So much of documentary evidence and graphic details of
barbarity against the hapless Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib
Prison, outside Baghdad, have been catalogued as to shame
any civilized government and people. But that doesn't
seem to be the case with the Bush administration or the
American people, for that matter.
Apparently, those horrible,
grotesque, photographs of Iraqi prisoners being tortured
like stray dogs, that made headlines throughtout the world
recently and sent shock waves travelling right up to Congress
were just the tip of the iceberg.
Congress, according to
the New York Times of May 13, has been given 1,800 additional
photographs and video images of Iraqi prisoners - both
males and females - being tortured, massively humiliated
and sexually abused with abandon.
Congress doesn't know what
to decide about them: allow them to become public or keep
them under wraps, for understandable reasons.
This latest cache of evidence
on American soldiers' moral depravity and the heinous
degradation, at their hands, of their Iraqi captives is,
to say the least, lethal and could be devastating for
Bush in this sensitive election year. That's why the Republican-dominated
Congress is taking its own time to make up its mind one
way or the other.
Maureen Dowd, the New York
Times' celebrated columnist and a trencahnt critic of
the Bush administration, spoke to Senator Dianne Feinstein,
the Democratic lady Senator from California, who had this
to say after viewing some of the material sent up to Congress:
" They're disgusting.
If somebody wanted to plan
a clash of civilizations, this is how they'd do it. These
pictures play into every stereotype of America that Arabs
have: America as debauched, America as hypocrites."
Surprisingly, however,
a public manifestation of revulsion over these graphic
violations of the Iraqi people's dignity and human rights
is more conspicuous by its absence.
The American people's apathy
and absence of any organized sense of moral outrage is
all the more astounding, given the massive disapproval
of the Iraqi invasion, both before the event and afterward.
Anti-war protests had brought
tens of thousands of Americans marching on the streets
of every major city in America. The dissent on display
in Europe was even larger. But in this case, with so much
evidence of moral abuse by the occupation power of Iraq
on display, neither the Americans nor the Europeans have
been sufficiently outraged, or galvanized, to bring them
pouring out on the streets.
As for Bush and his neo
conservative cohorts, after an initial show of remorse
for largely public consumption, there is now a massive
exercise in the works to pin the blame on a handful of
lowly soldiers and petty officers while shielding the
top brass at the Pentagon from any scrutiny or culpability
for the crimes at Abu Ghraib.
Rumsfeld, the principal
architect of war on Iraq, has been exonerated by Bush
of any responsibility. Despite calls from some Senators
and top Republican leaders to demand Rumsfeld's resignation,
or fire him, Bush is standing firmly behind his right
hand man.
No question of holding
Rumsfeld responsible for any wrongdoing because were he
charged, the flames of wrath might also lick Bush personally.
So Bush went up to Pentagon, two days after Rumsfeld had
been grilled on the Hill, to hail him as the greatest
Secretary of Defence America has ever had.
Bush eulogized Rumsfeld
for doing "a superb job" in the "war against
terror" and reminded the American people that they
collectively owed Rumsfeld "a debt of gratitude".
In another show of caring
two hoots about what the world might think or say about
the horrific atrocities committed against Iraqi prisoners
at Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison - which became synonymous
with the tyranny of Saddam against his own people - has
now been officially entrusted into the hands of Maj General
Geoffrey Miller.
Rumsfeld and General Meyers,
Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, have rushed
to Baghdad on an unscheduled visit to confer with Miller,
presumably about new methods of interrogation (or torture?)
to be adopted under Miller's command.
General Miller earned notoriety
as the commandant of the Guantanamo Bay Prison in Cuba
where more than 600 prisoners, allegedly Al Qaeda and
Taliban sympathisers, have been sequestered without any
legal authority or indictment.
Massive abuses of the Guantanamo
inmates have been routinely reported by the ICRC and other
humanitarian bodies. All those violations were committed
on Gen Miller's watch whose extra-judicial tactics and
methods to grill prisoners must have impressed Rumsfeld
enough to promote him for the job in Iraq.
The Bush administration's
blatant lie that what transpired at Abu Ghraib were the
antics of only " a handful of soldiers", as
Gen Meyers vehemently insisted, is nailed by the evidence
that Gen Miller was brought over from Cuba to Baghdad
last September to share his 'expertise' on prisoner interrogation
with the team at Abu Ghraib.
Apparently, the Miller
syndrome caught up very quickly with the wardens of prisoners
at Abu Ghraib. His ace technique to humiliate prisoners,
which he describes in a recent interview with the Washington
Post as "stress positions", was given the pride
of place in the way the Iraqi prisoners were treated,
thereafter.
The ICRC was the first
independent agency to get an insight into the crimes being
perpetrated against the Iraqi prisoners. On a visit to
Abu Ghraib last October, the Red Cross officials saw Iraqis
being held totally naked in dark cells.
The Wall Street Journal
has just recently put the 24-page ICRC report of that
visit on its website. The report, released last February,
had been confidentially passed on to the US government
much earlier than that.
According to the report,
"Upon witnessing such cases, the ICRC interrupted
its visits and requested an explanation from the authorities.
The military intelligence officer in charge of interrogation
explained that this practice was 'part of the process'."
Which forced ICRC to conclude:
"Persons deprived of their liberty face the risk
of being subjected to a process of physical and psychological
coercion, in some cases tantamount to torture."
There isn't a shred of
evidence to suggest that Gen Miller or his boss Rumsfeld
- a 'great survivor', according to his own proclamation
- have any grain of remorse or repentance about the barbaric,
inhuman, methods they gave currency to at Abu Ghraib and
elsewhere in Iraq.
The New York Times carried
a front-page dateline from its correspondent in Baghdad
based on the past track record of Gen Miller and recent
conversations with him. He was asked, in the light of
the abuse scandal, as to what in his view were acceptable
interrogation practices.
Miller's answer was revealing
of his own mentality as well as of his supporters in high
places. Miller cited about 50 coercive techniques his
soldiers were using against prisoners, including sleep
deprivation, bright lights, blaring music, etc.
Miller had no room in his
'ingenious' techniques for any observance of the Geneva
Convention which bans "acts of violence against prisoners
of war". Rumsfeld is at one with him.
How much implicit and explicit
support of Rumsfeld Miller has in his almanac of draconian
methods to subject prisoners to torture is borne out from
a recent report in the Washington Post.
It said Miller had received
Pentagon's total endorsement of at least 20 interrogation
techniques for Guantanamo, including sleep deprivation,
exposing inmates to heat or cold, "invoking feelings
of futility" and disorienting them with bright lights
and loud music.
It is obvious that Miller
has been promoted to Abu Ghraib - a much larger concentration
camp than Guantanamo - to use the techniques he honed
in Cuba on his Iraqi charges with impunity, or fear of
being questioned about his brutal methods.
With so much evidence now
on record of a sustained methodology of torture and massive
coercion applied over so long at Abu Ghraib, it makes
no sense for Bush and his minions to insist that what
happened there was the work of a few deranged soldiers
on the loose.
ICRC has long been on record
trying to draw the world's attention to a systematic and
wholesale plunder of the Iraqi prisoners' moral dignity
and human rights at the hands of their American captors.
Its director of operations,
Pierre Karehenbuehl, once again insisted, in the wake
of recent revelations, "We are dealing here with
a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern
and a system."
Bush and his neo cons have
apparently no concern for the human rights of a people
who have been mercilessly pounded and butchered since
the fall of Baghdad more than a year ago.
They are dealing with the
rights and lives of the Iraqis the way Bush's 'buddy'
Sharon has been trampling over the rights and lives of
the Palestinians in the occupied lands.
It may be a taboo subject
for the American news media but is well known in Iraq
and the Middle East that Iraq is presently teeming with
thousands of Israeli agents who have come in tow with
the American occupiers of the land in all garbs and guises,
including the cover of at least 20,000 private 'contractors'
blessed by the Pentagon.
It was the murder of four
of these 'contractors' last month that unleashed the yet
unending cycle of violence and reprisals in Iraq's heartland
and has consumed nearly a thousand Iraqi lives. But who
cares for Iraqi lives; they are cheap and expendable.
