It’s all there in the cheesy grin of the US army’s Specialist Charles Graner and Private Lynddie England as they beam triumphantly for the camera over the Iraqi captives lying in a tangle on the floor in front of them – the sheer joy of torture. In image after image, the weaponless American soldiers can be seen ritually dominating their terrorised prisoners in the same way a hunter poses with his dead prey. Tellingly, the hooded and naked Iraqis have no identity; they are lumps of human meat to be ordered around at will by their captors.
Less funny ha ha is the picture of an unnamed prisoner, packed in ice, who somehow got beaten to death by his American interrogators in Abu Ghraib prison before his battered body was gleefully snapped as another war souvenir.
More than any other images, the US army’s 372nd Military Police Company’s souvenir pics from Abu Ghraib reveal the failure of America’s mission in Iraq. Within months the liberators have turned torturers, just as the liberated have become a despised subhuman enemy. The war in Iraq is not going well.
No western democracy fights on a single front; there is always the media war and the real war. From Bosnia to Afghanistan, our war against the enemy is always a righteous struggle against the evil forces of terrorism or oppression. Western soldiers fight with honour and do not rape, torture or indiscriminately murder prisoners. War reporters embedded with the troops do pieces to camera as tanks manoeuvre in the desert dunes behind them. And in general, from either patriotism or an inability to report from the battle zone independently, most western media outlets follow their government’s line.
Despite the recent controversy over alleged abuse pictures printed in the Daily Mirror, the British army’s role in Basra is still largely being depicted as a glorified nanny service helping out with Iraqi nation-building.
Perhaps we need to believe that. But real wars are never like the script. The American war against the Taliban in Afghanistan has become an alliance of convenience with a series of murderous warlords and heroin traders whose human rights record is among the worst in the world. In the course of saving Iraq from Saddam Hussein, western soldiers have killed 16,000 Iraqis using all of the huge firepower under their command against a largely defenceless population.
Nor is every western soldier an extra from Saving Private Ryan. The same qualities of aggression, submission to authority and group solidarity that make good military material also make soldiers easy to manipulate into fighting a “dirty war”. A good intelligence officer and a good torturer can wear the same uniform. Or, as we have just shockingly learned from Abu Ghraib, our governments can, in the new era of privatisation, just hire in the torturing talent from the vast array of private defence firms that offer to service every need of the Pentagon.
As part of the media script, we like to believe that there is still some kind of democratic scrutiny of the wars that are being fought in our name. Such naivety is a fallacy. Until this month, the role of private security firms such as CACI International, whose operatives helped run the brutal interrogations at Abu Ghraib, was totally unknown. The real war is only rarely glimpsed.
Torture by western soldiers is not new. In 1957, France’s General Jacques Massu ordered the systematic brutalisation of thousands of Algerian FLN suspects in the notorious Battle of Algiers. Captured guerrillas were routinely beaten and half-drowned, their genitals electrocuted. Many died under interrogation by French paratroopers.
In Vietnam in the 1960s, a CIA paramilitary rural assassination campaign known as Operation Phoenix resulted in the deaths of more than 20,000 suspected Vietcong guerrillas after prolonged torture sessions.
And even in Ulster, in historic terms the British armed forces’ most restricted operational zone, republican terrorist suspects were tortured, in the early 1970s, on the direct orders of senior army commanders. More than a dozen IRA suspects were hooded, forced to stand in painful, stretched positions against walls, fed “white noise” through headphones and deprived of food, water and sleep. If the men refused to maintain their agonising positions, they were beaten. According to the army’s reasoning, these ” interrogations in depth” would quickly break the suspect’s will and provide a quick and invaluable insight into the nascent IRA. Little real intelligence was ever obtained.
The Irish were lucky. The British army’s torture techniques in Ulster were a refinement of the ferocious torture practices they had developed in Kenya and Cyprus, suppressing far more violent insurgency struggles there. But, interestingly, the torturers felt the same need to record their dominance of the enemy. In his autobiography, the republican leader Gerry Adams relates how he was arrested and violently beaten by plain-clothes soldiers at Springfield Road police station in 1973. Adams, then the IRA’s most senior officer in Belfast, says he was kicked in the kidneys and the groin and was forced to squat in the corner of his cell with a bucket over his head. Another soldier then stubbed out a cigarette on Adams’s wrist. Just before Adams was handed over to the RUC, the soldiers from the 2nd Battalion Light Infantry made him pose alongside them for group photographs. The event is even recorded in the Light Infantry’s regimental history – an elusive enemy powerless and at last within range of your fist.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about the Abu Ghraib controversy is just how quickly the US army’s military policemen flipped from being soldiers into being torturers. The 372nd Military Police Company, six of whose members have been charged with torture offences, was first sent to Iraq in the spring of 2003 for light traffic duties. In October, it was reassigned to prison guard duty at Abu Ghraib, a notorious torture centre under the old Saddam regime. The 372nd Company did have some experience of penal systems. The leading enlisted man, Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, had worked for the Virginia State prison system for seven years. Graner had also worked as a prison guard. The torture of Iraqi prisoners is said to have begun straight away.
The abuse was centred in a special unit of Abu Ghraib prison, where the most dangerous Iraqi prisoners were held prior to or during interrogation by the CIA, military intelligence or private contractor specialists. In his defence, Frederick claims he ran a regime of terror, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliations and casual beatings at the behest of his military superiors in order to soften up prisoners for those interrogators.
The souvenir pictures that so utterly damn Frederick and his co-accused are, of course, just happy torturer snaps. The really nasty stuff – sodomising prisoners with chemical lights or pouring phosphoric acid over their genitals or unleashing military attack dogs or the alleged rape of a young prisoner – never got digitally recorded.
But the pictures still tell an awful story. There is nothing covert about them. Graner and England are not concerned about being interrupted by a superior authority as they force their prisoners to masturbate for their amusement or flop down on the floor in a human pyramid. England, no more than eight stone, is unafraid of being inches away from a squad of hostile, naked prisoners. She knows the Iraqis are all already under her control, all already terrorised into submission. These “animals”, Frederick’s favourite description of his prisoners, would never dare lay a hand on her. The prisoners are less than human.
Frederick claims that the private contractors and military intelligence were the dominant force within the prison and that the chain of military command above was aware of what was going on. He was, in the time-honoured phrase, just acting under orders. There is evidence to support his claim: Major General Antonio Taguba, the American officer responsible for investigating the Abu Ghraib abuses, has recommended that more senior military figures, including a former director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Centre, Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, should also be held accountable.
But it’s all too late. The path of the US war in Iraq is unlikely to be influenced by how many senior American officers now lose their stripes. The 372nd Military Police Company’s torture snaps are an indictment not just of individuals, but also of the entire US military machine in Iraq. Such systematic and sustained human rights abuse over three months is not the work of a small squad of isolated sadists.
In reality, the military policemen and women of the 372nd Military Police Company who did the torturing picked up their cues from the rest of the US military command structure. The captives who arrived at the prison gates had already been kept hooded and bound for hours by the soldiers who arrested and processed them. There was no appeal against arrest or evidence to justify it. The rule of law in Iraq has long been replaced by the suspicion of US intelligence. As Iraqi resistance has stiffened, every Iraqi has become a potential suspect.
Abu Ghraib is just another link in a military penal chain in which the Iraqis were dehumanised intelligence cargo and a US private soldier potentially had the power of life and death over them. Frederick and his co-defendants tortured their prisoners because their superiors wanted them to and because there was no one to stop them. Their own degradation as potential war criminals was invisible to them. When Graner and England looked at their handiwork on the CD drive, all they could see was their own joyful power over a defeated supine enemy, at last within range of a solid American fist.
There is no going back. America said it came to Iraq to liberate its citizens, but instead has fallen into a sullied war of imperial conquest against a hostile native population. The only way it will ever escape that prison is for its armies finally to withdraw in defeat.
Kevin Toolis is the New Statesman terrorism correspondent
kevintoolis@hotmail.com
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