Iron law may have to bend
Sydney Morning Herald May 4 2004
By Marian Wilkinson in Washington
Leading military commanders in the United States are insisting there is no need for an independent investigation into the abuses that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
President George Bush and every senior officer in the US Army has condemned the repulsive behaviour of the junior US military guards. Yet, despite months of cover-up by the military, they really believe an internal investigation will be acceptable to the Iraqis and the world.
It is an iron law of the Bush White House that in the so-called war on terror no outside body has the right to question the conduct of the US military and intelligence services.
For months, when Amnesty International complained of abuses of Iraqi and Afghan detainees, the US insisted that it could not even release the names of the thousands they had detained because they were dangerous, "terrorists" and "former regime elements".
"Trust us, we're Americans" was the reply whenever questions were raised about detainees dying in custody or being tortured. As General Myers repeated on Sunday: "We don't torture people . . . We stay inside the international law."
This is the same assurance the Bush Administration gave the Supreme Court recently in the case of the Guantanamo Bay detainees. There is no need for any court to review the actions of the US military or the president in the war on terrorism, the Solicitor-General argued, because the US could oversee itself.
Those assurances have been exposed as worthless. The scenes captured on video and on camera in Abu Ghraib provide ample evidence of why the military and intelligence services cannot be given unfettered power in the war on terrorism.
So far, the Pentagon is still trying to ward off an outside investigation and contain the scandal. The criminal behaviour at the jail, the generals insist, was carried out by a handful of officers who are now facing charges.
But the theory of the rotten apple does not ring true here. These were supposedly high value prisoners and were under repeated interrogation by senior CIA and military intelligence operatives.
Did senior CIA and Defence Intelligence Officers not notice when prisoners were bashed, raped and left in their cells hooded and naked? One military guard facing charges says that at least one prisoner died under interrogation by intelligence officers.
The former head of the jail system in Iraq, Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, gave a disturbing insight into the system last week. She told The Washington Post the abuse began only after military intelligence officers from Guantanamo Bay visited Abu Ghraib last year.
Yet General Myers is now saying that the military commander of Guantanamo Bay, Major-General Geoffrey Miller, is going to Iraq to take over running the detention centres there to clean things up.
Like Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib jail insisted on keeping dangerous prisoners from any contact with the outside world. But one of the stunning revelations in the internal army report on the prison is that nearly 60 per cent of the civilian inmates were considered no threat to the US.
Congressional figures have added their voices to the call for a full and open inquiry.
The Pentagon, and the Bush Administration, will find it difficult to resist those calls.