Rohan Pearce
Attempts by the White House to defuse the Iraq torture scandal by claiming that the prisoner abuse didn't represent US policy have unravelled in the face of more evidence that US President George Bush and members of his cabinet had a direct hand in devising a post-9/11 policy of torture.
Moreover, there is evidence that the Australian government, a partner in the illegal and brutal invasion of Iraq, lied when it claimed not to have known about human rights abuses committed in Iraqi prisons until the recent public revelations in the US media.
The May 16 edition of CBS' Face the Nation, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, who broke the story of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, explained that after the war on Afghanistan began, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld set up a special intelligence unit — recruited from Delta Force, Navy SEALs and the CIA — to obtain information from prisoners through the use of torture techniques, including sexual abuse. Members of the same group, employed in the war against Afghanistan, were sent into Baghdad after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Hersh's May 24 story in the New Yorker explained, "The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by ... Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq."
The methods of interrogation involved a clear breach of international law. However, using as an excuse the supposedly unique nature of the "war on terror" — in particular, claiming that war was not being waged against a foreign government and therefore the Geneva Conventions didn't apply — during the war on Afghanistan the US government overrode the objections not just of human rights organisations, but also of many of their own legal advisors.
Enemy fighters taken prisoner in Afghanistan were declared not to be prisoners of war, but "unlawful combatants". This spurious argument allowed the Bush regime to use unlawful interrogation techniques and to sidestep its legal requirement to repatriate POWs after the conflict ended.
Euphemistically described as "stress-and-duress", these techniques are nothing less than torture. An investigation by US magazine Newsweek (published on May 24), which obtained confidential government documents, revealed that Bush, along with Rumsfeld and Attorney-General John Ashcroft, "signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods."
One memo sent to Bush by White House counsel Alberto Gonzales in early 2002 argued: "The nature of the new war [the 'war on terror'] places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians... In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."
According to Newsweek, the added attraction of declaring that the Geneva Conventions were not applicable to prisoners in the "war on terror" was preventing US officials from being prosecuted for war crimes. "Gonzales said he feared 'prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges' based on a 1996 U.S. law that bars 'war crimes,' which were defined to include 'any grave breach' of the Geneva Conventions."
The US Justice Department, the Pentagon, the CIA and the White House "reconsidered" the definitions of international anti-torture conventions. Along with the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, secret CIA-run detention centres were set up around the world where prisoners were interrogated "with unprecedented harshness". Agreements with the governments of countries that housed these camps gave legal immunity to CIA operatives and private contractors who worked with them.
Additionally, the US began pursuing a policy of handing over prisoners for interrogation to friendly regimes known to employ torture, including Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan and Uzbekistan.
Newsweek revealed that Rumsfeld, "impressed by the success of techniques used against Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay, seemingly set in motion a process that led to their use in Iraq, even though that war was supposed to have been governed by the Geneva Conventions".
When Rumsfeld decided that the US wasn't obtaining enough intelligence from prisoners about anti-occupation resistance fighters, a veteran of the Guantanamo Bay experience was sent to rectify matters.
A May 26 Washington Post report revealed a transcript of sworn testimony by Colonel Thomas Pappas, the head of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, who was in charge of the section of Abu Ghraib where the worst of the documented torture of Iraqi prisoners took place.
He said that the idea for using dogs to frighten and assault prisoners in Abu Ghraib had come from Major Geoffrey Millar during the latter's visit to the prison in late 2003. At the time, Millar commanded one of the notorious US military prisons at Guantanamo Bay.
The results of Millar's visit have been well documented by soldiers' photos.
With domestic opinion having turned firmly against his government's war policy, Australian PM John Howard and the Coalition have sought to avoid any responsibility for the torture scandal.
Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer told Sky News on May 25: "The first I heard — the first anybody knew publicly about this, which was the first time I could reasonably have heard about it was in January, the middle of January — I was actually on leave at the time — but it was made public then, that the Americans were conducting investigations".
Similarly, in a May 4 interview with Kerry O'Brien on ABC's 7.30 Report Australian defence minister Robert Hill claimed that if the torture scandal "had of come to my knowledge other than through the public domain I would have made inquiries and expressed my views".
O'Brien asked Hill: "Why wouldn't you ... have expected to be told privately that this, that these instances of torture had been discovered and that this ... investigation was going on?" The minister replied that "what I'm saying is I don't believe the US military leadership was aware of it either and they seem to be appalled by it as I am".
Yet the Sydney Morning Herald's defence reporter, Tom Allard, revealed on May 27 that Australian defence department officials were aware of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners as early as October 2003. According to Allard, Major George O'Kane "liaised directly with the Red Cross from the time it first complained of abuse" of Iraqis imprisoned by the US. O'Kane even had a hand in writing a letter to the ICRC defending the treatment of Iraqi captives on legal, not moral, grounds.
The White House and Pentagon have predictably responded to the torture revelations with a campaign of scapegoating, seeking to cover-up the role of government policy in the Abu Ghraib scandal.
A number of soldiers are to face courts martial where they will be prosecuted for their role in the torture of Iraqis, while those who gave the orders get off scot-free. The successful court martial of a number of low-level soldiers and officers is no doubt intended to silence others who took part in abuses at the behest of their commanders.
On May 19, Human Rights Watch revealed that its monitors had been banned from the court martial of US Army Specialist Jeremy Sivits, one of the handful of soldiers charged. "Barring human rights monitors from the court martial is a bad decision in its own right", said HRW's Sarah Whitson. "It also sends a terrible signal to Iraqis and others deeply concerned about what transpired in Abu Ghraib."
In a US ABC News interview published on May 18, Sergeant Samuel Provance, who was stationed at Abu Ghraib in September, claimed that "There's definitely a cover-up", adding: "What I was surprised at was the silence... The collective silence by so many people that had to be involved, that had to have seen something or heard something."
Provance was ordered not to talk to the media. When Major General George Fay, the Army's chief of staff for intelligence, interviewed him as part of an inquiry into the role of military intelligence in the Abu Ghraib torture, "the general seemed interested only in the military police, not the interrogators, and seemed to discourage him from testifying". When the International Committee of the Red Cross complained in November last year of abuses at Iraqi prisons, the Pentagon responded by trying to end Red Cross inspections.
Like Iraq's mythical arsenal of WMD, the cover-up of the occupation forces' torture policy is just another campaign of lies to whitewash the crimes being committed to brutally subjugate a Third World nation. It is telling that 60% of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib are being held for "crimes against the [occupation] coalition".
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, June 2, 2004.
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