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Torture’s out. Now they call it abuse
No screaming, no cries of agony, no shrieks of pain. Yes, it sounds
much better, doesn’t it?
By Robert Fisk
11/12/05 "The
Independent" -- --
"Prevail" is the "in" word in America just now. We are not going to
"win" in Iraq - because we did that in 2003, didn’t we, when we
stormed up to Baghdad and toppled Saddam? Then George Bush declared
"Mission Accomplished". So now we must "prevail". That’s what F J
"Bing" West, ex-soldier and former assistant secretary for
International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration said
this week. Plugging his new book - No True Glory: A Frontline
Account of the Battle for Fallujah - he gave a frightening outline
of what lies in store for the Sunni Muslims of Iraq.
I was sitting a few feet from Bing - plugging my own book - as he
explained to the great and the good of New York how General Casey
was imposing curfews on the Sunni cities of Iraq, one after the
other, how if the Sunnis did not accept democracy they would be
"occupied" (he used that word) by Iraqi troops until they did accept
democracy. He talked about the "valour" of American troops - there
was no word of Iraq’s monstrous suffering - and insisted that
America must "prevail" because a "Jihadist" victory was unthinkable.
I applied the Duke of Wellington’s Waterloo remark about his
soldiers to Bing. I don’t know if he frightened the enemy, I told
the audience, but by God Bing frightened me.
Our appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations - housed in a
58th Street townhouse of deep sofas and fearfully strong air
conditioning (it was early November for God’s sake) - was part of a
series entitled "Iraq: The Way Forward". Forward, I asked myself?
Iraq is a catastrophe. Bing might believe he was going to "prevail"
over his "Jihadists" but all I could say was that the American
project in Iraq was over, that it was a colossal tragedy for the
Iraqis dying in Baghdad alone at the rate of 1,000 a month, that the
Americans must leave if peace was to be restored and that the sooner
they left the better.
Many in the audience were clearly of the same mind. One elderly
gentleman quietly demolished Bing’s presentation by describing the
massive damage to Fallujah when it was "liberated" by the Americans
for the third time last November. I gently outlined the folk that
Bing’s soldiers and diplomats would have to talk to if they were to
disentangle themselves from this mess - I included Iraqi ex-officers
who were leaders of the non-suicidal part of the insurgency and to
whom would fall the task of dealing with the "Jihadists" once Bing’s
lads left Iraq. To get out, I said, the Americans would need the
help of Iran and Syria, countries which the Bush administration is
currently (and not without reason) vilifying. Silence greeted this
observation.
It was a strange week to be in America. In Washington, Ahmed Chalabi,
one of Iraq’s three deputy prime ministers, turned up to show how
clean his hands were. I had to remind myself constantly that Chalabi
was convicted in absentia in Jordan of massive bank fraud. It was
Chalabi who supplied New York Times reporter Judith Miller with all
the false information about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. It
was Chalabi’s fellow defectors who persuaded the Bush administration
that these weapons existed. It was Chalabi who was accused only last
year of giving American intelligence secrets to Iran. It is Chalabi
who is still being investigated by the FBI.
But Chalabi spoke to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute in
Washington, refused to make the slightest apology to the United
States, and then went on - wait for it - to meetings with Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice and national security adviser Stephen
Hadley. Vice-President Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
also agreed to see him.
By contrast, Chalabi’s gullible conservative dupe was subjected to a
truly vicious interview in The Washington Post after she resigned
from her paper over the Libby "Plame-Gate" leak. A "parade of Judys"
appeared at her interview, Post reporter Lynne Duke wrote. "Outraged
Judy. Saddened Judy. Charming Judy. Conspiratorial Judy. Judy, the
star New York Times reporter turned beleaguered victim of the
gossip-mongers ..." proclaiming her intention to make no apologies
for writing about threats to the United States, Miller did so
"emphatically almost frantically, her crusading eyes brimming with
tears". Ouch.
I can only reflect on how strange the response of the American media
has become to the folly and collapse and anarchy of Iraq. It’s
Judy’s old mate Chalabi who should be getting this treatment but no,
he’s back to his old tricks of spinning and manipulating the Bush
administration while the American press tears one of its reporters
apart for compensation.
It’s like living in a prism in New York and Washington these days.
"Torture" is out. No one tortures in Iraq or Afghanistan or
Guantanamo. What Americans do to their prisoners is "abuse" and
there was a wonderful moment this week when Amy Goodman, who is
every leftist’s dream, showed a clip from Pontecorvo’s wonderful
1965 movie The Battle of Algiers on her Democracy Now programme.
"Colonel Mathieu" - the film is semi-fictional - was shown
explaining why torture was necessary to safeguard French lives. Then
up popped Mr Bush’s real spokesman, Scott McClellan, to say that
while he would not discuss interrogation methods, the primary aim of
the administration was to safeguard American lives.
American journalists now refer to "abuse laws" rather than torture
laws. Yes, abuse sounds so much better, doesn’t it? No screaming, no
cries of agony when you’re abused. No shrieks of pain. No discussion
of the state of mind of the animals perpetrating this abuse on our
behalf. And its as well to remember that the government of Lord
Blair of Kut al-Amara has decided it’s quite all right to use
information gleaned from this sadism. Even Jack Straw agrees with
this.
So it was a relief to drive down to the US National Archives in
Maryland to research America’s attempts to produce an Arab democracy
after the First World War, one giant modern Arab state from the
Turkish border to the Atlantic coast of Morocco. US soldiers and
diplomats tried to bring this about in one brief, shining moment of
American history in the Middle East. Alas, President Woodrow Wilson
died; America became isolationist, and the British and French
victors chopped up the Middle East for their own ends and produced
the tragedy with which we are confronted today. Prevail, indeed.
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