[News] Torture started at the very top < By Ahdaf Soueif

[News at freedomarchives.org]

This torture started at the very top

A profound racism infects the US and British establishments

Ahdaf Soueif
Wednesday May 5, 2004
The Guardian

The media in this country is politely shocked at photos of Iraqis being 
tortured and humiliated by US and British soldiers. A BBC1 news presenter 
says the pictures seem to have been "merely mementos". That's all right, 
then. The folks at home will have a good laugh and paste them into the 
family album.

In the first half of the last century, the French in Algeria and Morocco 
used to send home postcards of prostitutes posing sullenly, with breasts 
bared and skirts pulled up to their thighs, over captions like "Le harem 
Arabe" or "Fille Mauresque". The Americans have pushed it further: their 
pornography of occupation is at once more childish, playful, crude and 
sinister than that of "old Europe". Also, we assume the prostitutes were paid.

BBC commentators and British politicians have been reminding us that the 
soldiers' activities "do not compare with Saddam Hussein's systematic 
tortures and executions". Hussein is now the moral compass of the west.

The media are fearful that these images will go down badly in the Arab 
world because "they show Muslim men being humiliated by American women". 
Again the not-so-subtle reduction of the Arab world to an entity that 
reacts only to religious prodding. Actually the photographs have confirmed 
people's belief that the US and Britain are not in Iraq as an act of 
goodwill. They have strengthened the feeling that there is a deep racism 
underlying the occupiers' attitudes to Arabs, Muslims and the third world 
generally.

It was only a matter of time. In the past year the world has seen photos of 
many Iraqis stripped with their wrists tied behind their backs with plastic 
cord. At first we could look into their eyes and bear witness to what was 
happening. Then they were bagged. At no point was there an outcry.

We have grown used to seeing Arab men bound and hooded, in the occupied 
territories and Gaza. Israel advises the US on how to control civilians and 
interrogate them. Ariel Sharon has made the Israeli army's "rules of 
engagement" available to the US military. The world notes the similarity 
between the practices of the US army in Iraq and those of the Israeli army 
in Palestine. There is evidence that scenes like the ones now shocking the 
world have been common in "Facility 1391" (Israel's secret prison), and 
some say in other jails. We just haven't seen the photos.

It is no use for US spokesmen to talk about "rogue elements", how 
"contractors" are not answerable to the military and how Staff Sergeant 
Chip Frederick had not read the Geneva conventions before taking charge of 
prisoners at Abu Ghraib. This abuse is going to turn out to be widespread. 
Amnesty International has already said it is systematic.

The acts in the photos being flashed across the networks would not have 
taken place but for the profound racism that infects the American and 
British establishments. At squaddie level, Sarah Oliver reports in the Mail 
on Sunday that "the British soldiers loathe the dirtiness of Iraq and the 
native population's slothfulness, kleptomania and determination to do as 
little as possible for themselves".

There have been reports of US troops outside Falluja talking of the fun of 
being a sniper, of the different ways to kill people, of the "rat's nest" 
that needs cleaning out. Some will say soldiers will be soldiers. But that 
language has been used by neocons at the heart of the US administration; 
both Kenneth Adelman and Paul Wolfowitz have spoken of "snakes" and 
"draining the swamps" in the "uncivilised parts of the world". It is 
implicit in the US administration's position that anyone who does not agree 
that all of history has been moving towards a glorious pinnacle expressed 
in the US political, ideological and economic system has "rejected 
modernity"; that it is America's mission to civilise and to punish.

I've seen a photo of a young American soldier with two Iraqi boys. There is 
no nakedness or torture, but it is no less nasty for that. The boys are 
holding a cardboard sign. They and the soldier are smiling and doing a 
thumbs up. He is pointing at the cardboard sign, on which he's written: 
"Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad. then he knocked up my sister!" Imagine the 
scene: Lance Corporal Boudreaux, a soldier on a liberating, civilising 
mission, asks the natives to pose for a "memento". He gives them the sign 
to hold. What lie did he tell them about its message? "Iraq is liberated", 
or "Mission accomplished"? And who, in this scene, is the more civilised?

The one good thing in all of this is that there are soldiers in the US and 
British armies who could not live with what was happening and who blew the 
whistle. The world needs to see the photos coming out of Iraq not as 
"deviant" but as an authentic message from the heart of the thought system 
that is seeking to control our planet.

· Ahdaf Soueif's collected essays will be published by Bloomsbury in the 
autumn



Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20040505/b3bcb8c2/attachment.htm>