The dehumanizing nature of
occupation By Ehsan Ahrari
If the United States invaded Iraq to liberate
its people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, recent
reports of "systematic" inhumane treatment of Iraqi
prisoners only underscore that the very nature of
occupation of one country by another is such that it
invariably leads to acts that dehumanize the occupied
people in the name of security. The outcome: intense and
incessant hostility, resentment, and anger of the
occupied toward the occupiers.
New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh has written
a gruesome account of gross and systematic abuse of
Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Gharib prison. The ultimate
irony is that, during the rule of Saddam, Abu Gharib
became a symbol of brutality. Once it could not find
weapons of mass destruction to justify its invasion of
Iraq, the administration of US President George W Bush
claimed that the liberation of Iraqis from the most
inhumane rule of a dictator was a good enough reason for
taking military action against that country. Now reports
of the US military's abuse of Iraqi prisoners in that
notorious prison threaten to deprive the United States of even
that wobbly claim.
The seeds of prisoner abuse
were sown in the very act of invasion and occupation of
a country, especially when it was done without the moral
authority of the international community. By going into
Iraq without the sanction of the United Nations - the
sole symbol of international legitimacy - the occupation
forces became the target of Iraqi anger, particularly by
not only remaining there indefinitely, but also by
promising to transform Iraq into the image of their own
society. Any expectation of overwhelming cooperation
from the Iraqi populace was unrealistic. The
manifestation of Iraqi anger through acts of resistance
and insurgency was bound to create an equally brutal
response from the occupying forces.
No
occupying force
can effectively respond to acts of insurgency, subversion
and resistance without good intelligence. Therein
lies the rub. Can the Anglo-American forces get credible
information regarding potential hostile acts - known
in the jargon of intelligence as "actionable intelligence"
- without the use of force, including psychological
means of torture and acts of humiliation regarded
highly offensive in the Arab and Islamic culture?
The answer, at least in the case of Abu Gharib prison,
is that someone at the top made the decision to use
whatever means desirable to get credible and actionable
intelligence, or to look away and play innocent. Now
the focus of inquiry ought to be whether such a
decision, indeed, was made at the top. If so, how far up
the chain of command does the notion of culpability go?
Bush has appropriately
and promptly expressed his feeling of disgust at the reports
of abuse. However, General Richard Meyer, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, was quick to go on the
defensive during an interview conducted on Fox Television Network
on Sunday. He said: "There is no evidence of systematic
abuse" in the US detention operations in the region.
However, his claim was in direct contradiction with the
one reported in Hersh's essay. Major-General Antonio M
Taguba's report, which he wrote for the Pentagon, but was
not meant for public release, cites numerous instances
of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at
Abu Gharib. The Taguba report notes: "Breaking
chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on
detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating
detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening
male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard
to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured
after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing
a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a
broomstick; and using military working dogs to frighten and
intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one
instance actually biting a detainee."
The issue
of culpability may be best pursued by closely examining
the rationale - such as it was - for any abuse or
dehumanizing treatment of Iraqi prisoners. At least for
now, there are reasons to believe that the perpetrators
of such acts were not merely some young soldiers from
rural West Virginia or Oregon, acting on their own and
without proper guidance, training, or supervision. Hersh
reports: "In letters and e-mails to family members,
Frederick repeatedly noted that the
military-intelligence teams, which included CIA [Central
Intelligence Agency] officers and linguists and
interrogation specialists from private defense
contractors, were the dominant force inside Abu Gharib.
In a letter written in January, he said: 'I questioned
some of the things that I saw ... such things as leaving
inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female
underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell -
and the answer I got was, "This is how military
intelligence [MI] wants it done" ... MI has also
instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell
with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water,
no ventilation or window, for as much as three days.'
The military-intelligence officers have 'encouraged and
told us, great job, they were now getting positive
results and information,' Frederick wrote. The CIA has
been present when the military working dogs were used to
intimidate prisoners at MI's request. At one point,
Frederick told his family, he pulled aside his superior
officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Phillabaum, the
commander of the 320th MP Battalion, and asked about the
mistreatment of prisoners. His reply was. 'Don't worry
about it.'"
If the preceding information is correct, then these events may not
be swept under the rug merely by taking
disciplinary action against a few soldiers, junior officers and
one flag officer, Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, who was
in charge of military prisons in Iraq. One has to go to
the top - all the way to Lieutenant-General Ricardo
Sanchez, senior commander of US forces in Iraq. After all, he
was the one who initially ordered Major-General Donald
Ryder, provost marshal of the US Army, to review the
Iraqi prison system. The Ryder report concluded that the
"situation had not yet reached a crisis point". Why did
General Sanchez decide against a further probe when he
knew how damaging such incidents could be for the
overall US prestige in the world?
We know now
that the conclusion of the Ryder report was rejected by
General Taguba when he stated in his report:
"Unfortunately, many of the systemic problems that
surfaced during [Ryder's] assessment are the very same
issues that are the subject of this investigation. In
fact, many of the abuses suffered by detainees occurred
during, or near to, the time of that assessment." He
went on to add, according to Hersh: "Contrary to the
findings of M G Ryder's report, I find that personnel
assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade, were
directed to change facility procedures to 'set the
conditions' for MI interrogations." Army intelligence
officers, CIA agents and private contractors "actively
requested that MP guards set physical and mental
conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses".
The Arab world has been saturated with the
reports and pictures of the dehumanization of Iraqi
prisoners. Admittedly, there is no comparison between
the brutality of the Saddam regime and the reports of
abuse of prisoners in occupied Iraq. However, as one
dispatch in the latest issue of Newsweek aptly notes:
"No one would liken US abuses to Saddam's techniques,
which included the most sadistic forms of torture and
murder. But then, being more humane than Saddam isn't
much to brag about."
Ehsan Ahrari,
PhD, is an Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent
strategic analyst.
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