The New Zealand Listener
May 22-28 2004 Vol 193 No 3341
What the pictures reveal
by Pamela Stirling
The dogs of war, once unleashed, cannot easily be controlled. The criminal naivety with which the US went to war in defiance of international law is reflected in George Bush's plaintive comments over the harrowing pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib prison: "This is not the way we do things in America." No, but it is the way Americans do things in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. The trophy shots of sexual abuse and sadistic humiliation of naked Muslim prisoners might have the air of tourists' holiday photos. But this is war. This is exactly the kind of insurgency situation that saw brutal and sometimes atrocious responses from the British in Kenya against the Mau Mau, the Russians in Chechnya and the US in Vietnam. And sexual sadism is as old as warfare itself. Why would US soldiers in Iraq be exempt from the dangers?
The lessons are there in America's past. World War II hero General George Patton talked openly about it. "There would unquestionably be some raping," he predicted: "a little R&R" for the personnel.
And the same lessons about cover-ups still go unlearnt. Patton thought it a violation of national security that his abuses of power were reported. In 1943, a contemptuous Patton slapped and threatened to shoot two US soldiers suffering from shell-shock and, in one case, malaria, in hospital. The American press was persuaded for months that it was not in the national interest to publish the details ? even after Patton was relieved of his command. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld takes a similar line today: criticising the press who published the "radioactive" photographs from Abu Ghraib.
The same "national interest" argument was used to try to prevent news of the My Lai massacre. It was successfully used until late 1970 to stop publication of the photos of the infamous "tiger caves" in which suspected Viet Cong men, women and children were secretly kept ? some crippled for life ? by the US-run South Vietnamese prison system.
And here it is happening again. For two weeks in April, CBS pulled its planned broadcast of the first pictures of the outrageous events at Abu Ghraib because defence officials argued that publication was not in the public interest and could endanger Americans in Iraq.
Perhaps if the US had a president who took more interest in truth and accuracy the administration could be trusted to hold to account those responsible. But this is a president who was wrong on the weapons of mass destruction, wrong on the links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. This is an administration that blames the torture on "just a small number of soldiers doing the wrong thing". Torturing a terrified naked man with brutal dogs dismissed as "the wrong thing"? It is the Bush administration's whole determination for war, its demonisation of the enemy that is wrong.
If ever a situation called for honest transparency, this is it. Yet, astounding as it is, it was only after the publication of the photos that General Richard Myers, head of the US military, felt compelled to read the damning February report on Abu Ghraib by Major General Antonio Taguba. That report found a "number of incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses". Yet Myers, in recent interviews, has insisted "there is no evidence of systematic abuse in the system". No? Guards were requested to set "physical and mental conditions" for interrogation. And who were they interrogating? Coalition military intelligence officers estimate that 70 to 90 percent of prisoners detained in Iraq since the war began were "arrested by mistake", says the Red Cross.
The carnivalesque photographs were part of the humiliating abuse. But the very technology that spread those images around the world is one of the main hopes now for stopping abuse and totalitarianism. The only other hope for the incendiary situation in Iraq is the UN. Yes, it is still bedevilled with hypocrisy: Human Rights Watch has just released a damning report on Sudan, where government-backed militias in Darfur have "ethnically cleansed" an entire district, with Arabs burning, killing, raping and expelling a million Africans from fertile lands. And yet Sudan has just been elected to the UN Commission on Human Rights. But the UN, with its peacekeeping that New Zealanders have so successfully championed in places like Bosnia, by being tolerant and trustworthy, remains the best option for peace. And Turkey and other Arab nations must be included. The alternative? That's simply not worth picturing.