Abu Ghraib and an NPA Prison

The Macapagal-Arroyo government has refused to ask Washington to remove the NPA from its “terrorist list” saying that it is America’s “sovereign act” to do so. This bizarre understanding of what a “sovereign act” means clearly implies that Macapagal-Arroyo finds no problem at all with the prison abuse and other crimes being committed with impunity in Iraq and other U.S. war fronts as these happen to be identical to what is happening in her own country.

By Bobby Tuazon
Bulatlat

A prisoner at the Abu Ghraib (left) and a prisoner of war at an NPA camp (right)

The Bush government faces a strong international condemnation for maintaining a lawless regime in its prison camps in Iraq and Afghanistan – an issue that has generated at least three separate investigations and the denunciation of human rights organizations across the world. Last week, another scandal surfaced about new revelations of prisoner abuse at the notorious Abu Ghraib, a U.S. military prison west of Baghdad. The reports revealed the use of unmuzzled police dogs to frighten detained Iraqi teenagers. The minors – some as young as 15 years old – were forced to urinate on themselves as part of a sadistic game.

Two weeks ago in the Philippines, the New People’s Army (NPA) released two prisoners of war (POWs) almost six months after they were captured by the guerrillas in an ambush in Camarines Sur province, several kilometers south of Manila. Army 1Lt. Ronaldo Fidelino and Pfc. Ronel Nemeno were turned over to representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and later to Silvestre Bello III, chief negotiator of the government (GRP) peace panel, other officials and the two POWs’ families. The two told newsmen that they were treated well and that they were briefed of their rights as POWs under the Comprehensive Agreement on the Respect of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law (Carhrihl), which the government and NDFP signed in 1998.

The two Filipino POWs were not detained inside a prison with bars as the NPA unit that captured them had to be mobile, more so due to intensive military operations all over Southern Luzon. What they had, as a Bulatlat report said, was a “prison without walls and bars.”  As POWs, Fidelino and Nemeno were treated as hors de combat under Carhrihl, the Geneva Conventions and protocols of war. Their daily regimen included a medical check-up administered by a medic of the NPA, meals, newspapers and even a pack of cigarettes. The leader of the NPA custodial team who was interviewed by Bulatlat before their release said that security had to be tightened at night and only so because the two tried to bribe some guerrillas for their escape. The guerrillas didn’t take the bait.

The two would have been released earlier anyway had not defense and armed forces officials refused the NPA’s request to issue the suspension of military and police operations (SOMO/SOPO) in Camarines and Albay provinces in order to guarantee the soldiers’ safe release. About two years ago, Army special forces violated a SOMO by raiding an NPA camp at night that led to the killing of a POW who was about to be set free.

Knowing better

Many POWs, some of whom included senior military officials like Army Brig. Gen. Victor Obillo who was set free in 1999 in Mindanao, told of how they were treated well by their NPA captors. Many of them, including Obillo, would admit later of how they came to know better the ideological and political cause of the armed revolutionary movement even if they disagreed during intense discussions with their captors over their methods. When release time came, media men were astonished at seeing the POWs’ emotional farewell to their NPA captors.

Army Gen. Raymund Jarque in the late 1980s commanded the largest military operations that gave the NPA a lot of headache but also a lot of pain to the people of Negros. When he defected to the NDFP in 1997, he had to visit the hinterlands and in public meetings apologized to the poor masses of Negros for all the displacement and atrocities his command had done. He was welcomed by the NPA and he became, for a time, a military consultant to the NDFP during peace talks.

The New People’s Army is the same entity tagged by the Bush government, through its State Department, as a terrorist along with the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). (Following the U.S. decision, Jose Maria Sison, the NDFP’s chief political consultant, was also listed as a “terrorist” by the Dutch government and the EU Council.) The tagging of the NPA in the state department’s “foreign terrorist” list was made in late 2002 after a Washington meeting between U.S. President George W. Bush and Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The list, according to the NDFP, has been used by both the U.S. and Philippine governments to blackmail the NPA to capitulate.

Late last week, the Bush administration was to be tried before the Iraq War Crimes Tribunal in New York. Prominent personalities from all over the world including former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, a number of UN officials and representatives of previous war crimes tribunals in Europe, Japan and the U.S. were expected to testify and pass judgment on the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Bush and other top administration and military officials in Iraq. The holding of the tribunal has been timed with the Republican Party National Convention where Bush was to be officially nominated for reelection.

And the new scandal about other unreported crimes committed by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib and other prison camps in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan is timely. How vivid the impression such reports would make about the Bush government that, while harping about its democratic values and as a believer in human rights, also tags other countries as “rogue states” and anti-U.S. forces including the NPA as “terrorist.”

Exposed

The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison was first exposed by a letter smuggled out by a woman prisoner from her cell in December 2003 saying that U.S. guards had raped her and other women detainees. The women had been forced to strip naked in front of men, the woman known only as “Noor,” wrote, and several of them became pregnant. The note urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail to spare the women further shame. “Noor,” who became pregnant, is believed to have been killed, the human rights watch Amnesty International reported.

The secret inquiry launched in January by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who is of Filipino descent, found the note accurate. Apparently, many other Iraqi women detainees – who were among some 40,000 people in U.S. custody all over Iraq since last year’s invasion – suffered the same fate. Some had committed suicide.

Many more reports of prisoner abuse were leaked last April along with thousands of digital photos taken by U.S. interrogators and MPs themselves. Some photos showed naked Iraqi prisoners stacked in a pyramid, forced to pose in mock sexual positions and being beaten. Other photos showed a guard raping a woman; reports also told of male detainees sodomized.

At Abu Ghraib, prisoners were often kept naked in very hot or very cold, small rooms, or completely darkened rooms, clearly in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Some prisoners were tortured and killed, with their deaths faked by U.S. doctors as due to natural causes. In fact, U.S. doctors at Abu Ghraib and other prison camps have been severely criticized by medical groups in the U.S. for serving as accessory to the mistreatment of prisoners.

Scores of MPs have been investigated and some of them face possible court martial. But the abuse of prisoners could have been as well authorized by U.S. commanders themselves and legitimized by military field manuals. The axe has apparently not fallen on them.

Interrogation techniques

Interrogation techniques prescribed by a secretive Special Operations Forces/Central Intelligence Agency task force that operated in Iraq and Afghanistan were followed almost to the letter at Abu Ghraib. The task force policy endorsed the use of stress positions during harsh interrogation procedures, the use of dogs, yelling, loud music, light control, isolation and other methods.

The whole gruesome scenes of interrogation techniques and abuse of prisoners not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan can be traced to policy decisions and public statements from the Pentagon itself and, by extension, to President Bush. At the start of the bombing of the bombing of Afghanistan in retaliation for 9/11 late 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ruled that the U.S. was not bound by the Geneva Conventions and that no prisoners taken would be held as war combatants. In January 2002, he declared publicly that hundreds of people captured by U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan “do not have any rights” under the Geneva Conventions.

The Pentagon statement virtually established a “lawless regime” not only in Afghanistan but also in Iraq and implied that any humane treatment would depend on the goodwill of U.S. soldiers. And this policy could not have been put into effect at Abu Ghraib without the blessings of Bush.

Prison abuse is routinely practiced by the U.S. military not only to extract confessions from enemy suspects but more so to create long-term effects. Prison abuse is not only meant to deny the detainee’s rights which are provided for in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the protocols of war but also, as a psywar tactic, to demoralize the “enemy.” It also destroys the very soul of the detainee himself and hence diminishes his fighting will. It magnifies the superiority of the conqueror including its power to disregard international humanitarian convention. It reduces the conflict to a relationship of master and slave, of the triumph – to use Bush’s own words - of the “good guy” over the “bad guy.”

This is the same U.S. government that consistently finds defense in the Philippine government. The Macapagal-Arroyo government has refused to ask Washington to remove the NPA from its “terrorist list” saying that it is America’s “sovereign act” to do so. This bizarre understanding of what a “sovereign act” means clearly implies that Macapagal-Arroyo finds no problem at all with the prison abuse and other crimes being committed with impunity in Iraq and other U.S. war fronts as these happen to be identical to what is happening in her own country.

Now, who is the real terrorist? Bulatlat

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