H.D.S. GREENWAY
Bush's damage control comes too lateAMERICAN officials are quick to say that the behavior of a few torturers shouldn't overshadow the good that the majority of Americans are trying to do in Iraq. They are right. It shouldn't. But it does, and it will all over the world, and no number of interviews with President Bush on Arab TV is going to put it right.
Senator Joseph Biden of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee spoke the truth when he said these revelations of abusing Iraqi prisoners constitute the "single most undermining act in a decade in the region," and that it had caused "phenomenal damage." The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Richard Myers, said there was "no evidence of systematic abuse," but as the revelations roll on, it is becoming abundantly clear that there was. There have been leaks coming from Afghanistan and Guantanamo of abuse of prisoners for too long now to think otherwise. Amnesty International said it has uncovered "a pattern of torture" by coalition forces in Iraq. President Bush was right to tell Donald Rumsfeld that he wanted appropriate action taken against those responsible for these "shameful, appalling acts," but he still went on campaigning with his stump speech saying that because of his actions in Iraq, "torture cells are closed." Try telling that to Iraqis. For much of the world, the truth lies in the appalling pictures. Of course, it is ridiculous to compare these abuses committed by American prison guards with the crimes of Saddam Hussein against his own people, and prisons invariably bring out the sadists among us. But that these crimes were committed by foreigners occupying an Arab land is having an electric effect throughout the Arab world and beyond. That these acts took place in Abu Ghraib prison, which was so infamous for Saddam's misdeeds, carries its own freight. It is as if the US occupation force in Germany after World War II decided to use Dachau for their interrogation center. Indeed, the entire incident seems to illustrate the haphazard way the Pentagon is running this war. General Myers has admitted that he did not even read the 53-page report on prison abuses completed more that two months ago by his own investigators. Rumsfeld said he hadn't finished reading it. The hapless General Janis Karpinski has been quoted as saying back in January that something "very, very bad" was going on in the prison under her charge. The Pentagon hoped to keep it a secret. One of the more distressing sidebars to this sorry tale is the amount of outsourcing to private enterprise the Pentagon is willing to allow in the pacification of Iraq, with civilians handling security matters that traditionally fall to the military to perform. Military personnel who engaged in these hideous acts may be punished, but it is unclear that anything will happen to the subcontractors of torture. Continued... |
