Prison Abuse Photos
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=96365§ionid=3510203
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWxpQ87C4t4
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Action, cut!
Pornography, feminisation of the enemy? Confused over what Obama’s view on
Guantanamo and the backlog of torture images from Abu
Ghraib? Join the club, laments Eric Walberg
The centrepiece of United States President Barack Obama’s PR campaign to show
the world the US is the nice cop was to end the military tribunals, which he
called “an enormous failure” during last year’s
presidential campaign, and close the infamous Guantanamo
prison. This was Obama’s first major “achievement” upon assuming
office.
Rumblings about the impossibility of closing Guantanamo were being heard even as
Obama took office. It appears there’s no place to send the prisoners, most of
whom are innocent of anything other than fighting invaders, if that. Congress
does not want to allow them to come to stay in equally notorious US jails, where
overcrowding, violence, drugs and AIDS are endemic. Nor is Congress willing to
fork over any money to close Guantanamo. Of course this is nonsense.
Venezuela’s president offered to take them all, but Obama dare not accept any
favours from someone so principled, lest his house of
cards come tumbling down.
As for the tribunals, Obama faces two deadlines: his 120-day review of the
tribunals has now ended, and on 27 May the trial of Ahmed Al-Darbi, a Saudi
accused of plotting to attack a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, was scheduled to
begin, and it appears it now will, but under slightly improved conditions,
including restricting hearsay evidence. The tribunals now must move quickly in a
race against the clock before Guantanamo is scheduled to be closed next January.
If the prison is indeed closed and the trials are still going on then, the
detainees will have to be brought to the US, where they will receive greater
legal rights.
About 20 of the 241 detainees currently at Guantanamo will now be tried by
military tribunals along with 13 already in the works. The rest of the detainees
must either be released, transferred to other nations or tried by civilian
prosecutors in US federal courts. It’s also possible that some could continue to
be held indefinitely without trial as prisoners of war, though government
officials insist they will now receive full Geneva Conventions protections.
The decision to persist with the tribunals was immediately attacked by critics.
“It’s disappointing that Obama is seeking to revive rather than end
this failed experiment,” said Jonathan Hafetz of the American Civil Liberties
Union. “There’s no detainee at Guantanamo who cannot be tried and shouldn’t be
tried in the regular federal courts system.”
How did this sorry state of affairs come about so soon after all the fanfare?
Obama stressed to families of victims of the USS Cole attack when he met them
in February that he would not free “potential jihadists”, but when Binyam
Mohamed, suspected in a plot to set off a “dirty bomb” inside the US, was
repatriated to Britain and released, this was greeted by a hysterical outcry in
the US,
ignoring the fact that Mohamed was determined to be innocent by the
world’s oldest upholder of due process. The pressures on Obama to hold the Bush
course are immense, with former vice president Richard Cheney brazenly attacking
him as a wimp on US television.
Then there’s Obama’s decision to block the court-ordered release of
more torture photos. He was for the pictures being released before deciding last
week he was against it, apparently convinced by military officials the photos
would increase danger for US troops.
Dawdling, of course, just confirms the view of the rest of the world, especially
among Muslims, that Obama is not the principled liberal they were led to expect,
that he is afraid to make a clean breast of the past atrocities, that he is
merely a politically correct Bush lite. The irony being that, contrary to
Cheney’s ravings, it is his very indecisiveness that increases the danger for US
troops.
The legal intricacies of Guantanamo vs US incarceration and jurisdiction are
less sensational than the torture pictures. But the likelihood of many Muslims
actually seeing the latest shots of US troops in Iraq sodomising those who
resist them is remote. In any
case, the pictures were originally intended for possible publication by the
torturers themselves. This startling revelation was made by Seymour Hersh in
2004 when he exposed the logic behind the officially-condoned US strategy of
sexual torture. The idea was to use blackmail to encourage victims to work for
the occupiers as spies, threatening
to publish the photos unless the victims agreed to collaborate with the
occupiers. A government consultant revealed to Hersh, “I was told that the
purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could
insert back in the population.”
The strategy, of course, failed spectacularly, and the photos — old and new –
are being consumed primarily by jingoistic Americans revelling in such scenes of
violence inflicted on the “enemy”, inured to the monstrosity of this by their
regular diet of media violence and Islamophobia. Already the “blocked” photos
are being leaked all over the net, making Obama’s last minute efforts a fool’s
errand.
How such unconscionable behaviour became official US policy is
fascinating. American pilots were trained during the “first” Gulf War by
watching pornographic films, according to the Washington Post at the time. In
order to better subjugate Arab Iraq, according to Joseph Massad, “American
imperial military culture supermasculinises not only its own male soldiers, but
also its female soldiers who can partake of the feminisation of Iraqi men.” The
pornographic pictures are merely the logical outcome of this strategy to subdue
the so-called enemy, constructed by diabolical Pentagon strategists. The 2003
invasion updated this strategy, though with unintended
consequences, as new technology allowed simple soldiers to produce their own
DVDs of their sadistic frolics.
This stark reality is inverted in Washington, as interpreted by Obama’s envoy of
peace to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, who told the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee about US media efforts in Pakistan: “Concurrent with the
insurgency is an
information war. We are losing that war.” Rather than acknowledging past sins,
however, he advocates even more TV and radio propaganda supporting the US wars.
Holbrooke is referring to the $100 million
propaganda campaign launched by the Bush regime in Iraq in 2005 by a
Washington-based PR firm to plant administration propaganda in the
Iraqi news media and to pay Iraqi journalists to write favourable stories about
the occupation.
So it appears withholding the Abu Ghraib photos is really part of the US
government media war, just as the question mark over Guantanamo is really part
of the military plans to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan come hell or
high water. And that these policies are not up for discussion. The reversal of
Obama’s key policies after only a few months does not bode well for him or the
US.
Perhaps withholding the photos is also connected with the appointment of Stanley
McChrystal as head of the military in Afghanistan, which
should brace itself for more Abu Ghraib-style action. McChrystal cut his teeth
in Iraq, where he directed the Joint Special Operations
Command’s special operation teams, which carry out assassinations and terrorise
local populations opposed to the occupation. McChrystal was a favourite of
Rumsfeld and Cheney. He was a direct participant in overseeing torture,
according to a report by Esquire and Human Rights Watch in 2006.
Just about everyone but the US officials conducting their war on terrorism
realise by now that it is this very policy that is producing more and more
jihadists, and will continue to produce them until Obama, or some future less
timid president, declares an end to this campaign of terror being conducted by
the US itself, with its allies dragged kicking and screaming behind it.
This is no time for Obama to be indecisive. Guantanamo must be closed and
remaining prisoners must be tried in US courts or repatriated. If that’s a
problem, he can always take up Chavez’s offer. And patch up relations with him
and Castro in the process. Hell, why not give back
Guantanamo to Cuba as a peace offering while he’s at it? The important thing is
not to blink while he’s doing what’s right, or else the jackals of war will chew
him to shreds.
The latest fear among Democrats is that the gulf between them and the
Republicans is widening, even as Democratic policies are gaining support among
the people. Huh? They should take a leaf from FDR’s book, to fear nothing but
fear alone. Let the Republicans march into the wilderness. Take control of US
politics for the next two decades by following truly popular, socially just
policies. Americans are not imperialists at heart. They will follow you. And be
sure to close
Guantanamo .
***
Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly. You can reach him at
www.geocities.com/walberg2002/
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