Bush and Rumsfeld Pretend Not to Know About Iraqi Abuse Photos
Commentary
~ May 8, 2004: Despite assertions from George Bush and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that they were in the dark about the gross American violations of human rights committed by U.S. troops in Iraq, the facts say otherwise. Both Bush and Rumsfeld were not only aware of the abuse, they probably actually even encouraged it.
The latest images, published in The Washington Post, include one of Private First Class Lynndie England holding a leash attached to a naked Iraqi on a prison floor. Another images shows the same young woman giving a thumbs-up sign next to a pile of naked Iraqis.
International and Iraqi human rights officials have blasted U.S. officials for repeatedly ignoring human rights monitors' repeated pleas for official investigations of American abuse, torture and killings of Iraqi prisoners over the past year. They say the abuses are widespread in Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere the U.S. has a military presence.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is responsible for monitoring the conditions of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, told journalists on Friday that it had warned U.S. officials of abuse of prisoners in Iraq more than a year ago, shortly after the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion.
Speaking to members of the U.S. Congress on Friday, Rumsfeld accepted responsibility for the abuses, and even admitted that the military had a stack of similar photos from its own investigation that ended in March. Disingenuously, Rumsfeld denied having ever seen the photos even though they were presented to him more than a month ago.
Rumsfeld conceded, however, that the military investigators had even more pictures, and even videos, of an even greater "sadistic, cruel and inhuman" nature.
The New York Times quotes a senior Defense Department official as saying the vast majority of the photos the Army investigators possessed are “pornographic pictures involving only American soldiers.”
What are these American soldiers doing over there producing pornographic images of one another? We are losing hundreds of American lives, killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, spending untold billions of taxpayer dollars and these soldiers are taking pictures of each other having sex?
Evidence of Premeditated Torture
The Globe and Mail points out that the images that the world has seen thus far symbolize the worst possible combination of insults in the Arab culture. The photos combine everything that is considered most shameful: “the display of naked flesh; the use of dogs and dog-like treatment in human company; the removal of space between people and forced contact, grovelling and prostration; physical and intimate touching by strangers; nudity and sexual exposure before other men; homosexual contact; the humiliation of men in front of women; filth; enslavement.”
The effect on Arabs of such humiliations is well known to U.S. military-intelligence interrogation teams. The teams in Iraq were reportedly trained at the U.S. Army interrogation school in Fort Huachuca, Ariz., where the Globe and Mail quotes interrogation instructor John Giersdorf as bragging in 2002 that his job “is just a hair's breadth away from being an illegal specialty under the Geneva Convention.”
A Wall Street Journal journalist who was granted a rare visit to Fort Huachuca reported that recruits are “taught 30 interrogation techniques, many of them based on shame and humiliation.”
The Journal quoted the training manual from Fort Huachuca as saying, when conducting interrogations, soldiers should “prey on a prisoner's ethnic stereotypes, sexual urges and religious prejudices, his fear for his family's safety or his resentment of his fellows.”
It looks like the horrific treatment of the Iraqi prisoners was right in line with the training provided, and was condoned and even ordered by superiors right up the chain of command to Rumsfeld and Bush.
Commentary
~ May 8, 2004: Despite assertions from George Bush and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that they were in the dark about the gross American violations of human rights committed by U.S. troops in Iraq, the facts say otherwise. Both Bush and Rumsfeld were not only aware of the abuse, they probably actually even encouraged it. 