George Galloway was expelled from the Labour Party for susesting
that British soldiers should refus to obey illegal orders.
The good news for Blair is that ordering troops to torture doesn't appear to be illegal. It may be against the Geneva Convention -but the techniques of sexual abuse, sensory deprivation and beatings are what the British and American armies teach their interrogators to do.
Their senior officers wouldn't allow them to study these arts for recreational purposes. They are trained in these techniques so that they will be able to use them.
Now Bush and Blair are wringing their hands in pious horror at the torture their troops have practised against hundreds, perhaps thousands of Iraqis.
They are lying when they claim that it was only the work of a few renegades. It's not true when Rumsfeld describes it as 'unAmerican', and Sir Michael Jackson, Britain's top soldier, says that they bring dishonour to the British Army'. Both these armies have long experience of torturing and murdering prisoners.
n countless conflicts including Kenya, Malaya and Ireland the British army
used torture and murder, including by proxy, as standard procedures.
Harassment and intimidation of civilian communities was endlessly refined by the British Army in the north of Ireland. Photos exist of grinning British soldiers holding the severed heads of Malayan communists.
The British Military Police now searches soldiers leaving Iraq and confiscates digital camera memory sticks and computer discs with "compromising" images. The Mirror's pictures may have been false, but the British Army has in its possession images which confirm the paper's allegations. Blair knows this, as does the Ministry of Defence: indeed it now emerges they have known for months of formal allegations of abuse of prisoners by British troops raised directly with ministers by the Red Cross.
Rumsfeld and the American Army's leadership, too, knew for at least six months the true extent and brutality of what their troops and "contractors" were doing to Iraqi prisoners. They did nothing to stop it.
What forced them to act was not their own indignation but the fact that the hapless Lynndie England had been pictured in the world's press smiling gormlessly while degrading the prisoners. Similar abuses, if they had been inflicted on American troops would resulted in action in minutes.
"It was inconsistent with the values of our nation, inconsistent with the teachings of the military, and it was fundamentally unAmerican." That's what Rumsfeld said to the US Senate and House Armed services Committee hearing.
He's wrong on every regimes such as Egypt, Jordan or Pakistan which are known to use torture are fine old American traditions.
More recently the Bush administration set up its own torture charge, trial or legal rights American as apple pie. arms manufacturers. Guantanamo, specificially exploiting the fact that it is not formally on US soil, in order to prosecute systematic and long-term abuse of hundreds of prisoners from Afghanistan and elsewhere, who have been held without
Brutality and mass murder in Fallujah, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Somalia is as
Torture, murdering civilians and prisoners, cover-ups and lying are as integral a part of imperialist war as are massive profits for
Professional armies intentionally bruinstitutionalised torture in Guantanamo
The leaders have set the tone, just as we can be sure that well-educated officers, pos sibly trained in elite establishments like Sandhurst and West Point have created the conditions for the lumpenised subordinates whether ignorant squaddies or private mercenary "contractors, to terrorise prisoners as part of their battle for control in Iraq.
res prosecute the torturers. Yes sack Rumsfeld: but let's put the real criminals on trial - Bush and Blair.
And let's make sure Blair pays a heavy political price at the ballot box for the crimes