[News] Torture, Slaughter and Lies
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Wed Dec 24 12:08:43 EST 2008
http://www.counterpunch.org/cloughley12242008.html
December 24, 2008
War With Contempt for Civilians
Torture, Slaughter and Lies
By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY
In September an Afghan journalist, Jawed Ahmad,
was released from a US military prison in
Afghanistan where his jailers " broke two of my
ribs during the beatings." He worked for Canadian
TV and the BBC, among other media outlets, and he
had done nothing wrong. That is obvious, because
he was freed without charge after a year of
hellish treatment at the hands of uniformed filth
whose claim to being human is at best feeble. If
there had been the slightest genuine suspicion
that he had committed a crime he should have been
put on trial, but that is not the way the US
system works, in these horrible days. Bush policy
in Iraq and Afghanistan is never to admit that
anyone can be innocent because everyone arrested
is automatically guilty. But will it get any
better under Obama? Can he alter what has become
normal behavior on the part of the robotic minions of the commander-in-chief?
In February Jawed Ahmad was declared an "enemy
combatant," which is a glib catch-all description
used by Washington's foulest to describe any
foreigner who, in shades of the horrible McCarthy
years, they suspect of possibly being involved in
what they term anti-American activities. These
victim of hysteria, of whom there are countless
thousands around the world, are locked up in
prisons where their treatment varies from casual
brutality to hideous torture. From the
British-owned, US-leased island of Diego Garcia
in the Indian Ocean to the US colonial enclave at
Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, by way of Bagram and
Kandahar in Afghanistan and equally horrible
prisons in Iraq, the misery of innocent or even
guilty detainees casts a dreadful blot on what
the world used to think was a fair and free democracy.
Two Afghans were beaten to death by American
soldiers in Bagram in 2002 (and these are the
ones we know about). As recorded by McClatchy
Newspapers "Spc. Jeremy Callaway, who admitted to
striking about 12 detainees at Bagram, told
military investigators in sworn testimony that he
was uncomfortable following orders to "mentally
and physically break the detainees." He didn't go
into detail. "I guess you can call it torture,"
said Callaway." The maximum punishment awarded to
the killers was three months in confinement.
Imagine the penalty that would have been meted
out if an American had been beaten to death by an
Afghan. Imagine the sentence if an American in
America had been murdered in this fashion : the
death penalty, automatically. But Afghans don't matter. Nor do Iraqis.
Anyone unfortunate enough to be taken captive by
US forces or intelligence people can expect
nothing but the direst conditions, indefinite
confinement without charge and without legal
representation, and oh joy methods of
interrogation that "have been deemed not to cause
significant physical or psychological harm."
That quotation is from one of the worst
Secretaries of State the US has suffered, the
Bush protégé Condoleezza Rice, who wrote to
Congress on 12 September that the "simulated
torture techniques" administered to would-be
members of US special forces during their training, would not harm them.
Right. Of course it wouldn't harm them : because
these volunteers knew that the 'torture' would
end immediately if they just once shouted Stop,
Please Stop It. And they knew, also, that it
would certainly end, sometime. Maybe in an hour
or two; maybe longer. But they knew it would not
go on indefinitely. And when it ended they would
be free to boast that they got through it without any problem.
But real prisoners, held in filthy primitive
conditions, beaten by vicious barbaric laughing
guards and interrogated by demented sadists, have
no idea when their torture is going to end. They
can't hold up a hand and say "Stop." It is
absurdly naive or despicably pitiless for
Rice to claim that their treatment does not cause
"significant physical or psychological harm;" but
that's the way things are in psycholand.
Detention without charge, denial of access to a
lawyer and refusal of trial have become normal in
the US justice system as practiced by the US
military. They arrested a Reuters' photographer,
Ibrahim Jassam Mohammed, in September, and the
Iraqi Central Criminal Court ruled on 30 November
that there was no evidence against him and that
he should be released from US military custody.
In a staggering display of contempt for
democracy, decency and the constitutions of Iraq
and America the military refused to comply. He's
still in jail; without justice, without hope. So
much for democracy, US-style, in Iraq.
And contempt for democracy doesn't stop with
sadism in prisons. Afghanistan, like Iraq, is
supposed to have an independent government. This
means that foreign activity in these countries
should be subject to domestic laws and that there
should be total cooperation between foreign armed
forces and those of the country on which they are
inflicted. When military operations are mounted,
the authorities of the 'host' countries,
appointed by democratically-elected governments,
should be informed. Does this happen? Almost
never. In a recent display of ignorance and
criminal arrogance, US special forces attacked a
police station in the town of Qalat in south
eastern Afghanistan on December 10, imagining it
to be a "militant hideout." The policemen thought
the special forces were militants and opened fire.
The police were in their own country ; they were
in a police post whose location should be known
to foreign troops operating in their country ;
they were not told that there would be any
foreign operations in their area. So of course
they opened fire. And what did the gallant
special forces do? Did they "close with and kill
the enemy, in any terrain, in any weather, by day
or by night"? (This used to be the way we were
taught but it seems to have gone out of fashion a
bit.) Don't be silly: they called in airstrikes
that killed the police commander, five of his
men, and, inevitably, a civilian whose house they
destroyed. Oh; and wounded "at least 13 others."
119 Afghan civilians (including policemen) were
killed by US airstrikes in January to July 2008,
The figure for the whole year will be much
higher. The effect on Afghans cannot be measured
accurately, but it is unlikely that their regard
for foreign troops will be high. In fact it is
inevitable that there will be much hatred
engendered by these cowboy catastrophes,
concerning which the first option is to lie if it
is considered the truth is unlikely to surface.
Take the case of the killing of 90 people by US
airstrikes in August in the Afghan village of
Azizabad. The immediate reaction by the US
military was to flatly deny that any civilians
had been killed. An inquiry by the UN which
confirmed the scores of civilian deaths was
scorned by the military. Unfortunately for them,
a local doctor had taken photographs showing 40
bodies, mostly children and young women. Many of them had been his patients.
After the slaughter, the Afghan Women's
Association recorded a 25 year-old woman as
saying that when she regained consciousness "I
was in hospital, and they told me that all of my
family were dead and already buried. Was my
two-year-old child a terrorist? Then am I not
also a terrorist? Why did they let me live?" And
"Ghulam Azrat, 50, director of the middle school
in Azizabad, said he collected 60 bodies after
the bombing. "We put the bodies in the main
mosque. Most of these dead bodies were children
and women. It took all morning to collect them" [he told Associated Press]."
But even then, even after they had been forced to
hold an inquiry that eventually had to admit that
civilians were killed, the US military stated "US
and Afghan forces did not commit any violations
of the law of war or rules of engagement." This
was because there were supposedly "22
anti-coalition militants" killed. In fact, of the
fifteen males killed, only seven were under 40; the others were ancients.
One survivor said he heard shooting and was just
coming out of his house when he saw his
neighbor's sons running across. "They were killed
right here; they were 10 and 7 years old." In the
compound next to his, he said, four whole
families, including those of his two brothers,
were killed. "They bombard us, they hate us, they
kill us," he said. "God will punish them."
Well, God might punish them, eventually. But they
seem safe enough from justice while on earth. The
sadistic torturers; the incompetent arrogant oafs
who killed the policemen ; the gung-ho gangsters
who murdered the children in Azizabad; the liars
who tried to cover up all will go unpunished.
Will there be change under Obama? Will he order a
case review of the 15,000 people held without
charge or trial, without legal advice, in hellish
conditions, without hope, by US forces in Iraq
and Afghanistan? Will he be able to release from
captivity the unknown number of people kept in
foreign jails by arrangement with US intelligence
operatives? Will he make it his business to
ensure that the demented out-of-control special
forces be reined in? Will he order inquiries into
torture? Will he, above all, insist on the truth being told? Watch this space.
Brian Cloughley's book about the Pakistan army,
War, Coups and Terror, has just been published by
Pen & Sword Books (UK) and will be published in
the US in May by Skyhorse (New York)
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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