Saturday, May 1, 2004 Iraqi
Prisoner Images 'Disgust' Bush, Anger
Arabs
By Nada Abou El-Magd,
AP CNN
The images appeared on
CBS and in European newspapers. CAIRO, Egypt (May 1) - Arab
outrage flashed across the Middle East on Friday as
TV stations showed graphic images of naked Iraqi
prisoners being humiliated by smiling U.S. military
police. President Bush condemned the
mistreatment, saying he shared ''a deep disgust
that those prisoners were treated the way they were
treated.''  David
Irving comments: A NUMBER of things
stands out about this story, namely things
it omits to say. The photos were in the
hands of the Pentagon for over a month,
and would have remained a secret if CBS
television had not got hold them too.
So far as we
know, none of those responsible, about a
dozen officers and men, has actually been
arrested or charged (despite what this AP
story says) or placed on court-martial in
those weeks or even now, merely
"suspended".
On British television
last night, April 30, the father of one of
the army torturers, "Chip", who seemed a
decent enough man from West Virginia,
talked about the case.
He said that his son was
ignorant of military law, had never been
told it was wrong to do these things, and
had been instructed to carry out these
acts by "civilian contractors" employed by
the CIA. His son had merely been
following their orders.
What's the betting that
the US Army heirarchy looks after its own
again, à la My Lai? THIS is another instance of the
difficulties of fighting a good
old-fashioned brute-force war in the age
of television coverage.
Instances of prisoner
torture and humiliation like this were a
common- place in all the wars of the
twentieth century, as any Real Historian
can confirm. The Americans excelled in
their torture of the prisoners held at the
old Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria
in 1946/7.
The Simpson Commission
of Inquiry established that over one
hundred witnesses in the Malmedy Trial had
had their genitals destroyed by kicks from
US Army interrogators (who were not
US-born, I might add), in order to obtain
the required testimony, which led to
convictions and death sentences on a score
of German officers, most of whose
sentences were subsequently commuted in
consequence (unless they had already been
executed).
I have always maintained
that if CNN's television cameras had
covered Hamburg in July 1943, then Dresden
would never have been permitted to happen
in February 1945.
How the Pentagon must
curse John Logie Baird and his American
counterpart, whose name I forget. |
The photographs, shown on the Dubai-based
Al-Arabiya and the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera, included
pictures of prisoners naked except for the hoods
that covered their heads. They were first broadcast
Wednesday on CBS' ''60 Minutes II'' and have led to
charges against six U.S. soldiers.The Arab TV stations led news bulletins with the
photos of hooded prisoners piled on top of each
other in a human pyramid and simulating sex acts,
with their genitals blurred. Two U.S. soldiers
standing near the prisoners hammed it up for the
camera. At the White House, Bush said the mistreatment
of prisoners ''does not reflect the nature of the
American people. That's not the way we do things in
America. I didn't like it one bit.'' But many in the Middle East saw the mistreatment
as the latest example of American disregard for
Arabs. ''They were ugly images. Is this the way the
Americans treat prisoners?'' asked Ahmad
Taher, 24, a student at Baghdad's Mustansiriyah
University. ''Americans claim that they respect
freedom and democracy - but only in their
country.'' Ayed al-Manna, columnist for the Kuwaiti
Al-Watan daily, said the ''barbaric''
treatment of Iraqi soldiers will rally anti-U.S.
sentiment among Islamic fundamentalists and Arab
nationalists. In Syria, Damascus merchant Sahban Alawi,
45, asked ''what's the difference between them and
Saddam Hussein? They are doing to Iraq more than
what he did.'' Nader Naqib, a 27-year-old student in
Sidon, Lebanon, praised the media for ''uncovering
such an act so that the whole world will see what
the Americans are committing in human rights
violations.'' Last month, the U.S. Army announced that six
members of the 800th Military Police Brigade faced
court martial for allegedly abusing about 20
prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. The
charges included dereliction of duty, cruelty and
maltreatment, assault and indecent acts with
another person. Their boss, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski,
commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and
at least seven others have been ''suspended'' from
their duties at Abu Ghraib prison. In Baghdad, military spokesman Brig. Gen. Mark
Kimmitt said the commander of the Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, detention facility, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey
Miller, was being sent to Iraq to take over the
coalition detention facilities. Kimmitt said the Army is taking ''very
aggressive steps'' to minimize the chances of such
acts happening again, and ''we are also taking a
hard look at interrogation practices.'' The photos, taken last year, were inflammatory
in an Arab world already angry at the U.S.
occupation of Iraq. Arabs consider public nudity
dishonorable. ''I was disgusted and angered by those
humiliating pictures,'' Egyptian insurance agent
Omar Boghdady said. ''The scenes were really
ugly.'' One of the photos showed a hooded prisoner
standing on a box with wires attached to his hands.
CBS reported the prisoner was told that if he fell
off the box, he would be electrocuted, although the
wires were not really connected to a power
supply. Bathsheba Crocker, an
expert on Iraqi
reconstruction at the Center for Strategic
and International Studies in Washington, said the
images are likely to ''fuel the feeling of
anti-American, anti-occupation sentiment among
Iraqis.'' ''It doesn't help a
situation in which the United States is already
viewed very badly. From a public relations
perspective, it is yet another image for Arabs
to add to pictures of civilians being killed in
Fallujah,'' she said. Abu Ghraib was the most notorious of former
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's detention
centers. Its jailers are
alleged to have
tortured and killed thousands of Iraqis; a cemetery
outside has dozens of unmarked graves. ''This will increase the sense of
dissatisfaction among Iraqis toward the
Americans,'' said a member of the U.S.-appointed
Iraqi Governing Council, Mahmoud Othman.
''The resistance people will try to make use of
such painful incidents.''  ''The
Saddam era was full of executions and torture, and
we want the new Iraq to be clean of such images,''
Othman added.
Part of the problem, said Hurst Hannum, a
professor of international law at the Fletcher
School at Tufts University outside Boston, is that
Bush has ''put this war on such a high moral plane
that any moral deviance will be taken more
seriously by critics, and will be interpreted as
either being arrogance or hypocrisy.'' Any investigation into the mistreatment of Iraqi
prisoners should include not only the soldiers
involved, but also their superiors, according to
the New York-based Human Rights Watch. ''The brazenness with
which these soldiers conducted themselves ...
suggests they felt they had nothing to hide from
their superiors,'' said Kenneth Roth, the
group's executive director. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan
welcomed ''what appears to be a clear determination
on the part of the U.S. military to bring those
responsible to justice,'' U.N. spokesman Fred
Eckhard said. Amnesty International, in a statement from its
London headquarters Friday, warned the evidence of
prisoner abuse ''will exacerbate an already fragile
situation.'' ''The prison was notorious under Saddam
Hussein,'' it said. ''It should not be allowed to
become so again.'' British military officials said they are
investigating new allegations that their soldiers
abused a prisoner in Iraq. The report followed
confirmation from the Ministry of Defense in a
separate case that military authorities are
considering whether to prosecute eight soldiers for
allegedly abusing prisoners. Copyright 2004 The
Associated Press. 
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