If Bush and Rumsfeld now express "outrage" at revelations of torture, it's only because they finally got caught in the act. Desperate to stem the rising tide of resistance inside Iraq, Rumsfeld personally authorized that a "Special Access Program," already in use in Afghanistan, which "encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation" of prisoners be applied in Iraq. According to a government consultant, the explicit photos of the prisoners were designed to blackmail their subjects into becoming spies for the US, "people (who could) be inserted back into the population...as informants." Only now that the pix have become public property, "Torturegate" threatens to not just upset the whole apple cart of Iraqi occupation but endanger plans for expanding the empire throughout the rest of the region as well. After all, sanctions against Syria, based on the same flimsy "evidence" that they used against Iraq (approved by the Democrats as well as the Republicans) recently went into effect. So no wonder they want to "move past" it as soon as possible.
Desperate to come up with yet more lies to justify prolonging the US presence in Iraq, already sinking under the body blows being dealt to it by the Iraqi resistance, Bush took to the airwaves to announce a "five point" program to the American people, who, according to all indicators, are almost as fed up with his war for oil and empire as the Iraqis are. For their part, the Iraqis have already had enough of his previous five points: sanctions, bombing, invasion, occupation and torture. The previous months had seen Shi'ites and Sunnis come together in an armed insurrection that drove the occupiers from a slew of cities across Iraq. The response of administration apologists was to expect American and Arab audiences to believe that what was in reality a war of national liberation, supported by the vast majority of the Iraqi people, was the work of a handful of Baathist "leftovers," Al Queda agents and "foreign fighters." The later rings particularly hollow coming from invaders who have not only brought thousands of their own "foreign fighters," including mercenaries, to occupy Iraq with, but are trying to get even more from NATO, the UN, or anyone else willing to take their bait. Not surprisingly, instances of torture rapidly rose at the same time that the scale and scope of the resistance increased. To be fair, however, it should be said that the mercenaries' companys were getting bonuses for the terror and torture they doled out even before the uprising began.
Like Starbucks or Duane Reades, a vast chain of American administered concentration camps has spread across Iraq, holding thousands of innocent victims swept up into the night and fog of "detention." According to the Red Cross, military intelligence itself admits that up to "70% and 90%...had been arrested by mistake." Just as in Vietnam where every "gook" was potentially "Viet Cong," in Iraq every Arab is potentially a "terrorist." The US "gulag" not only includes franchises in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, where the "Geneva Convention" was always little more than a dead letter, but in the US as well. Thousands of detainees continue to languish in US prisons, having been picked up in the days after "9/11," held without being charged for anything other than for the "crime" of being from the Middle East or the Indian subcontinent and subject to the same regimen of abuse as those in Iraq or Afghanistan. While the press and the politicians chose to focus on the exploits of the enlisted men and women whose photos have been flashed around the world, it is clear that they are being offered up as scapegoats for what the Red Cross called "a pattern and a system" sanctioned by those at the top. Thus six of the seven soldiers facing charges say that military intelligence officers ordered the abuse. Indeed, reports prepared by both the Justice and Defense departments, going back to 2002, point to administration attorneys arguing that Bush "had the constitutional authority to disregard both international treaties and federal laws banning torture" if he thought that "national security" was on the line.
Torture has long been employed by the military and the "intelligence community" against anyone anywhere who has dared to challenge the "right" of America's ruling rich to invade, occupy, pillage and plunder their countries. While many Americans who fell for Bush's lies may have been shocked and awed by the "Torturegate" revelations, none of it comes as a surprise to the people of Iraq, who know the realities of invasion and occupation all too well. Even polls taken in Iraq by the occupation authorities themselves show that over 80% of those asked want their "liberators" to leave ASAP. For however much administration apologists make try to deny it, torture is totally in line with the real aim of their invasion and occupation of Iraq, oil and empire, and the need to use force and fear to repress resistance to it. The military's use of torture goes hand in hand with their killing of thousands of Iraqi civilians in their attempt to crush the uprising in Fallujah, where ambulances, hospitals and homes were all fair game for their snipers, fighter-bombers and gunships.
During the upheavals of the 1960s, H. Rapp Brown pointed out that violence is as American as cherry pie. So too is torture. After "freeing" the Philippines from Spain, the US went on to kill almost 1 million Philippines when the ungrateful natives rose up in revolt against their "liberators." Throughout the Vietnam war, when US policy was based on destroying towns in order to save them and "only (the) fear of force (got) results (from) the Asian mind," suspected "VC" were routinely tortured in "tiger cages" or tossed out of helicopters while thousands of others were simply assassinated by the CIA's Project Phoenix. The My Lai massacre, covered up for the army by then Major Colin Powell, was no exception to the rule, it was the rule. And Vietnam itself was no exception either. Not only has the US installed and armed torture chamber regimes around the world in order to dominate the economies of these countries and repress resistance to them, but it has even set up schools and published manuals on how to do so more effectively and efficiently. The Shah of Iran, Mobutu in the Congo, Suharto in Indonesia, Pinochet in Chile; these are just a few of imperialism's more prestigious protegees. Then there's today's poster boy for "the war on terrorism," Osama Bin Laden, whose resume lists the CIA as his primary reference. When it comes to South and Central America and the Caribbean, the list of "contras," death squads and dictators made in the USA is far too long to list here. The recent coup in Haiti is just the latest in a long line of imperialist interventions in which torturers and terrorists, who were armed, aided and abetted by Washington and Wall Street, rose to power by wading through the blood of their "own" people. So while Bush and Rumsfeld may claim that violence and torture are "un-American," Martin Luther King, Jr. was far more on the money when he pointed out that "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world ...(was the US) government."
Nor is torture something confined to far-away places like Iraq or Afghanistan. The same methods employed in Iraq have long been standard fare in America's prisons, which hold the largest collection of inmates anywhere in the western world, most of them the victims of Bill Clinton's phony "war on drugs," which in reality was a war on poor Black and Latino youth. Even the NY Times has been forced to admit that "physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern." Not surprisingly, many of the soldiers whose faces appeared in the torture photos were prison guards before they joined the military. Those whose brutality was even too much for the US prison system to stomach had no trouble getting jobs doing the same thing in Iraq. As for their boss, George Bush, as governor of Texas, not only was he the king of capital punishment but he presided over a prison system that was notoriously riddled with inmate abuse. Under Rudy Giuliani, another "hero" of "9/11, NYC became the police brutality capital of the US. Remember Anthony Biaz, Abner Luima, Amado Diallo and Patrick Dorismond? For America's racist rulers, Black and Latino lives come as cheap here as Arab ones do in the Middle East. While Bush claims to be fighting for "freedom" in Iraq, his administration has run roughshod over democratic rights at home with laws like the USA PATRIOT Act (supported by Bush's alleged "opponent" John Kerry) while his buddy Bloomberg is once again trying to deny anti-war activists their rights to rally in NYC. And while Arabs may have become the bete noir of the racist regime's war mongering and security hysteria after "9/11," Black people have been its victims from day one; from slavery to segregation to racial profiling. That is after Native Americans were systematically slaughtered to make way for capitalism's conquest of the continent.
Not only would the Bush gang have the public believe that instances of torture are few and far between but that they are the sole stain on an otherwise unblemished record of altruistic American actions in Iraq. Apparently exporting "democracy" is a rather heavy burden for the white man to bear. So Iraqis should be grateful for being bombed, starved, invaded, occupied, pillaged and plundered, be good sports and grin and bear the torture and terror as an unfortunate excess on the part of a few of their "liberators." After all, "democracy," as Bush says, "isn't perfect." He should know, never having been elected in the first place. If "mistakes are made," that is, if someone gets caught out in the open doing what is normally done behind closed doors, a whitewash, "independent," of course, in which a subordinate or two is hung out to dry, will set things straight. First to go was Ahmed Chalabi, who as low man on the totem poll of imperialist accomplices, is now being blamed by both the NY Times and Newsweek for fooling both of them...and the government, no less, into believing his tall tales about "WMDs." "It looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in" bemoaned the Times. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.
Meanwhile the "democracy" Bush claims to be bringing to Iraq doesn't include elections anymore than it includes jobs, electricity or clean and running water. So when the US pretends to "turn over" authority to the Iraqis at the end of June, so that Bush can claim "mission accomplished" in time for the US elections, that "authority" won't include control over the military or even the ability to pass any new laws. Just "so that it no longer looks like occupation" as Colin Powell told a British newspaper. And no wonder. The occupiers already used their bayonets to write their own laws...legalizing their theft of anything and everything that wasn't nailed down under the guise of privatizing it. Real power will lie with the new American ambassador, John Negroponte, who learned his "democracy" organizing death squads for Reagan in Central America in the 1980s and who will now control the cashbox for "reconstruction," ie, handouts to American corporations. Every ministry will be controlled by teams of American "experts" installed inside them and the Iraqis won't even be able to control their own oil revenues without outside approval. Fourteen American military bases will remain as well, "guests" of the US installed government, to make sure that the Iraqis don't get any funny ideas about taking "freedom" too seriously and to remind the rest of the region who the new landlord is. In spite of all the talk about torture, the US will remain in control of two maximum security prisons, chock full of "detainees," including Abu Ghraib, until Bush's buddies at Halliburton get to build a new one to replace it, no doubt at the expense of the American taxpayer.
Only now that the occupation is meeting stiff resistance from the Iraqis and its true face has been exposed by the torture photos, this whole house of cards threatens to come down. Hence the rush to "hand over" authority even before the deadline date of June 30. Even Chalabi was forced to denounce the "sovereignty" sham, making his replacement by Iyad Allawi, another CIA "asset" who was quick to "invite" US forces to "stay on" as "guests," necessary. The UN, which endorsed the occupation just as it gave its blessing to the sanctions that devastated Iraq for the previous 12 years, has now become "relevant"again by giving its seal of approval to this farce. It can provide a "humanitarian" figleaf to cover continuing colonialism in Iraq, or, better still, foot part of the bill or provide some of the cannon fodder. That is as long as they give their blessing to there being American hands on the oil spigots as well as American command over the troops protecting them. In the meantime, American taxpayers are expected to ante up another $25 to $50 billion to keep the terror and torture going even if it means the further gutting of social programs in the US. Just as Democrats and Republicans both supported the war, they both continue to support the occupation. While the legion of "leaks" over torture and the endless exposes of government lies are indicative of a split amongst the ruling rich, the only "difference" being "debated" is over how to better enforce and implement occupation, not how and when to end it. Yet it is the war and the occupation themselves that are the real crimes; crimes not only against the Iraqi people, but against the American people, who will have to pay for and die for policies abroad that only benefit the same bosses who rob and rip them off at home. Imperialist war is the continuation of capitalist "globalization" by means more forceful than those usually used (the IMF, WTO, World Bank) and the war in Iraq, just like its big brother, "the war on terror" is nothing more than an attempt by America's ruling rich to turn as much of the world as possible into their private preserve for pillage and plunder. Just as the combined resistance of the Vietnamese people and the antiwar movement in the sixties (and their influence on the GIs) ended that war, so too will the joint efforts of the Iraqi resistance and today's antiwar movement be necessary to do the same today. That is, providing lesser-evil liberals like the leaders of UFPJ don't derail, demoralize and demobilize the mass movement in order to ally themselves with the pro-war Democrat John Kerry in the name of "Anybody But Bush" instead.