For
several months now, the diehard neo-conservative
civilians in the Pentagon have been trying to
manufacture a scandal over the former United Nations
"oil for food" program. Their main concern was never to
check what the UN may or may not have done, but to
ensure that the international organization and its
representative in Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, were kept off
balance and weakened in their dealings with the US.
Since the White House has now decided that the
UN is indispensable for its exit strategy in this
election year, the Pentagon crowd are all under gag
orders. However, they and Iraqi National Congress leader
Ahmed Chalabi know that no plan that Brahimi drafts has
a role for him. He also knows, despite what he was
assuring the gullible in Washington for so many years,
that he has no domestic constituency in Iraq at all. So
he has been making the bullets to be fired by the
neo-con surrogates in the Wall Street Journal, the
National Review, and William Safire in the New York
Times, from trying to fan the flames on the issue.
And now, the US administration, and particularly
the Pentagon, has been completely poleaxed by a genuine
scandal: the abuse, torture and killing of prisoners by
US troops. The scandal has been compounded because of
the efforts of the military to keep it quiet until CBS's
pictures hit a horrified world. The prisoners, hooded,
shackled and abused, have come to epitomize everything
that has been wrong with US policy.
It is the
final dab in a concatenation of events that, like the
dots in a pointillist painting, come together to form a
recognizable image, all focused on the issue of
prisoners. Considering each of these thousand points of
darkness separately, firstly, President George W Bush
announced on his weekly radio broadcast that regardless
of quibbles about the causes for the war, Saddam Hussein
was gone and his torture chambers were out of business.
He did so just as the world saw pictures of American
military abuse and humiliation in the very Baghdad
prison where the Ba'athist torturers used to practice
their craft. The purpose of the war was not supposed to
be the replacement of Iraqi torturers by Americans.
Then CBS revealed that the US military had
persuaded them to hold off on releasing those pictures,
even as Secretary of State Colin Powell was trying to
twist the arm of the Qatari foreign minister to censor
alJazeera, the TV station that has set new standards of
objectivity in the Arab World, by, for example, being
the first to interview Israeli ministers. It was
additionally revealed that the military knew all about
the practices, had compiled a report about it, but that
the high command and the Pentagon civilians had not
actually bothered to read it.
It seems that not
only were these prisoners shuffled around to keep them
from the Red Cross, but that those who were involved,
and maybe even in command of the "interrogations" were
civilian contractors. These mini-Halliburtons and their
employees are not subject to military discipline, not
currently subject to what passes for Iraqi law - and
only by an unlikely determined effort by the federal
government, liable under US law.
Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a leading civilian neo-con in
the Pentagon, who himself avoided the Vietnam War, when
asked on television how many US casualties there were,
showed his patrician disdain by taking a stab at a round
number, of 500, when it was over 700 and rising. Such
things are beneath his notice was the message.
The week went on with a Ba'athist Republican
Guard general, in full uniform, taking control of
Fallujah, with the blessing of the US Marines. The
Republican Guards have traditionally had few scruples
about shooting Iraqi civilians, and so there should be
no worry about Geneva Conventions when they get to work.
At the same time, it was leaked that the US
wants a draft UN Security Council resolution dissolving
UNMOVIC, the UN Iraq weapons inspectors and allowing the
US's own Iraq Survey Group to complete the report for
them.
On the tail of the prisoner abuse stories,
the Supreme Court heard appeals firstly against the
White House's contention that Guantanamo Bay is in
another legal dimension, cut off from Cuban, American or
international law, and secondly against the White
House's detention of US citizens as enemy combatants
with no recourse to law if the president does not like
the cut of their jib. The military lawyers for some of
the detainees facing military tribunals have redeemed
the honor of the American military by loudly contesting
the legality of what they imply are kangaroo courts,
illegal under domestic and international law.
Following that, two Muslim immigrants who were
among hundreds locked up and abused physically and
mentally in the Brooklyn Federal Detention Center in the
first wave of xenophobia after September 11, launched
their case in the New York federal courts. They did so
from Pakistan and Egypt, the countries to which they had
agreed to be deported rather than fight their cases from
what seems to have been a living hell in the detention
center. None of the prison officers, despite copious
documentation of their illegal and immoral behavior,
including a report by the justice department's inspector
general and videotapes of them at work, has been
prosecuted, or indeed even disciplined.
To put
an outline on this ugly picture as it takes shape, look
at the polls. Frightening numbers of Americans at large
still firmly believe that Iraq was behind the World
Trade Center attack. In a recent Roper poll, apart from
a clearly delusional 12 percent who thought the war in
Iraq was going "very well", another 43 percent though it
was going "fairly well".
Previous polls would
suggest that a strong correlation between those who get
their news from cable television like MSNBC and Fox and
those who think that the war is going well, that Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction had been found, and that
Saddam was behind September 11. It is likely that those
reservists and National Guard troops called up and sent
to Iraq to staff the Abu Ghraib prison fervently
believed all those impossible things before breakfast.
Certainly, they had not been told about the
Geneva Conventions, and in a way, why should they, when
the White House's closest ally agrees with those
military legal officers that the US is breaking the
Geneva Conventions in Guantanamo Bay and with its plans
for military tribunals? Indeed, why should they pay any
attention at all to international law when the
administration and its supporters repeatedly cast doubts
on its applicability to the US when it was preparing for
war without a UN mandate?
What we are seeing in
those images from Abu Ghraib prison is what happens when
people hold that the ends justify the means. What we see
in the overall picture formed by all these points is
even uglier than its separate parts. In fact, as history
teaches us, the means shape the end. And the end is that
every one of those prisoners abused in that prison, all
of their families, and the hundreds of millions of Arabs
and Muslims who think that those prisoners were tortured
because they were Arab and Muslim like themselves, will
never believe a word the US tells them about democracy
and the rule of law again. And frankly, who can blame
them?
Over the next few weeks, the Security
Council will be considering some deeply theological
points about the transfer of sovereignty to Iraq on June
30. Phrases like limited sovereignty, or full
sovereignty but partial exercise of it, are floating in
the refined air.
The issue of the prisoners
brings that esoteric discussion to a sordid head. Will
the present Iraqi prisoners be handed over to the new
Iraqi authority? Will the multinational force hand over
any prisoners it takes? Will the force be under any
political direction by the Iraqi authorities, or does
command and control mean that the Americans can continue
to do what they like? What will be the status of those
private security contractors? Are they subject to Iraqi
laws?
In the rush to diplomatic ambiguity
necessary to get a resolution past the Security Council,
the US will certainly try to blunt those points. But
media pressure alone may ensure that they have to be
dealt with, and any such derogation from genuine
sovereignty for the Iraqi administration on July 1 will
make the plan that much more unacceptable to broad
swathes of Iraqi society, and indeed to the world. Those
hooded, humiliated and handcuffed Iraqis may have done
their country a profound, if involuntary service, in the
long run.
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