[lbo-talk] Tom Engelhardt on the US gulag

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun May 2 16:19:22 PDT 2004


[HTML version has links to sources]

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.)



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