[News] Robert Fisk: Why Have We Suddenly Forgotten Abu Ghraib?

Tue Sep 28 18:58:23 EDT 2004

<http://www.counterpunch.com/>http://www.counterpunch.com

September 28, 2004

Why Have We Suddenly Forgotten Abu Ghraib?

"Children, Ardent for Some Desperate Glory"

By ROBERT FISK
The Independent

We are now in the greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis. That’s 
how we run the Iraq waror the Second Iraq War as Lord Blair of Kut 
al-Amara would now have us believe. Hostages are paraded in orange 
tracksuits to remind us of Guantanamo Bay. Kidnappers demand the release of 
women held prisoner by the Americans. Abu Ghraib is what they are talking 
about. Abu Ghraib? Anyone remember Abu Ghraib? Remember those dirty little 
snapshots? But don’t worry. This wasn’t the America George Bush recognised, 
and besides we’re punishing the bad apples, aren’t we? Women? Why, there 
are only a couple of dames leftand they are “Dr Germ” and “Dr Anthrax”.

But Arabs do not forget so easily. It was a Lebanese woman, Samia Melki, 
who first understood the true semantics of those Abu Ghraib photographs for 
the Arab world. The naked Iraqi, his body smeared with excrement, back to 
the camera, arms stretched out before the butch and blond American with a 
stick, possessed, she wrote in CounterPunch, 
“<http://www.counterpunch.com/melki06032004.html>all the drama and 
contrasting colours of a Caravaggio painting”.

The best of Baroque art invites the viewer to be part of the artwork. 
“Forced to walk in a straight line with his legs crossed, his torso 
slightly twisted and arms spread out for balance, the Iraqi prisoner’s 
toned body, accentuated by the excrement and the bad lighting, stretches 
out in crucifix form. Exuding a dignity long denied, the Arab is suffering 
for the world’s sins.”

And that, I fear, is the least of the suffering that has gone on at Abu 
Ghraib. For what happened to all those videos which members of Congress 
were allowed to watch in secret and which wethe publicwere not permitted 
to see? Why have we suddenly forgotten about Abu Ghraib? Seymour Hersh, the 
journalist who broke the Abu Ghraib storyand one of the only journalists 
in America who is doing his jobhas spoken publicly about what else 
happened in that terrible jail.

I’m indebted to a reader for the following extract from a recent Hersh 
lecture: “Some of the worst things that happened that you don’t know about. 
OK? Videos. There are women there. Some of you may have read that they were 
passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu 
Ghraib... The women were passing messages out saying please come and kill 
me because of what’s happened. And basically what happened is that those 
women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been 
recorded, the boys were sodomised, with the cameras rolling, and the worst 
above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking...”

Already, however, we have forgotten this. Just as we must no longer talk 
about weapons of mass destruction. For as the details slowly emerge of the 
desperate efforts of Bush and Blair to find these non-existent nasties, I 
don’t know whether to laugh or cry. US mobile site survey teams managed, at 
one point, to smash into a former Iraqi secret police headquarters in 
Baghdad, only to find a padlocked inner door. Here, they believed, they 
would find the horrors that Bush and Blair were praying for. And what did 
they find behind the second door? A vast emporium of brand new vacuum 
cleaners. At Ba’ath party headquarters, another teamled by a Major Kenneth 
Dealbelieved they had discovered secret documents which would reveal 
Saddam’s weapons’ programme. The papers turned out to be an Arabic 
translation of A J P Taylor’s The Struggle for Mastery in Europe. Perhaps 
Bush and Blair should read it.

So as we continue to stagger down the crumbling stairway of our own ghastly 
making, we must listen to bigger and bigger whoppers. Iyad Allawi, the 
puppet prime ministerstill deferentially called “interim prime minister” 
by many of my reporter chumsinsists that elections will be held in January 
even though he has less control of the Iraqi capital (let alone the rest of 
the country) than the mayor of Baghdad. The ex-CIA agent, who obediently 
refused to free the two women prisoners the moment Washington gave him 
instructions not to do so, dutifully trots over to London and on to 
Washington to shore up more of the Blair-Bush lies.

Second Iraq War indeed. How much more of this tomfoolery are we, the 
public, expected to stomach? We are fighting in “the crucible of global 
terrorism”, according to Lord Blair of Kut. What are we to make of this 
nonsense? Of course, he didn’t tell us we were going to have a Second Iraq 
War when he helped to start the First Iraq War, did he? And he didn’t tell 
the Iraqis that, did he? No, we had come to “liberate” them. So let’s just 
remember the crisis before the crisis before the crisis. Let’s go back to 
last November when our Prime Minister was addressing the Lord Mayor’s 
banquet. The Iraq war, he informed us thenand presumably he was still 
referring to the First Iraq Warwas “the battle of seminal importance for 
the early 21st century”.

Well, he can say that again. But just listen to what else Lord Blair of Kut 
informed us about the war. “It will define relations between the Muslim 
world and the West. It will influence profoundly the development of Arab 
states and the Middle East. It will have far-reaching implications for the 
future of American and Western diplomacy.”

And he can say that again, can’t he? For it is difficult to think of 
anything more profoundly dangerous for us, for the West, for the Middle 
East, for Christians and Muslims since the Second World Warthe real second 
war, that isthan Blair’s war in Iraq. And Iraq, remember, was going to be 
the model for the whole Middle East. Every Arab state would want to be like 
Iraq. Iraq would be the catalystperhaps even the “crucible”of the new 
Middle East. Spare me the hollow laughter.

I have been struck these past few weeks how very many of the letters I’ve 
received from readers come from men and women who fought in the Second 
World War, who argue ferociously that Blair and Bush should never be 
allowed to compare this quagmire with the real struggle against evil which 
they waged more than half a century ago.

“I, now 90, remember the men maimed in body and mind who haunted the lanes 
in rural Wales where I grew up in the years after 1918,” Robert Parry wrote 
to me. “For this reason, Owen’s ‘Dulce et decorum est’ remains for me the 
ultimate expression of the reality of death in war, made now more horrific 
by American ‘targeted’ bombing and the suicide bombers. We need a new 
Wilfred Owen to open our eyes and consciences, but until one appears this 
great poem must be given space to speak again.” It would be difficult to 
find a more eloquent rejoinder to the infantile nonsense now being peddled 
by our Prime Minister.

Not for many years has there been such a gapin America as well as 
Britainbetween the people and the government they elected. Blair’s most 
recent remarks are speeches madeto quote that Owen poem“to children 
ardent for some desperate glory”. Ken Bigley’s blindfolded face is our 
latest greatest crisis. But let’s not forget what went before.

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560254424/counterpunchmaga>Pity 
the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book, 
<http://www.easycarts.net/ecarts/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Bookshop.html>The 
Politics of Anti-Semitism.

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