| First of all, the Bush
team already has attempted to use “damage control”
on the widespread horror of photographs on the covers
of newspapers the world over, not only by trying to
characterize the abuse of prisoners as the work of a
handful of rogue soldiers (who, no doubt, watched “Natural
Born Killers” and listened to Marilyn Manson),
but also by sending out spin doctors singing the now-familiar
refrain of how the administration has been working dutifully
to investigate and remedy the offenses as soon as they
were discovered. This latter claim is absolutely and
demonstrably false.
To begin with, the allegations of abuse in the Abu
Ghraib prison and across all of Iraq bear a chilling
similarity to allegations voiced by the few inmates
in the Guantanamo Bay prison facility who have been
released. Most recently, a half-dozen British detainees
who had been held as suspected al-Qaida soldiers for
slightly more than two years gave extensive accounts
of their ordeals to the British press, including specific
descriptions of sexual humiliation tactics. Even more
damning, the former prisoners noted that the sexual
humiliation techniques were targeted specifically at
the more conservative Muslim prisoners —those
who would take the most cultural and religious offense
to sexual humiliation. (And, as should be obvious, the
British men who were released were allowed to return
to Britain, because the military found that they were
not members of al-Qaida and thus were not terrorists.)
The problems of unsupervised and untrained soldiers
abusing prisoners under their supervision, therefore,
should have been apparent before American forces even
set foot in Iraq. More sinister is the clear possibility
that the intentional technique of sexual humiliation
and abuse as a form of softening for interrogation was
developed prior to the official kick-off of the invasion
of Iraq in March 2003.
American military leadership, however, treats allegations
of abuse as non-issues. The Geneva Convention governs
conduct — and specifically treatment of prisoners
— during war. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
led the charge to attack application of the Geneva Convention
to U.S. treatment of prisoners. He insisted that the
“set of facts” regarding Afghanistan meant
that the Convention, ratified by Congress and signed
by the president, did not apply — that he simply
could decide who did and did not qualify as a prisoner
of war.
Rumsfeld eventually retreated from his wholesale rejection
of the rule of law a tiny bit, but even this month was
referring to the Convention as basic rules, saying that
despite the conflict in Iraq clearly being a war in
the traditional sense, the Geneva Convention did not
“precisely apply.” Rumsfeld clearly continues
to hope that he can throw out the rule of law in favor
of his own absolute rule over people outside of America’s
borders.
A particularly galling bit of misdirection by the administration
is that it learned of the mistreatment of prisoners
at the same time the public did. Bush said he first
saw the photos of prisoners on the TV program “60
Minutes II.” But contrary to his claims, the abuse
did not first come to light that recently. The military,
up to and including the commander of forces in Iraq,
has known of these specific abuses for months, at least.
And this was not a case of crack investigative journalism
— these same reports were made to the administration’s
highest levels months ago.
The Red Cross made an exhaustive study of conditions
in Afghanistan and Iraq, and reported widespread abuse
in facilities across Iraq, not just the Abu Ghraib prison
or even just in Baghdad. More disturbingly, it appears
that select prisoners were shuttled from Afghanistan
to Iraq specifically to avoid the Red Cross interviewing
or seeing them. As reported in the British paper The
Observer, the president of the Red Cross reported these
findings in person to Secretary of State Colin Powell,
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
Furthermore, the military issued its own investigative
report of the allegations — in February. Major
General Antonio Taguba supervised an inquiry encompassing
dozens of statements from military police, military
intelligence personnel, soldiers who since have been
charged with the abuse, and detainees. The report states
that the allegations were substantiated by numerous
statements and by “extremely graphic photographic
evidence.” It found that the soldiers in Abu Ghraib
had committed numerous “sadistic, blatant and
wanton criminal abuses.”
Perhaps most despicably, the government undoubtedly
knew not only of the reports of abuse at Abu Ghraib,
but that the report and photos of prisoners being mentally,
physically and sexually abused would be revealed to
the public. General Richard B. Meyers, the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Dan Rather eight
days before the report was scheduled to air on “60
Minutes II,” to request that CBS delay broadcasting
the segment. As is always the case when the military
seeks to conceal its own wrongdoing, the justification
for this delay was to avoid danger to “our troops”
and to the “war effort.”
CBS complied with Meyers’ request and put off
showing the piece for two weeks, finally putting it
on air only when the network discovered that The New
Yorker was preparing to print a detailed report of its
own. The request showed that the military was aware
of the upcoming media focus. It is thus ridiculous and
fraudulent to insist that the news reports of the abuse
came as a surprise to the administration.
And finally, the response of Republicans to the abuse
has been typically appalling. Rumsfeld said he will
not resign “just because people [are] trying to
make a political issue” of the abuse. He also
said that he wishes he had been able to “convey
the gravity” of the situation to the president,
Congress and American citizens before seeing it in the
media — conveniently leaving out, of course, the
fact that the military had nearly a month of lead time
between knowing the reports would be in the media and
when they actually aired; and three months of time between
when their own investigator reported that the abuse
was substantiated.
Later statements by Rumsfeld clarified why he left
out those salient details, as he stated that “the
real issue” was not that Americans are committing
war crimes against prisoners, but that photos of the
war crimes were leaked to the media. Good to know that
in the Bush White House, releasing photos of atrocities
being ignored by the government is a worse sin than
actually committing the atrocity.
Vice President Dick Cheney managed to issue a public
statement without going on Rush Limbaugh’s show,
for once, saying that he though Rumsfeld was “the
best secretary of defense the United States has ever
had,” and that “people ought to let him
do his job.” (Incidentally, Limbaugh showed his
usual tact and reason in characterizing the abuse as
soldiers “letting off steam.” I would say
that you would have to be on drugs to make such an analysis
of what is so clearly illegal and disgusting brutality,
but that would be stating the obvious.)
It is difficult to express a reaction to the usual
administration two-step duck-and-cover to the horrors
of Abu Ghraib without flipping a thesaurus to “horrified”
and copying all the entries — more difficult still
because that would fail to express the depth of revulsion
and disgust I feel. The individual abuses that have
splashed across newspapers in full color are detestable
enough, but it is made worse by the knowledge that this
should have been prevented, and was not dealt with.
A famous study by Stanford psychologists in 1971 showed
that the prisoner/guard relationship must be monitored
very carefully lest it turn violent and abusive: Put
into a mock jail situation, Stanford student volunteers
turned so brutal so quickly that the experiment had
to be cut short and never repeated. Put underpaid and
under-trained soldiers into such a situation, with prisoners
whom they rightly see as enemies, and it should have
been obvious that careful supervision and oversight
were needed. Instead, there is a possibility that intelligence
officers and “civilian contractors” ordered
or even encouraged these monstrosities. And when the
environment turned so repulsively bad, immediate and
drastic changes should have been made.
Instead, as is par for the course for the Bush administration,
Bush’s handlers refused to admit any mistake,
blatantly lied about the facts, and accused those rightly
criticizing their lack of action of being politically
motivated. It is execrable and sickening that the administration
made the decision to ignore detestable human rights
abuses in favor of standing in line with a secretary
of defense, military policy and Bush handlers who do
not care about anyone’s rights unless they have
donated four figures to the Republican party.
For a listing of Dara's past articles, visit her archive
page at http://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/dara/.
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