The usual suspects have embarked on another mass butchery — sorry “training exercise” — in resource-rich Mali, and they are also meddling in Algeria. The UK, ever keen to kill, has gone from Prime Minister David Cameron's “no boots on the ground” assurances to “Operation Creep” in barely over a week. The US, says a spokesman, assesses that the “intervention” may “last for years.” He was talking about Mali. Think Africa. The US is planning a drone base on the Mali-Niger border, one of a constellation of secret drone bases in East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and in Ethiopia, Djibouti, the Seychelles and beyond, which is designed to bomb Yemen and Somalia and most likely perform surveillance missions in East Africa and the Gulf. The disaster of another recent African foray — the ruins of Libya, the lives lost, ranging from 30,000 to 100,000, the horror of the plight of the country's former leader and that of his children and grandchildren, the murder of the US ambassador, the torching of his Benghazi residence and the deaths of three US government employees — has seemingly been forgotten. There have been no “lessons learned”. The British embassy in Tripoli has received “credible threats”, and the UK foreign office is advising against travel to the country, with Westerners facing a “high threat from terrorism”. Yesterday's gift of “democracy” to Afghanistan, where US soldiers are being killed with relentless regularity by their Afghan colleagues, who, of course, they have “trained”, has brought poverty and desperation such that the BBC, usually loyal to a fault to any colonial invasion, is now reporting that some families are resorting to selling one child in order to gain enough money to feed others. In the horror of the country's prisons, the UN reports this month that torture is on the rise, and like in Iraq the unspeakable continues. In Iraq itself, the occupation's abuses continue to haunt the invaders and the Iraqis alike. The tireless lawyer Phil Shiner, of the UK's public interest lawyers, is currently presenting another case on behalf of 180 Iraqis in Britain's high court, alleging that they were systematically abused and tortured by British troops using methods chillingly reminiscent of the Americans at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. The claim is of a “systematic” policy between 2003 and 2008 of lawless torture and killing. Shiner has said that “we've got the training materials; we've got the policy documents. Violence was endemic to the [UK] state practices and part of the state practices.” As the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion approaches, it is surely time for the invading countries to attempt to make amends for the enormity of the illegality of the invasion and for the individual sufferings it entailed. Details of the alleged abuses by Britain's “heroes” defy depravity, bestiality, sadism and sub-humanity's worst. Just a few of those who suffered have had their days in court. Others have made pleas that should also shame. Former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tarek Aziz, incarcerated under sentence of death since 2003, whose audience with the pope in 2003 was a plea to avert an attack on Iraq that had suffered so grievously under the embargo and whose people had died in their hundreds of thousands from its effects, has again appealed to the pope. In 2003, he appealed for Iraqis to be allowed to live to the pope in the Vatican and to officials in other European capitals. Last week, he appealed to Pope Benedict, asking that he should be allowed to die. His lawyer, Badie Ezzat, has said that his client is deeply depressed and is sending an appeal to the pope to intervene to end his suffering. “Aziz told me that the former spokesman of the Iraqi government, Ali Al-Dabbagh, visited him some months ago, accompanied by two judges, and promised to study his case, but he did not receive any response from him.” Aziz had stated that “I would prefer to be executed rather than to remain in this situation.” Two other former Iraqi government officials, Saadoun Shaker and Abed Hammoud, are also facing this most shocking form of barbaric “victor's justice”. Aziz now suffers from a range of serious health problems, and he has seemingly given up calling on “international organisations to intervene to put an end to his current status,” Ezzat said. Last year, Iraq's US-imposed “prime minister” pushed for the death sentence against Aziz to be speeded up, in spite of the fact that Iraqi law does not allow the death penalty for those over 70. Aziz is 74. His family has urged human-rights organisations and other relevant bodies and politicians to release him, due to his frail state and the lack of medical care. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has said that he will never sign the order for Aziz's execution, but Talabani was rushed to Germany after a heart attack, and there has been an ominous silence as to his condition since. Aziz could have fled Iraq ahead of the bombs and tanks, but he was true to his words to me in an interview at the time that “I will never give up on Iraq.” His health has failed him, but whatever the complexities he has not given up on the country he served and loved. It is impossible not to ponder whether the core of the proclaimed Western values is not hypocritical cant. Many people, distinguished and compassionate, have written to the pope, to archbishops, and politicians, all of them professing faith, learning the Ten Commandments barely out of nursery school, and reciting the Lord's Prayer on Sundays, and at festivals. Yet, these people simply annihilate, or condone the annihilation, of those who pose no threat whatsoever. They ignore, year after year, pleas for justice, pleas for human lives, and pleas in line with their hollow, hypocritical prayers. “The quality of mercy is not strain'd. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven, upon the place beneath: It is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes,” wrote Shakespeare in his play The Merchant of Venice. Another fantasy that the children of the West are indoctrinated with: values of total delusion. Of the torture cases before the UK high court that have recently commenced, law professor Andrew Williams of the UK's Warwick University says that “this is our last chance to get to the truth of what happened. This is what we demand of others, but we do not demand it of ourselves. What kind of message does that give the world about who we are?” Indeed. Western governments have become the regimes they warned us about. Ones that illegally invade, rape, torture, and incarcerate, without oversight or review, either without trial, or via a proxy kangaroo court. Last September, archbishop Desmond Tutu called for George W. Bush and Tony Blair to be brought to the International Criminal Court at The Hague on war crimes charges. They had, he said, “fabricated the grounds to behave like playground bullies… They have driven us to the edge of a precipice where we now stand with the spectre of Syria and Iran before us.” In the interim, perhaps those two professed Christians could do something, well, Christian, and pressure Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki to release their fellow Christian Tarek Aziz, his colleagues, and the mass of illegally held Iraqis.
The writer is a journalist specialising in social and environmental issues with a special knowledge of Iraq.
