Doug Lorimer
On January 15, US Army soldier Charles Graner was sentenced by a court martial to 10 years' imprisonment for his role in physically abusing and sexually humiliating Iraqis held at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in 2003. A few days later, the court martial began of three British soldiers charged with assaulting and sexually humiliating Iraqis held at a British Army supply deport outside the southern Iraqi city of Basra in May 2003.
In both cases, it was the public disclosure of photographs of US and British soldiers physically and psychologically torturing their Iraqi prisoners that forced the top brass of their respective armies to instigate court martial proceedings. In both cases, the charged soldiers have stated they were acting on orders from superior officers.
And, in both cases, the soldiers' governments have claimed that these illegal acts of brutality are isolated incidents, totally at odds with how the US and British occupation forces treat the tens of thousands of Iraqis whom they have held prisoner, without charges or trial.
However, evidence has been accumulating that the torture of Iraqi prisoners was approved at the highest levels of the US government and carried out with the participation of officers from other US government agencies, including the FBI.
On January 13, the US Department of Justice's inspector general ordered an investigation into whether FBI agents participated in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, sparked by the public release of an account by an agent who claimed to "observe numerous physical abuse incidents of Iraqi civilian detainees", including "strangulation, beatings [and] placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees' ear openings".
It is now an established fact that top Bush administration officials argued that the US occupation forces in Iraq should not be bound by the Geneva Conventions' prohibitions on the torture of prisoners. Thus, Jay Bybee, the Bush administration's former assistant attorney-general, changed the US government's definition of torture, limiting it to the infliction of pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily injury or even death".
"The Bybee memorandum defined torture so narrowly that Saddam Hussein's henchmen could have claimed immunity from prosecution for many of their crimes", Democrat Senator Edward Kennedy told the US Senate judiciary committee on January 26.
A day earlier, the New York-based Human Rights Watch organisation released a 93-page report detailing widespread use of torture by the US-recruited Iraqi police force, including in Iraqi prisons where US and other occupation "advisers" have a major presence.
The torture of Iraqi prisoners by the US and British occupation forces and by their puppet Iraqi police force is clearly not a result of a few "bad apples", but the necessary result of the US-led occupation regime. This a regime that is hated by the big majority of Iraqis and therefore can only maintain itself by systematic use of terror — from the torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to the wholesale destruction of rebel cities like Fallujah.
From Green Left Weekly, February 2, 2005.
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