US Torture in Iraq:  From a Scratch to Gangrene

By James Petras
Posted by Bulatlat.com

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The whole world is now knowledgeable about the US government’s systematic large scale torture of Iraqi prisoners:  The gang rape of Iraqi women and men, the sexual degradation of hooded, manacled Arab men; US and British soldiers urinating on, beating and murdering thousands of Iraqi ‘suspects’ arrested in mass midnight sweeps through neighborhoods and mosques, smashing doors and seizing any and all Iraqis.  The US and British soldiers are not merely following orders of their superiors in military intelligence and the CIA – they are proud of their dirty deeds, they take souvenir photos and videos to show their friends and families or perhaps to sell ‘back home’ to the violent pornography industry. 

From the very beginning of the colonial war – and even before – the US government deliberately encouraged the use of unrestrained violence.  Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld spoke of ‘using all means necessary to win the war’.  Bush assured the US public that “we will do everything in our power to bring this war to a successful conclusion.” 

Zionist ideologues in the Bush Administration promoted the use of ‘Israeli techniques, that is systematic torture and humiliation of naked, bound, hooded prisoners practiced against Palestinian resistance fighters, to fight Iraqi ‘terrorism’.  Early on the US military high command, especially in Iraq, encouraged the soldiers to use pejorative language against Iraqis or “rag-heads”, “camel drivers”, “Hadjis”.  The ‘politics of colonial language’ became the starting point for the plunge into the politics of endless torture and the perverted psychopathic practices of ordinary Anglo-American soldiers.

The infection has moved from a scratch to gangrene.  The tortures and abuses practiced by the US against prisoners parallel the policies of the Israeli state against the Palestinians.  This is not a casual coincidence – as the Zionist architects of the war in the Pentagon have established joint training sessions of interrogation techniques led by Israeli military and Mossad instructors, experts in exploiting the most humiliating tortures for Muslim and Arab prisoners.

Some of the mass media in the US have published graphic photos of the torture of naked Iraqi prisoners.  The main concern of the US political elite and mass media however is not the crimes against humanity, the great moral evil that has its roots in a colonial war against a whole people – it is the public relations impact on the “Arab people”, the world’s Muslims, the “image” of the US, its “credibility” as an imperial power. 

They would have us believe that the only people repulsed by the barbarous acts of the US military-intelligence are Arabs and Muslims and not the great majority of Christians, Buddhists, atheists and others in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa.  The effort by President Bush and his Zionist colleagues to limit the indignation over US war crimes to “Arabs and Muslims” is indicative of the willful ignorance of world opinion and a manipulative tactic to undermine moral outrage within the US.  The front page headlines in the Financial Times (May 6, 2004) read “A Humble Bush Gives Arabs Vow of Justice”.  Bush’s purpose is to reduce these crimes against humanity into a question of “Arab” justice.

Justice however is not merely an Arab problem, nor will justice come about via Presidential “vows”.  Injustice is structurally and inexorably linked to colonial occupations, wars and rule.  On May 6, 2004, the BBC published excerpts of an Amnesty International report on Kosova and how UN and Nato troops (mostly US and Europeans) “fuel the sex trade”.  It describes eleven-year old girls “traded” in sex slave markets in Kosova (from $60 to $2000 each), and forced to work in more than 200 brothels (up from 18 prior to the US led occupation). 

In Afghanistan, thousands of prisoners were tortured and murdered in and out of metal shipping containers and tossed into mass graves by CIA supervised tribal warlords…And torture is routinized by US interrogators or their Israeli counterparts.  Colonialism brings out the worst bestiality in the conquering armies.  Even the lowest of soldiers feels superior to his or her prisoner – free to apply to the ‘other’, the ‘rag-head’, all the humiliation they have experienced in civilian and military life.  The military high command, mostly distant from the sexual violence, the stench of urine and feces, the sight of blood and gore, the howls and groans of tortured prisoners, give license to their underlings, side benefit to those who receive no economic gains from the colonial war and run all the risks of being killed by a resistance fighter. 

And now that the stench of death has reached and repulsed world opinion and US torture of Iraqis has become public knowledge, the Generals and the Presidents claim ignorance, call for investigations, playing to the ingenuity of the US public, which is unaware that a 53 page military report providing all the details on CIA and military intelligence involvement in systematic torture was prepared months earlier.

Already fissures are appearing in the monolithic elite structure supporting the US colonial wars in the Middle East.  In late April 2004, UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, a US-backed official, criticized Washington’s colonial policy, pointing out that Iraqis were tired of the US arrests of people without charges, holding them without trial, torturing and brutalizing and often killing them.  The UN envoy went on to criticize the Jewish state’s colonial policies and brutal attacks on Palestinians as “the great poison in the region” undermining efforts to secure peace. 

Immediately the Jewish regime denounced the UN envoy and set in motion its transmission belt in the US:  every major Jewish organization (Anti-Defamation League, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the American Jewish Congress etc.) rushed to condemn and discredit Brahimi.  Up to now all the major Jewish “human rights” organizations have supported Israel’s murder of Palestinians and none have condemned US torture of Iraqi prisoners – and none will, unless Sharon presses the button.  Scores of US former diplomats joined 52 former British diplomats and condemned the brutality of the US colonial occupation and linked it to Israel’s illegal ethnic purge of the Palestinians as undermining peace efforts. 

The linkage between Israeli colonialism, the US-Iraq war and US Zionism has become common knowledge throughout the world – except in the US, where, according to Abraham Foxman of the (Jewish) Anti-Defamation League (ADL) claims “Jewish groups here concerned with the Israel-Iraq linkage from the beginning but we were able to stop it.”  He added, “Now it has resurfaced in an uglier way (sic) with Brahimi and the letter from the British Ambassadors,”(The Forward May 5, 2004 – a New York Jewish weekly newspaper).  How was the ADL able to “stop” the discussion of an Israel-Iraq linkage?  By using all of its direct and indirect influence in the mass media to censor any mention of the issue and by threatening journalists, academics and politicians with financial or political retribution or worse by labeling any critic as an “anti-Semite”.

Bush’s claims to innocence and the Zionist campaign in the mass media to deny US and Israel state crimes in Palestine and Iraq has led the great majority of the US public to remain passive if not acquiescent before the images and reports of barbaric torture inflicted by US soldiers on Iraqi civilians.  Images of systematic torture executed by the US throughout Iraq will not be wiped from the minds of the citizens of the world by a few intellectual signatures in the US. 

What is striking and appalling in the US today is the absence of any public mass protest in the face of explicit knowledge of state torture.  Worse than Germany, our people, our intellectuals cannot claim “they didn’t know” – despite receiving the “news” in their living rooms (despite the Zionist efforts “to stop” the debate).  They know or refuse to know, or pretend not to know and they refuse to act, or they don’t care about the “damned Arabs”.

Even the “best and the brightest” of our intellectuals refuse to tell the story of the linkage between torture in Iraq and in Israel and the role of Zionist organization in ‘stopping’ the debate.  Is this a case of selective intellectual amnesia, deep-seated irrational ethnic loyalties, or simply intellectual cowardice? Posted by Bulatlat.com

May 6, 2004

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