just killed two US soldiers and wounded another five. It seemed they had been caught in a trap.
When the soldiers smashed their way into an old brick house in the Waziriya district of Baghdad last week, they were raiding what they had been told was an insurgent bomb factory, only for it to erupt as they came through the door. The reaction of local people, as soon as the surviving American soldiers had departed, was to start a spontaneous street party.
A small boy climbed on top of a blackened and smoldering Humvee and triumphantly waved a white flag with an Islamic slogan hastily written on it. Some other young men were showing with fascinated pride a blood-soaked US uniform. Another group had found an abandoned military helmet, and had derisively placed it on the head of an elderly carthorse.
A year after President George Bush famously declared "major combat" in Iraq over, how is it that so many Iraqis now have such a visceral hatred of Americans? One reason is that the photographs of brutality and humiliation of Iraqi detainees by British and American troops, which have so shocked the rest of the world and angered Arab countries, have come as little surprise to Iraqis. For months it has been clear to them that the occupation is very brutal; for weeks they have been watching pictures of the dead and injured in Fallujah on al-Jazeera satellite television which CNN did not broadcast.
Iraqis, who are cynical about their rulers, may also suspect that real as well as simulated torture is going on in Abu Ghraib prison, where US intelligence calls the shots. They may suspect that, as under Saddam Hussein, the humiliation and ill-treatment were quite deliberately inflicted to soften up prisoners before they were interrogated. More graphic pictures of real torture are said to have been taken as well those shown on US television last week.
Saddam should not have been a hard act to follow. Iraqis knew that he had ruined their lives through his disastrous wars against Iran and Kuwait, and were glad to be rid of him. Even the supposed beneficiaries of his rule, the Sunni Arabs of cities such as Tikrit and Fallujah, could not see why they were so much poorer than the people of other oil states such as Kuwait and Abu Dhabi.
Watching the dancing, jeering crowd in Waziriya was Nada Abdullah Aboud, a middle-aged woman, dressed in black. She had a reason for hating Americans, though she claimed she did not do so. "I do feel sorry for the young soldiers, though they killed my son," she said quietly. "They came such a long distance to die here." It turned out that her son, Saad Mohammed, had been the translator for a senior Italian diplomat working for the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority. She said: "My son was driving with the Italian ambassador last September near Tikrit when an American soldier fired at the car and shot him through the heart."
Saad Mohammed was one of a large but unknown number of Iraqis shot down by US troops over the past year. There seems to have been no rational reason why he had been killed. But the high toll of Iraqi civilians shot down after ambushes or at checkpoints has given Iraqis the sense that, at bottom, American soldiers regard them as an inferior people whose lives are not worth very much.
Iraqis make very plain what they think about the occupation in private conversation, but Paul Bremer, the US viceroy in Iraq, and the US military command, shut away in their headquarters in Saddam's old Republican Palace, had no idea of the growing hostility towards them until April. Then, when they started the sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, they discovered that aside from the Kurdish minority, Iraqis had turned decisively against the occupation.
Another simple reason for disillusionment with the US is simply the Americans' failure to restore normal life. Iraqis in Baghdad continually say that Iraq recovered more quickly from the damage inflicted by the first Gulf War under Saddam in 1991 than it did after the second war in 2003.
Baghdad is a city on edge. Shopkeepers keep their stock at home in case there is another outbreak of looting. The police are back on the streets and there is less casual crime than last year, but it is still more dangerous than it was under the old regime.
Abu Amir, a shopkeeper in the middle-class Jadriyah district of the capital, said: "Under Saddam I sometimes did not make money in my store, but I could go home in the evening without worrying if my son had got back safely. Now there is looting everywhere. If you walk in the streets maybe you will be shot by the Americans or by criminal gangs fighting each other."
A curious achievement of the US over the past year has been to revive Iraqi nationalism in Iraq. This had been largely discredited by Saddam. But Fallujah and the pursuit of Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia cleric, has meant that nationalism is once more respectable.
The extraordinary political weakness of the US in Iraq became evident as never before last week. Despite having an overwhelming military force available to take Fallujah and Najaf, the US did not dare do so. It had become evident even in Washington that to crush the resistance in either city - not a difficult task against a few thousand lightly armed gunmen - would spread rather than end the rebellion.
Even so, it was extraordinary to see Jassim Mohammed Saleh, a general in Saddam's Republican Guard - disbanded like so much else in Iraq last May - being driven into Fallujah on Friday in full uniform past cheering crowds. The old Iraqi flag, now dropped by the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, was being waved from his car window.
It is a measure of how far the Governing Council is out of touch with ordinary Iraqi opinion that they should have voted to change the flag in the first place. Mohammed, an engineer trying to patch up a broken sewage pipe in Baghdad, still had time to express his fury at the change. "Of course the occupation is a disaster," he said. "We understand the Governing Council are American agents. But a man has to be the worst of collaborators to change his country's flag."
On 30 June the US will be handing over very little to Iraqis. Security remains firmly in US hands; so does control of money. One of the biggest US mistakes was not to hold elections earlier, something British and US officials admit in private could have been done. This would have produced a legitimate Iraqi authority to which Iraqi security forces could have given real loyalty. Dr Mahmoud Othman, a member of the Governing Council, says: "Iraqis are never going to fight other Iraqis under the orders of an American." This was amply borne out when half of the US-trained security forces deserted or mutinied in early April.
The tide is going out for the US in Iraq. They were not able to use their military strength against Fallujah and Najaf. They have very little political support outside Kurdistan. They can no longer win. It may be one of the most extraordinary defeats in history.
© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
http://news.independent.co.uk/ |
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