How to evaluate America's systematic use of torture against Iraqi detainees, asks Mohamed Sid-Ahmed Some have tried to portray the well- documented acts of torture inflicted on Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison as isolated incidents, dismissing them as sadistic acts perpetrated by a depraved few acting on their own base impulses without the knowledge of their superiors. Such gross human rights abuses, they argue, are committed in all wars by all armies, especially when the rules of engagement are not clearly defined and challenges appear insurmountable. In such circumstances, there is a tendency to revert to the law of the jungle, to act outside the norms of civilised behaviour, in order to achieve quick results. According to this line of reasoning, the torture, humiliation and sexual abuse of enemy detainees is a commonplace occurrence that has been blown out of proportion in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Much as we would like to believe that the atrocities in Iraq were committed by "rogue elements" acting on their own initiative, much as we want to believe that America, the self-appointed guardian of human rights and democracy throughout the world, cannot be reduced to the shocking pictures of American troops torturing the very people they claim to be liberating, the facts speak for themselves. It is now established that we are not dealing with isolated incidents but with an official state policy that was being systematically implemented pursuant to clear orders from high up in the chain of command. According to secret documents from the American National Archives that have been declassified, officials who claim they knew nothing about what was going on the Abu Ghraib are lying through their teeth. Forty-three thousand Iraqis have been detained since March 2003, many in Abu Ghraib, and it is hard to see how those in charge of the prison could have failed to realise what was going on under their noses. Moreover, the methods of interrogation and torture used by US troops are based on instruments issued by the CIA in the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, which were repealed by the Carter administration and reactivated under Ronald Reagan. The hey question is whether the United States, the most powerful state on earth and the only remaining pole in the present unipolar world order, is ready to practice what it preaches and renounce, once and for all, the use of immoral means to attain its ends. The occupation of Iraq and the abuse of Iraqi prisoners was a response to the 9/11 attacks. The atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagazaki were a delayed response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. The atrocities perpetrated by American troops in Vietnam, poignantly captured in the iconic photo of the young naked girl fleeing from the napalm attack on her village, were a response to the increasingly ferocious attacks launched against them by the Vietcong. The pattern of savage reprisal may not have been invented by the incumbent American president, but it has certainly been wholeheartedly embraced by him. Is it conceivable that an administration that has taken reprisal to new heights and that has launched the doctrine of pre-emptive war would willingly relinquish the means it possesses to hit back at whoever it accuses of perpetrating such monstrous acts as the attack on the World Trade Center? Actually, reprisals have not been limited to Abu Ghraib, already a notorious centre of horrific torture under Saddam Hussein. We are not talking here about random acts of senseless cruelty but the implementation of a systematic American plan sanctioned at the highest level. Any embarrassment the present administration is feeling because of the Abu Ghraib scandal is not due to the fact that such crimes were committed under its auspices but because they came to be known. That is why it is not conceivable that the Bush administration will abandon the use of measures which consecrate America's status as an invincible hyperpower. The Washington Post of Time magazine have identified 20 different torture techniques used on detainees held in Abu Ghraib and other similar penitentiaries, designed to "soften" them up through isolation, insults, threats and humiliation. But the state of mind of the American administration is not the state of mind of American society as a whole. It is not even the state of mind of the American media nor of important sections of American public opinion. The Vietnam war and the scars it produced on the American psyche, the struggle of American Blacks for their civil rights under the leadership of Martin Luther King and the student demonstrations which inflamed American campuses in the 1960s are among the events which have had a significant impact on American society in its fight for human rights and the establishment of the foundations of civil society. There is a powerful democratic tradition in the US that cannot and should not be underestimated especially that if the American state triumphed militarily over the forces it perceived as hostile, not all Americans necessarily see such confrontations in the same manner. Often the outcome depends less on the military ability to inflict defeat than on forces which emerge from within American society itself, and which strongly oppose violence and war. It might seem that no comparison can be made between the suffering endured by those who were taken prisoner by the invading US forces, whether in Iraq, before that in Afghanistan or in the global campaign launched by the US administration in the name of uprooting terrorism worldwide on the one hand, and between that endured by victims of the Holocaust, millions of whom were exterminated in the Nazi concentration camps during WWII, on the other. While there may be nothing in common between the two cases when it comes to the number of victims claimed by each, there is certainly a basis for comparison when it comes to the quality of the treatment both groups received at the hands of their tormentors, the way their humanity was degraded, how the human species is divided between a minority which enjoys protection and immunity under the prevailing world order and a majority exposed to the threat of being hounded and persecuted, even without committing any crime whatsoever. The way Iraqi prisoners were treated by their American captors is a contemporary version of racism. Although the Jews were major victims of the Holocaust, the Jewish state is now cooperating with the US and furnishing it with interrogation techniques based on torturing detainees and extracting confessions. According to the Daily Star (published in conjunction with the International Herald Tribune ), the American military closely follow the "advice" of Israeli "experts" on the lessons to be drawn from their dealings with Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movement detainees. Proceeding from the premise that achieving results takes precedence over respect for democracy and human rights, the Israeli and American intelligence communities conduct joint exercises in "anti-terror warfare" in the Negev desert, far from prying eyes, thus illustrating that the ill-treatment of inmates in Abu Ghraib is no exception, but part of an undertaking extending to the military in general, as well as to civilian contractors who inflict torture in return for a fee. Such practices have been going on for quite some time in Israel. An Israeli human rights organisation, Hamokid, has recently discovered that there exists an Israeli version of the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp. Shrouded in deep secrecy, it is where people arrested in Lebanon and Palestine are interrogated under conditions very similar to those we now know prevail in Iraqi prisons. Actually, the results obtained through torture in the Israeli concentration camps have been an encouragement for what is now going on in Iraqi. State-sponsored terrorism of prisoners is also a lucrative business. Thanks to the ill-defined "war on terror", those willing to inflict torture on enemy aliens stand to be handsomely rewarded. The big question is who is ultimately responsible for the outrageous practices that went on in Abu Ghraib and other detention centres in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the scandal first broke, it was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who bore the full brunt for what was then seen as a breakdown in the system. But now Bush himself is in the eye of the storm, following revelations that shortly after 9/11 he approved a system of detention and interrogation for so-called "unlawful combatants" that opened the door to such practices. The continued occupation of Iraq is being justified as necessary to introduce democracy to the country. No weapons of mass destruction, the original justification for launching the war, have been discovered. No evidence has been put forward to establish a link between Saddam and Bin Laden. Saddam has been arrested and he can no longer be regarded as a threat. Can military occupation, supported by abject torture in prisons, be the ideal way of building democracy in Iraq, and making it a model for the Middle East and the world at large? That is the issue the coming US presidential elections will have to decide.
