military torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib - described even in General Taguba's Pentagon investigation as 'sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses' - symbolise the occupation of Iraq. The issue is off the front pages for a while, but, as PIERS MOSTYN reports, it won't lie down.
Is heads have rolled, a drip feed of
A leaks has painted a clearer picture
of what happened. The Washington Post reported that in August 2002 the Justice Department, in a 50 page document signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, advised the White House that tor-. ture might be justified 'to prevent further attacks on the United States by the Al Qaeda network'.
It set out a potential defence to any criminal allegation based on necessity and selfdefence. The document redefined torture as limited to that 'equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death'. This contrasts with a much broader definition in the US Army's Field Manual and international guidelines.
The report was commissioned because interrogations at Guantanamo Bay weren't yielding enough intelligence. That the majority of the detainees might be innocent was clearly an unacceptable explanation. Torture guidelines
Then, in October 2002, General Rick Baccus was sacked as Guantanamo Bay commander, according to him for being too soft, and replaced by General Miller. Donald Rumsfeld gave military intelligence control over all aspects of the prison camp and a 72 point matrix for 'stress and duress was instituted. This included hooding or keeping prisoners naked for 30 days, threatening by dogs, shackling detainees in positions designed to cause pain, and extreme temperatures.
March 2003 the US Defence Department conducted its own review by Pentagon lawyers at the request of Rumsfeld. This agreed with the Justice Department report that the 'wartime authority' of the US president and his directives superceded domestic and international law. This would allow a soldier engaged in 'exceptional interrogations' to claim she or he was following 'superior orders delegated from President.
These reports were prepared by two septerror' - and every Iraqi peasant beaten unconscious whilst shackled naked can be "justified' as saving lives in London or New York (as well as dollars on their oil markets)
Torture and abuse has been an integral feature of all wars of colonial occupation -whether by the USA in Vietnam or Latin America (by proxy) or by Britain in Malaysia, Aden and Ireland. It is also a legalised and routine practice of that other westernbacked 'democracy', the Israeli state.
This is because in an occupation intelligence is hard to come by without significant collaboration from the population. People don't like their communities swamped with foreign armies - so arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention without trial and torture are used as a terror tactic and to extract the informaUSA, even Republican senators are expressing concern that these will fail to satisfy global cynicism that the American military can be trusted to investigate itself. This is hardly surprising. President Bush has already pre judged the issue by blaming 'bad apples'. And a member of the four-person commission set up to oversee all the inquiries, Tillie K Fowler, has publicly stated that Rumsfeld needn't be a focus because he is 'an honest, decent, honourable man, who'd never conThis May, when Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan described the Abu Ghraib photos as 'the logical consequence of the pursuit of the war on terror by the United States after September Il', the White House glibly responded that, 'the war on terrorism has resulted in the liberation of 50 million... and the protection of their
However, a few weeks and a few leaked memos later, a somewhat less ebullient US Attorney General John Ashcroft was forced to deny that Bush himself was implicated. The very fact he now has to address the issue, suggests a new Watergate may be in Dishonestly, given the Red Cross report handed to a senior government official. And doing while the rest of the world read Amnesty's March dossier entided 'Iraq - one year on, the human rights situation remains dire'?
It listed a catalogue of atrocities and in particular that 'reports of torture and other illtreatment of Coalition Forces have been fre quent in the past year". It also commented even before the notorious photos were published, that little had changed' at Abu Ghraib with the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Britain's claim to 'clean hands' has been just as shameless, given its joint responsibility for the occupation. Official procedure in the event of a suspicious incident gives a local army commander total power to determine whether an investigation is required. Any inquiry is then conducted in secrecy by the military police
Up to April this year, Iraqis had to make do with a mere five secret self-investigations into the killings of civilians by British soldiers (three of which concluded there was no case). Following the Abu Ghraib furore Britain was forced to re-open the cases of a further 14 civilians killed. The government then increased the number of investigations into deaths in British military custody to six. And the number investigations into prisoner abuse has risen to 75
But these are a drop in the ocean consid ering incidents like the killing of 40 when British soldiers fired into a crowd of Iraqis at Amara in May.
And there is still no element of independ ence or public scrutiny. So despite a stream of cases, by June 2004(15 months into the occupation) no British troops had been punished, no officials sacked and no public hearBritain and the USA on the issue. And they have already failed. They proposed the June UN security council resolution. Put to one side that it was UN cover for a sham 'handover' to the Iraqis. Britain and the USA could still have responded to the calls from human rights groups to enshrine a clear commitment to defending the basic rights of pris the resolution, let alone a prohibition on torture and abuse. And not only has immunity from any legal action in Iraqi courts been granted to coalition forces but even to the
The resolution claims to herald an end to the occupation. If so, then Britain and the US have a duty under the Geneva Convention to immediately release all prisoners or hand them over to Iraqi tribunals with full lega
If Britain and the USA had any intention of righting the wrongs of Abu Ghraib they would also dismantle the worldwide network of secret prisons where thousands of detainees have been smuggled because tor these include four Arab states - Morrocco Egypt, Jordan and Syria - indicating that a battle will have to be fought on more than