May, 2004, Week 1

For the families standing in the dusty car park of Abu Ghraib prison yesterday, the revelations of torture and abuse came as no surprise. Every morning, relatives of Iraqi detainees inside the US prison, just west of Baghdad, gather in the hope that their loved ones might be released. They rarely are.

The photos of US soldiers abusing and humiliating Iraqi detainees may have provoked outrage across the world. But for Hiyam Abbas they merely confirmed what she already knew - that US guards had tortured her 22-year-old son Hassan.

Breaking down in tears, Mrs Abbas said US guards had refused to let her in. She had so far only managed to see Hassan once - two months ago - following his arrest last November.

"He told me: 'Mum, they are taking our clothes off. We are nude all the time. They are getting dogs to smell our arses. They are also beating us with cables.'

"It's completely humiliating," Mrs Abbas said. "My son is sick and suffering from hypertension. During the interview the American soldiers were standing so close to us. My son was crying."

Her son had been detained in the Baghdad suburb of Al-Dora, after a gang broke into their house. What did she think of the Americans now?

"They are rubbish," she said. "Saddam Hussein may have oppressed us but he was better than the Americans. They are garbage."

Yesterday other Iraqis gave similar accounts of what goes on inside Abu Ghraib, once a centre of torture and execution under Saddam.

The US military last week claimed that "no more than 20" US soldiers had been involved in abusing and humiliating inmates. The vast majority of US guards were not involved, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt suggested.

Yesterday, however, Abu Salem, who spent six months inside Abu Ghraib between August and February, said abuse by US guards went on all the time.

Mr Salem, 41, said he had also known about the practice of US soldiers posing for pictures with Iraqi prisoners for five months. "This didn't take place in the general camp but in individual cells," he said.

Mr Salem said he had been in the jail shortly before a visit from the International Red Cross in January. Until then, detainees in the prison wing had been kept naked.

"The night before the Red Cross arrived, the American soldiers gave them some new clothes. They told us that if we complained to the Red Cross about our treatment we would be kept in prison forever. They said they would never let us out."

Mr Salem said he had come to the jail, a short drive from the town's chaotic vegetable market, to try to find out what had happened to his three brothers. They were still inside the prison, he said, behind its outer fence and a vast razor wire- topped inner wall.

Generally, detainees were only tortured in the days immediately after their arrest, during interrogation, he added.

Many of the allegations made by Mr Salem and other former detainees yesterday correspond with the damning internal US army report into Abu Ghraib obtained by the Guardian and the New Yorker magazine.

Yesterday the mother of one detainee, Samira Hassan, said the latest allegations were horribly familiar.

Her 22-year-old son Abbas had been arrested three months ago while walking past a US military base in the Baghdad suburb of Amariya.

She finally managed to see him in prison two weeks ago. "He told me they are using electric shocks against the prisoners and taking off their clothes. He also told me something I can hardly talk about - that the Americans are raping the Iraqi men.

"This is terrible," Mrs Hassan said. "This is shame for us. We have a different culture and different religion. They should not do that.

"We are not talking about one case but of thousands of cases," she said. "The Americans said they would bring us freedom. Is this what they mean?"

Not all the detainees inside Abu Ghraib were young men, it emerged yesterday, or even very plausible resistance fighters. Several relatives wearing flowing white dish-dashes had turned up to try to visit Qahta al-Salim, a prominent 70-year-old sheikh from the Sunni town of Samarra.

Mr al-Salim had been in American custody for four months, his son, Mutashar Qahtan, said. US soldiers arrested him at his home after a neighbour claimed he supported the resistance.

"My father is an old man. He has a heart complaint. The first thing they did was to make him stand up for 12 hours," he complained. "They then took him to Tikrit and finally to here."

Mr Qahtan said the allegations of abuse by US soldiers were "nothing new". He said he spent 47 days last year in US custody in Tikrit. "Personally they didn't do anything wrong to me," he said. "But I saw for myself what they did to others. They forced a group of prisoners to stand naked on the roof for seven days. They also told us that all Iraqis were shit."

There are around 8,000 Iraqi prisoners in US custody, held in camps across Iraq without trial or access to a lawyer. A tiny minority of those detained are high-ranking members of the former regime.

Relatives, however, insist that the majority of "security detainees" are innocent, and claim they are often victims of random arrest following attacks on coalition forces. Either way, the images of torture and humiliation would merely serve to fuel the armed struggle against US occupation, Majid al-Salim, the brother of the imprisoned sheikh, said.

"The Americans are driving people into the arms of the Maqawama [resistance]," he said. "We now look back at Saddam's era with nostalgia," he added. "He was a good leader. There was security. We hope he comes back."

Maybe you've forgotten John DiIulio. An early ranking member of the Bush Administration -- in charge of faith-based programs -- he was the first to leave and tell us what really went on inside the White House.

Basically, he said, virtually every initiative of the Bush Administration was taken for partisan political reasons. There was precious little, if any, loftier discussion of whether something might be good for the American people. Everything flowed from the top down, from the cynical, manipulative minds of Rove and Cheney and their ilk. The major question dealt with was: How could this policy benefit Bush&Co. and their friends?

"This gave rise," wrote Dilulio "to what you might call Mayberry Machiavellis ? staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible."

Later, we heard variations on a similar theme by other, more highly-placed insiders -- such as Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Anti-Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke and Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV -- that confirmed that Bush and his inner-circle are not especially curious about the real world and are not interested in hearing unwelcome truths. Politics and power are what really matter.

Once Bush&Co. make up their minds, it's full speed ahead; if they run into a brick wall, all attempts are made to deny the existence of the wall-like obstacle in front of them. If there is no way to escape that impediment, they'll back and fill and try to go around another way, but the ultimate goal remains to get to where they wanted to get to originally and, by golly, they will get there -- even if it requires them, stealthlike, to pretend for awhile that they're changing their destination.

What's happening in Iraq is a good example. The neocons in charge of American foreign/military policy -- hard-rightists from The Project for The New American Century like Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Feith -- wanted to get a U.S. military foothold in Iraq, and to bend the existing Arab culture in the Middle East to its "democratic"/"free market" will. To effect this U.S. presence, the Bush Administration had to invent a rationale to justify an invasion and hyped an "imminent" danger posed by Saddam Hussein with his supposed terrifying biochemical and nuclear weapons. None of it was true, of course, and thousands of Americans and Iraqis are paying the ultimate price for those gross lies and deceptions -- and U.S. taxpayers, and their descendants, are paying the humongous financial price.

The ongoing conflict in Iraq has turned into an embarrassing disaster for the U.S., as it gets sucked into the kind of war Saddam and his military planners wanted to fight: an urban insurgency against the American occupiers. Comparisons with Vietnam and the Battle of Algiers are being made even by conservative pundits. Support at home for Bush's bumbling war policies is melting away. Unless Rove can find some way to get Iraq off the front pages of voters' minds, Bush conceivably could lose the election in November.

And so, Bush&Co. are desperate enough to do anything to get the U.S. out of the death zones in Iraq. The aim is to take American voters' attention off the war long enough to get Bush elected. Once that happens, all bets and restrictions are off; it's back to moving toward those original neo-con goals.

In Iraq, the goal is to have a military presence in the country -- the U.S. already has set up 14 bases inside Iraq -- so as to have leverage as the U.S. attempts to reshape the Middle Eastern geopolitical map, and to have effective control of the natural resources of the area at a time when oil reserves worldwide are running down. If Bush were to win in November, the original agenda would come into play: moving hard on Iran and Syria and others to toe the U.S. line, or face the consequences -- with the example of "shock-and-awe" and "regime change" in Iraq to help focus the minds of leaders who might object to American hegemony.

How history delights in irony. Bush claims that because of U.S. "liberation" of Iraq, America has taken the country beyond the Saddam horrors and brutalities and tortures of the past and into a bright new present and glowing future. At virtually that same moment, what many Iraqis and human rights groups already knew was revealed to the public: the U.S. and U.K. have been involved in systematic humiliation and torture of Iraqi prisoners -- sometimes to the point of death -- and often at the same jails that Saddam's thugs used for the same purposes.

Why Bush and Blair would be "shocked, shocked" to discover that the troops serving under their command would behave in an uncivilized manner is a mystery. For nearly four years now, Bush, for example, has behaved like a king who answers to no-one; his administration's behavior across the globe -- strutting and swaggering unimpeded like an arrogant bully, taking what it wants, demeaning its enemies as "uncivilized," claiming a dichotomy of God on our side & the Other as thoroughly "evil" -- almost invites ordinary U.S. soldiers to see their Iraqi enemy as lesser mortals, somehow unworthy of normal human consideration.

It's what the world witnessed in Stalinist Russia, Hitlerian Germany, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Israel in Palestine, France in Algeria, the U.S. in Vietnam. We are the good guys with God on our side ("Gott mit Uns"), our enemies are some barbaric subhumans whose God is inferior to ours; even with international rules of war and treatment of POWs in place, there naturally will be officers and troops who go over the line with great regularity. Once the war genie is let out of the bottle, we shouldn't be surprised by the inhumanity that follows.

The rationales justifying this Iraq adventure were, and remain, rotten. The post-"Mission Accomplished" war is a disaster. The commander-in-chief, looking through rosy-colored glasses, maintains that all is well, just a few malcontent natives and "foreign terrorists" to deal with.

When an entire war enterprise is based on faulty foundations, as in Vietnam, as in Iraq, one should expect the troops -- many, if not most, of whom come from moral, religious backgrounds -- to recognize, on some level, that what they're being asked to do varies from what they've been taught is right.

Some soldiers can't handle that kind of emotional/ethical warping and psychologically snap, performing ghastly acts of torture and violence. That is an expected part of warfare; if the war seems to be lasting forever, if your own country doesn't armor and protect you enough, if you as a soldier learn you can't trust anyone in the native population, and if the required changes aren't made from the top down, the entire war policy and behavior can slide off the moral tracks. It happened in Vietnam, it's happening increasingly in Iraq.

But, since the Bush neocons want Iraq and what it represents -- political greed, don't forget, is their middle name -- they will do anything necessary to stick to their goal of using Iraq to "transform" the energy-rich Middle East. They will do so even if it means temporarily contradicting their own best interests on the ground in order to reduce the number of Americans dying -- for one reason and one reason only: to win the election in November.

This attitude helps explain the U.S. rush to hand over the reins of "sovereignty" -- to someone, anyone, please -- even though the Americans will continue to maintain their bases and pull the strings from behind the scenery; and why the U.S. is even willing to pay out huge amounts of "protection money" to Iraqi militias (often made up of the same insurgents who were firing on them previously) in order to buy their way out of deadly firefights.

There clearly is a disconnect in the White House between what's happening in Israel/Palestine and what's happening in the Arabic Middle East and, in general, throughout the Islamic world. Since Bush&Co. have placed all their chips on Israel in that Middle East struggle, Sharon's Likud-led government considers that it has carte blanche to pacify and control that area however it wants. Bush&Co. simply refuse to comprehend (or care) that the U.S. and Israel are pouring gasoline on the smoldering fire of Arabic and Islamic resentment across the globe. If they really wanted to win hearts and minds in the Islamic world, the U.S. would engineer and work tirelessly for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East: Arab-wide recognition of Israel within secure pre-1967 borders, a geographically and economically viable Palestinian state, withdrawal of Israel from most of the occupied territories and settlements. But Bush has now moved the U.S. away from its traditional "honest broker" role between the two warring parties, and placed America squarely in the Likud camp, thus ensuring that Muslims worldwide see little or no difference between the two most powerful countries in the area. Both Israel and the United States increasingly are seen by Muslims these days as a common enemy -- occupying powers who employ similarly brutal, inhumane acts in trying to control the local populations.

In short, Bush -- the same guy who infuriated the Islamic world when he used the term "crusade" to define his initial anti-terrorist policy -- has become the best recruiter for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. And, most importantly in terms of domestic American security, Bush has become the best recruiter for Al Qaida.

Since Bush Administration policies are so outrageous and extreme, and since the manner of carrying out those policies is so incompetently handled, and since Bush&Co. alienate everyone who comes near them, one is tempted to believe that these Bush guys are alien pod people, or forces from the dark side, or agents of a foreign power -- sent to destroy America from within and ensure defeat abroad.

Of course, I'm not serious about that. But at times the Bush Administration's policies, behavior and bumbling ways certainly make one wonder. In addition to the blowback that can be expected from Bush's Israel/Palestine mistakes, here are a few more examples of policies that, if one didn't know better, could be viewed as designed to aid our enemies:

Well, you get the idea. Bush&Co. can't think straight, can't see straight, can't shoot straight. The result is endlessly and constantly to supply propaganda ammunition to our enemies.

Bush&Co., blinded by their extreme ideology and arrogance -- we're the only superpower on the planet and we can get what we want when we want -- are now trying anything to play catch-up with reality, even paying off insurgents not to attack them, even seeking help from the United Nations and former allies that they reviled and humiliated before the war. Who woulda thunk it?

It's a back-asswards way of running a war -- trying to do now what might have helped if done then -- but that's what happens when think-tank ideologues (who made sure never to be in a war themselves) send young men and women to fight for greed-based wacky theories, and for the idea that you can create instant democracy at the point of a gun. *****

In sum, friends, we are witnessing in Iraq and elsewhere the deadly result of nearly four years of Bush&Co.'s ideological stubbornness and insistence on politics-at-all-costs. The whole crew should be impeached -- and there are plenty of charges that would stick -- but it may not happen prior to the election. Still, that's no reason not to attempt it; doing so will keep Bush&Co. busy defending on another front, thus reducing the amount of havoc they can cause.

If the Republican-dominated Congress won't impeach these guys, then we the voters will. If we do it right in November, not only will Bush&Co. be sent packing from the White House, but a good share of Republicans in the House and Senate will take involuntary early-retirement along with their Bush&Co. mentors.

True, It will take years to undo the damage caused by Bush&Co. domestically and abroad, but at least we will know we are engaged in doing solid, moral work -- and, most importantly, that we are helping move our country out from the shadow world and back into the light. Let's do it!

Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at various universities, was a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for 19 years, and currently co-edits The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org).

Further embarrassment regarding torture at the US military prison at Abu Ghraib, Iraq emerged today, as high-level US civilian officials denied knowledge of torture in Iraq.

US officials have stuck to the story that they had no prior knowledge of the torture going on at Abu Ghraib but that tale is starting to unravel, as new revelations come to light.

In addition to the charges of torture levied against US military personnel, there have also been reports that private contractors have participated in torture.

Asked on Monday, Coalition spokesman Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said he was unsure what private contractors were doing at the prison.

Speaking to Public Radio host Allex Chadwick, from Baghdad, General Kimmitt was asked whether private contractors were carrying out interrogations of prisoners in the prisons in Iraq. "Are you clear on the role of the civilian contractors at the prison?" asks the host. "I personally am not clear on the role of the contractors. At the prison." Kimmitt admitted demurely.

While Kimmitt pleaded his prior ignorance about what happened inside Abu Ghraib, CPA head L. Paul Bremer was dealing with accusations that he was informed about abuses by Iraqi Human Rights Minister Abdel Basset Turki as early as November of 2003.

Interviewed in Baghdad, Turki said, "In November I talked to Mr. Bremer about human rights violations in general and in jails in particular. He listened but there was no answer. At the first meeting, I asked to be allowed to visit the security prisoners, but I failed,"

Bremer may have had other things on his mind, he is rumored by the Washington Post, to be interested in a cabinet job if Bush wins in November. He took time out from running Iraq on Monday to mend fences with the President regarding a comment he had made in February 2001, saying then that Bush's administration was "paying no attention" to preparedness for terrorism.

He is reported to have said then, "What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, 'Oh my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this,'''

In Baghdad on Monday Bremer used the word "regret" to describe those previous statements critical of Bush.

While the rest of the world is seething at the brutality that took place in the Iraqi prison, Bush Administration officials are characteristically singing a different tune from the rest of the world.

When asked by a reporter whether torture has taken place in Iraq, Rumsfeld said,

"My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture."

Appearing with Rumsfeld at the same press conference was Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace. General Pace referred to the secret Army report on Abu Ghraib as containing, "… hundreds and hundreds of pages of documentation that are classified."

However, the secret report obtained by Seymour M. Hersh and disclosed in The New Yorker magazine has been described as containing only 56 pages, not "hundreds and hundreds of pages."

It may well be that what was leaked to Seymour Hersh was only a summery of the secret report's findings, and if that is true then there may be more revelations to come.

By Walter Brasch

Let's pretend it's wartime, and the nation's largest aircraft carrier has just run aground.

(OK, so it's not likely that a carrier will ever run aground, but in the past three years we've been asked to pretend a lot. Let's pretend George W. Bush was not elected by a 5-4 vote . . . Let's pretend that the Saudis had no culpability in the 9/11 murders . . . Let's pretend there's a connection between Saddam and 9/11 . . . Let's pretend there really are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.)

Anyhow, for the sake of the argument, let's pretend a carrier really did run aground. Capt. Horatio Hornswaggle says he's really ticked off about it, has admonished his lesser officers, but he can't be blamed since he had just come off a 16-hour work shift and was getting a much-needed sleep. Cdr. Lesley Lobridge says it's not really his fault because he was in the officer's mess at the time, grabbing a quick snack before getting back to work. Lt. Cdr. Mizzen Mast says he wasn't on the bridge because he had to take a head break.

By the time the investigation ends, Petty Officer Second Class Peachfuzz Pitfall, the helmsman, is found guilty of dereliction of duty, malfeasance, and running a red light. No one else is charged--they weren't responsible.

Is this scene really plausible? Of course not. The captain, even when asleep, has a responsibility for the proper discipline, education, and execution of his crew and the ship's mission. And, it's not likely that the Navy's mission is to run billion-dollar carriers onto a reef. The captain, and all others in the chain of command, and maybe even a flag officer, might be brought before courts martial.

In Iraq, several American soldiers abused, assaulted, manhandled, and humiliated Iraqi prisoners. A scathing 53-page report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, classified in late February 2004 and not meant for public release, but leaked to investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh, found that the Army in Iraq had committed numerous instances of "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses." "60 Minutes II" released some of the pictures showing gloating American soldiers. An Army investigation led to charges included aggravated assault, battery, maltreatment, and dereliction of duty for seven soldiers.

President George W. Bush was quick to condemn the actions as "disgusting." He and his national security advisor went on Arab television to apologize for American atrocities. He scolded Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for not advising him of the problem until pictures appeared on television. Rumsfeld said the Defense Department was taking care of the problem of these "rogue" soldiers, although innumerable officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, had said that numerous attempts to have Defense take care of wide-ranging problems in Iraq had gone unanswered. Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the problem was small, caused by "just a handful" of soldiers--but he hadn't read the report several weeks after a draft was available. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, a Reserve officer in charge of all prisons in Iraq, rightly blamed military interrogators for establishing conditions that led to the abuse, but didn't seem to want to take any blame.

Taguba's report didn't just stop with condemnation of enlisted soldiers. Seymour Hersh, in "The New Yorker," said that report revealed "a much broader pattern of command failures than initially acknowledged by the Pentagon and the Bush administration in responding to outrage over the abuse." Taguba blamed interrogators, military intelligence officers, and civilians hired by the Department of Defense for not only allowing but also encouraging the prison guards to "soften" up the prisoners.

One of the soldiers who was charged with the crimes told "60 Minutes II" that the prison guards "had no support, no training whatsoever. And I kept asking my chain of command for certain things . . . like rules and regulations. And it just wasn't happening."

Innumerable times, President Bush told the nation he was giving his military all the resources they needed to fight. Either this was political spin of the truth, or his subordinates didn't take him seriously. Gen. Karpinski told Newsweek she didn't have enough troops or resources, that her brigade wasn't properly trained, and that when she complained to her superiors, they ignored her. "They just wanted it to go away," she said.

Almost a year earlier, the inspector general of the Department of Justice revealed the detention of individuals in the United States was "indiscriminate and haphazard," and that there were "significant instances" of "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse," including beatings of illegal immigrants, most of them Muslim or Arab, almost all imprisoned for minor offenses, by various employees and officials of the Department of Justice. Included were employees of the FBI, Bureau of Prisons, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Immigration and Naturalization Service.

In England, Lord Justice Johan Steyn, senior judge in the House of Lords, and one of the nation's most respected judges, said that conditions imposed by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay were of "utter lawlessness," a "monstrous failure of justice," and "not quite torture, but as close as you can get." BBC diplomatic correspondent Barnaby Mason pointed out, "It is rare for British judges to speak on contentious political issues and almost unheard of for them to attack a foreign government."

President Bush may condemn the actions of a "few." He, like the rest of the world, was be personally "disgusted." He may rebuke his subordinates. His staff and cabinet secretaries may launch investigations. And, there will be courts martial, especially since the world now knows what happened in Iraq. But, the problem, as others are pointing out, goes far beyond the actions of "just a handful" to expose critical problems in how this country has undertaken its mission in the President's self-proclaimed "War on Terror."

This president has defined himself as a commander-in-chief. As a war president. As the leader of this war, in which almost 800 American soldiers, and several thousand others, most of them civilians, have died. He is the one guiding this ship-of-state. The loss of civil rights of American citizens and human rights of all persons was, and is, his responsibility. It's one from which he can't deflect criticism or go AWOL.