@@ Western use of "torture" is now called "abuse" @@
Arash
November 12, 2005
Torture’s out. Now they call it abuse
No screaming, no cries of agony, no shrieks of pain. Yes, it sounds much better,
doesn’t it?
By Robert Fisk
"Prevail" is the "in" word in America just now. We are not going to "win" in Iraq -
because we did that in 2003, didn’t we, when we stormed up to Baghdad and toppled
Saddam? Then George Bush declared "Mission Accomplished". So now we must "prevail".
That’s what F. J. "Bing" West (http://www.westwrite.com), ex-soldier and former
assistant secretary for International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration
said this week. Plugging his new book - "No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the
Battle for Fallujah" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0553804022) - he
gave a frightening outline of what lies in store for the Sunni Muslims of Iraq.
I was sitting a few feet from Bing West - plugging my own book - as he explained to
the great and the good of New York how General Casey was imposing curfews on the
Sunni cities of Iraq, one after the other, how if the Sunnis did not accept democracy
they would be "occupied" (he used that word) by Iraqi troops until they did accept
democracy. He talked about the "valour" of American troops - there was no word of
Iraq’s monstrous suffering - and insisted that America must "prevail" because a
"Jihadist" victory was unthinkable. I applied the Duke of Wellington’s
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Wellesley%2C_1st_Duke_of_Wellington) Waterloo
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Waterloo) remark about his soldiers to Bing
West. I don’t know if he frightened the enemy, I told the audience, but by God Bing
frightened me.
Our appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations - housed in a 58th Street
townhouse of deep sofas and fearfully strong air conditioning (it was early November
for God’s sake) - was part of a series entitled "Iraq: The Way Forward".
Iraq: The Way Forward Series
http://www.cfr.org/publication/9191/iraq.html
http://www.cfr.org/publication/9083/iraq.html
http://www.cfr.org/publication/9097/iraq.html
"Forward", I asked myself? Iraq is a catastrophe. Bing West might believe he was
going to "prevail" over his "Jihadists" but all I could say was that the American
project in Iraq was over, that it was a colossal tragedy for the Iraqis dying in
Baghdad alone at the rate of 1000 a month, that the Americans must leave if peace was
to be restored and that the sooner they left the better.
Many in the audience were clearly of the same mind. One elderly gentleman quietly
demolished Bing’s presentation by describing the massive damage to Fallujah when it
was "liberated" by the Americans for the third time last November.
I gently outlined the folk that Bing’s soldiers and diplomats would have to talk to
if they were to disentangle themselves from this mess - I included Iraqi ex-officers
who were leaders of the non-suicidal part of the insurgency and to whom would fall
the task of dealing with the "Jihadists" once Bing’s lads left Iraq.
To get out, I said, the Americans would need the help of Iran and Syria, countries
which the Bush administration is currently (and not without reason) vilifying.
Silence greeted this observation.
It was a strange week to be in America. In Washington, Ahmed Chalabi, one of Iraq’s
three deputy prime ministers, turned up to show how clean his hands were. I had to
remind myself constantly that Chalabi was convicted in absentia in Jordan of massive
bank fraud. It was Chalabi who supplied New York Times reporter Judith Miller
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller_%28journalist%29) with all the false
information about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. It was Chalabi’s fellow
defectors who persuaded the Bush administration that these weapons existed. It was
Chalabi who was accused only last year of giving American intelligence secrets to
Iran. It is Chalabi who is still being investigated by the FBI.
But Chalabi spoke to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, AEI
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/aei.php) in Washington, refused to make the
slightest apology to the United States, and then went on - wait for it - to meetings
with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and national security adviser Stephen Hadley
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/hadley/hadley.php). Vice-President Cheney and
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82) also
agreed to see him.
A Foreign Policy Briefing from Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi
http://www.aei.org/events/type.upcoming,eventID.1192,filter.all/event_detail.asp
By contrast, Chalabi’s gullible conservative dupe was subjected to a truly vicious
interview in The Washington Post after she resigned from her paper over the Libby
"Plame-Gate" leak (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair). A "parade of Judys"
appeared at her interview, Washington Post reporter Lynne Duke wrote. "Outraged Judy.
Saddened Judy. Charming Judy. Conspiratorial Judy. Judy, the star New York Times
reporter turned beleaguered victim of the gossip-mongers ..." proclaiming her
intention to make no apologies for writing about threats to the United States, Judy
Miller did so "emphatically almost frantically, her crusading eyes brimming with
tears". Ouch.
I can only reflect on how strange the response of the American media has become to
the folly and collapse and anarchy of Iraq. It’s Judy’s old mate Chalabi who should
be getting this treatment but no, he’s back to his old tricks of spinning and
manipulating the Bush administration while the American press tears one of its
reporters apart for compensation.
It’s like living in a prism in New York and Washington these days. "Torture" is out.
No one tortures in Iraq
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse) or Afghanistan
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagram_torture_and_prisoner_abuse) or Guantanamo
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Delta).
What Americans do to their prisoners is "abuse" and there was a wonderful moment this
week when Amy Goodman, who is every leftist’s dream, showed a clip from Pontecorvo’s
wonderful 1965 movie The Battle of Algiers
(http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/09/1538221) on her Democracy Now
programme. "Colonel Mathieu" - the film is semi-fictional - was shown explaining why
torture was necessary to safeguard French lives. Then up popped Bush’s real
spokesman, Scott McClellan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_McClellan), to say
that while he would not discuss interrogation methods, the primary aim of the
administration was to safeguard American lives.
American journalists now refer to "abuse laws" rather than torture laws. Yes, abuse
sounds so much better, doesn’t it? No screaming, no cries of agony when you’re
abused. No shrieks of pain. No discussion of the state of mind of the animals
perpetrating this abuse on our behalf. And its as well to remember that the
government of Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara has decided it’s quite all right to use
information gleaned from this sadism. Even Jack Straw agrees with this.
So it was a relief to drive down to the U.S. National Archives
(http://www.archives.gov) in Maryland to research America’s attempts to produce an
Arab democracy after the First World War, one giant modern Arab state from the
Turkish border to the Atlantic coast of Morocco. U.S. soldiers and diplomats tried to
bring this about in one brief, shining moment of American history in the Middle East.
Alas, President Woodrow Wilson died; America became isolationist, and the British and
French victors chopped up the Middle East for their own ends and produced the tragedy
with which we are confronted today. Prevail, indeed.