Saddam, you're toast. 'Died of natural
causes in captivity.' 'Shot while trying
to escape,' whatever. That's the
subliminal message, the grayed-out caption
to the pictures of Lynndie
England.
|
May
2, 2004 (Sunday)
London I HAVE been sent by an anonymous
reader horrifying screen-shots taken from poor
quality videos showing people in American army
camouflage uniform seemingly committing a number of
sexual acts on civilian prisoners in Baghdad,
including women. These had been emailed to an Arab newspaper,
al-Basrah. I check the al-Basrah website
first, then spend some time working on the less
offensive of these and finally post them on the
website at 11:25 p.m. Although the images have
the prisoners' genital areas, the women's mouths,
etc., pixellated to conceal the detail, I provide a
carapace of warnings about their explicit nature --
though it is difficult to find an appropriate
wording which will not entice readers to go there
anyway. May
3, 2004 (Monday)
London During the night -- I am still working on volume
three of the Churchill biography -- I have second
thoughts about the images I have posted. I think
they are too graphic, and one person who has
already seen them on my website, emails to warn
that they could equally well have been taken off
some Hollywood porno video. The quality is too poor
for that, but even so I take that page down and
replace it with a link to the original source. By
morning that link too is dead. The British Daily Mirror has meanwhile
published photos showing British soldiers engaged
in perverted acts with a male prisoner or
prisoners. One shows a boot placed on the
prisoner's neck. The prisoner seems surprisingly
unconcerned -- his torso is not tensed, not
writhing. A rival newspaper's commentator says the
hooded prisoner's weight, body tone, and
musculature is more typical of a European than an
emaciated Iraqi. There have long been rumours of
British maltreatment of prisoners, and one or two
deaths have been reported, but I do not like these
photos at all: they seem to be stagy, too
well-focused, and for some puzzling reason although
they are digital images they are in black and
white, not colour, which would involve making a
pretty complicated adjustment to the camera: which
begs the question, why? The relieved British press -- except of course
for the Mirror, which has no doubt paid
handsomely for the scoop -- suggests that the
British images are faked, or staged, or
reconstructed (rather like that faked gas chamber
in Auschwitz, the one that has been shown to
millions of shuddering schoolchildren since it was
built in 1948).  More details have come out about the American
photos, taken at Abu Ghraid prison however,
including the names of the people concerned. The
prison's US commandant, the burly Brigadier-General
Janis
Karpinski, above, has a face that
would have suiuted her well for the role of the
Beast of Buchenwald, like Ilse Koch, making
her apocryphal lampshades from human skin: she has
a heavy, masculine face with the dark-ringed eyes
of a heavy smoker.  But
then through all history women have turned out to
be the crueler of the species: who was the famous
communist torturess of Enver Hodzha's Albania? I
forget her name.
Right:
Janis Karpinski and Karl-Otto Koch,
husband of Ilse. He was sentenced to death by an
SS court for brutality and corruption, and
hanged on Apr 5, 1945. 
Bush's jailer, and his nemesis too?
Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski.
May
5, 2004 (Wednesday)
London It gets worse. Another stranger emails to me the
gun-camera video taken by the crew of a US Apache
helicopter gunship, as it hunts down four Iraqis in
the middle of a field, and shoots them to death
with long bursts of 30mm cannon fire, one at a
time, including one who is detected to have been
"wounded". "Hit him!" -- and "hit" he is too, vaporized in
a burst of cannon fire that leaves nothing
discernibly human on the ground. The film is awful
to watch, I cannot bear to run it a second time.
But I put it on the website for others to judge, as
I have not seen it referred to in any newspaper
media, let alone shown on television.  The
camera as such, and these gun-cameras recording the
final seconds of the human beings in their sights,
will be the end of the global reputation of the
United States armed forces yet, as surely as the
souvenir snapshots taken by German soldiers
standing by the pits into which the Jews and other
enemies were massacred in 1941 and 1942 have made
it impossible to speak of the exploits of the
Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union in terms of
unqualified praise.
President George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have
taken the moral low ground by default. Not since
Custer's last stand have elements of the US Armed
Force behaved with so little honour.  Lynndie
England, US Army, and friend. May
6, 2004 (Thursday)
London  The
press is filled with still more images of the
torture and acts of perverted degradation in the
American prisons. Though only a few days, the
passage of time since this act began has however
given opportunity to stand back and reflect, amidst
all the clamour and calls for resignations at the
highest level of the Pentagon.
Let us retain a sense of proportion. True: It is
a humiliation to be paraded naked in front of your
captors, to be taunted by the female soldiers who
are now part of every democracy's army, to be
urinated on, and to be forced to commit real or
feigned acts of a sexual character. But this is small beer compared to what the same
forces have inflicted on the tens of thousands of
Iraqi and Afghan civilians, whose simple homes have
been blasted to pieces, brought down on top of
their families, or burned to the ground with
napalm, a country whose inhabitants are now forced
to inhale the irradiated dust of the British and
American uranium-tipped tank shells, or have seen
their families killed by ill-targeted Tomahawk
missiles, "daisy-cutters," anti-personnel mines, or
500 pound fragmentation bombs dropped at the whim
of some distant and callous "controller." To my western mind, humiliation seems less
permanent than death; it is less uncomfortable than
being torn apart by high explosive; more congenial
than being burned alive. Amidst the outcry for
resignations, I hear a voice -- mine -- calling
out: Many thousands of needless deaths still go
unatoned, and with no inquiry mounted into them:
hecatombs of the innocent, numbers neither counted
nor acknowledged by George Bush or Tony Blair.
Neither statesman has yet apologized for having
wrought this terror and tragedy upon a sovereign
nation on false premises, acting upon a lie, for
whatever purpose.
Finally, one further reflection: The Abu Ghraib
prison photos published this week make it unlikely
that Saddam Hussein will ever see the light
of day again, at least alive. He is a prisoner of
war, protected by the same conventions which should
have protected these very lowly Iraqi subjects upon
whom the humiliations and indignities of Abu Ghraib
were inflicted. And there's the rub: If the Central Intelligence
Agency's "civilian contractors" felt able to do
these things to these humble Iraqi folks, in order
to "stress" them -- to use the latest military
vernacular -- that is, to soften them up for
interrogation, what things have not been done
already to Saddam Hussein in order to force him to
reveal the whereabouts of those damn'd Weapons of
Mass Destruction, whose discovery is so urgently
needed now by the honourable gentlemen in
Washington and London?  If the Americans were ever to produce him for
trial, he might tell of the things that have surely
by now been done to him, to a far worse degree. Saddam, you're toast. "Died of natural causes in
captivity." "Shot while trying to escape,"
whatever. That's the subliminal message, the
grayed-out caption to the pictures of Lynndie
England, and the rest of the trailer-trash, whose
antics have succeeded in besmirching the name of US
forces everywhere. Hussein
after his capture Dec. 13, 2003. International
Red Cross officials visited Saddam Hussein at
his secret prison on April 27, 2004. Brigadier
General Mark Kimmitt told a news conference that
the location for the visit, the second by the
Red Cross to Saddam, would not be disclosed. The
Red Cross is keeping its findings secret. (Photo
by Reuters).  -
A
scurrilous website on Janis Karpinski
Atrocity-galleries from a
"bloodless war": rather worse than
humiliation-pics Pictures
that President Bush does not want the world to
see: hundreds of images of Iraqi
victims
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David Irving