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This post can be found at
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1416
When you incarcerate large numbers of people beyond the reach of any
court and under conditions lacking legality or oversight, it's hardly
surprising that an attitude of impunity develops among the imprisoners
from which abuse and torture follow all too naturally. From Guantanamo
to Iraq and Afghanistan, on military bases and in the foreign prisons
of "friendly" regimes, the Bush administration now holds startling
numbers of prisoners under just such circumstances and seems to be in
the process of creating an offshore archipelago of injustice.
In Iraq, the numbers of those held, including women and teenagers, in
"16 prisons and other incarceration centers around Iraq", though
unknown (possibly even to the U.S. military), are conservatively
estimated at ten thousand, and the numbers are likely to be far
higher. This week horrific photos (some of which can be clicked to
below) were released showing the tortures -- there is no other
appropriate word for them -- committed on Iraqi male prisoners by
young American guards, male and female, from the 372nd Military Police
Company at Saddam's former prison of Abu Ghraib. Smiling and relaxed,
they lord it over naked, hooded Iraqis, looking for all the world as
if they were involved in some minor fraternity prank.
One year ago, when our President was quite literally flying high, his
handlers planned the now-infamous "mission accomplished" photo-op
aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln with this November's election in mind.
Triumphant images for a second term president. This week, we've seen a
very different series of photo releases -- those from Abu Ghraib and
those of the American dead on Ted Koppel's Nightline. That only a year
separates the two linked moments can't help but take your breath away.
And, if the most recent reports pouring in are to be believed, on both
accounts, there is more and worse to come. In this week's New Yorker
magazine, journalist Seymour Hersh reports that there already existed
a scathing secret military report ("an unsparing study of collective
wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels")
on conditions at Abu Ghraib and the mildest thing that can be said is:
"The 372nd's abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine -- a fact of
Army life that the soldiers felt no need to hide." The worst: that
Iraqis were possibly murdered in the prison; that these acts were part
of a criminal interrogation policy that leads right up the chain of
command; and that some of the brutal interrogations were conducted not
just by military intelligence and CIA operatives, but by "contract"
employees -- private interrogators hired by the Pentagon from two
companies linked to the Bush administration, one of which reportedly
contributed $400,000 to Republican Party coffers -- who are evidently
beyond the reach of any law.
The Bush administration will undoubtedly opt to deal with the
photographed acts at Abu Ghraib as isolated incidents, but they were
simply the ones where the participants felt so sure of themselves, so
cloistered from any sense of possible retribution, that they evidently
wanted snapshots, souvenirs to remember it all by. This is, however,
part of a developing system, a global Bermuda Triangle of injustice
and such acts, or their equivalents, are likely to turn out to be
"routine" elsewhere as well. We must, for instance, now return to the
wildest of the tales of abuse told by British prisoners recently
released from Guantanamo with a new respect for their possible
validity. (And here's a little indication of where we're headed: Maj.
Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who ran our offshore prison system in
Guantanamo, has only recently been reassigned to "overhaul" our
sprawling detention system in Iraq.)