One sided view, sure. But good media criticism.
If you want many views, you read other articles as well.
Below is also the list information where you might consider
joining, if you can take lots of e-mails per day, and know
how to filter them to a separate folder. I think the list
is helpful in getting you more points of perception covered
into events. Don't join if you fear that your world picture
will shatter because not everyone sees America as the Jesus
and saviour of all humanity as Americans do.
I have collected the list news for some time now and they
have become a very handy and valuable reference archive over
time. An excellent list, if not the best I have come accross.
This is probably the list where Joe Dees dug out some of my
posts.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/may2004/tort-m03.shtmlUS media alibis for torture in Iraq
By Bill Van Auken
3 May 2004
Photographs of the sadistic torture of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of US
troops became front-page news around the world after their release last
week. Only in two countries were they largely suppressed by the media-the
United States and Iraq itself.
In Iraq, newspapers that can be-and have been-shut down at a moment's notice
by order of the US occupation chief Paul Bremer chose not to publish them.
Most Iraqis viewed on Arab television the revolting scenes of their
countrymen, naked and with bags over their heads, being abused by leering
American soldiers.
In the US last Friday, as people throughout the world viewed the appalling
photographs on the front pages of their newspapers, not a single major
American daily chose to give them similar treatment, and most blacked them
out altogether.
CBS News, which first broadcast the photos on its "60 Minutes II" program
last week, withheld the story for fully two weeks at the request of General
Richard Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. When it did air
the segment, it was produced with the cooperation of the Pentagon, which
sought to frame the story in such a way as to contain the damage before the
foreign media obtained the same pictures.
But such is the gravity of this damage to US policy in the Arab and Muslim
world that little or nothing can be done to contain it. The televised images
seen by Iraqis have largely sealed the fate of the US occupation. They have
confirmed the widespread and well-founded opinion that the war launched by
the Bush administration was aimed not at liberating but subjugating the
people of Iraq and expropriating the country's oil wealth. And they have
created vast new reservoirs of support for a nationalist resistance that had
already gained a mass following.
Iraqis viewing the hooded, naked men forced by grinning Americans to pile
onto each other, simulate sex acts and, in one case, stand on a box with
electrodes attached to the prisoner's body, were left to wonder whether the
faces behind the masks were those of their relatives, neighbors or
co-workers, tens of thousands of whom have disappeared into a network of
concentration camps set up by the US occupation.
So the US media's efforts have largely been aimed at softening the impact of
these revelations upon the American people themselves, among whom antiwar
sentiment has never been higher. Two newspapers that serve as national
voices for the ruling political establishment made this clear in a pair of
editorials published over the weekend.
"President Bush spoke for all Americans of conscience yesterday when he
expressed disgust" over the photographs, the New York Times declared in an
editorial Saturday entitled "Abuses at Abu Ghraib."
It continued, stating that the torture and abuse captured in the photos
defied "the accepted conventions of war" and supporting Bush's contention
that the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib prison were the work merely of a
"few soldiers" who would be "taken care of."
The media-including the Times-revel in proclaiming Bush the
"commander-in-chief" as if it were some royal title. Yet now, somehow, he is
the voice of "conscience" who bears no responsibility for the actions of
those soldiers whom he presumes to command.
It can be safely assumed that Bush was neither shocked nor disgusted. The
White House and the Pentagon had known about these atrocities for months and
had done all they could to prevent them from being exposed.
As for the claim that torture at the US concentration camps is a crime
carried out by just a handful of depraved military police reservists, it is
disproved by the very existence of the photographs. Why did these soldiers
feel so comfortable recording their criminal actions for posterity? How were
they were able to assemble large numbers of naked prisoners in an open area
and stack them into a pyramid for their amusement, without any fear of being
discovered or punished?
Clearly, this degrading and abusive treatment was standard operating
procedure for the US military. Torture was accepted and encouraged.
Photos just "the tip of the iceberg"
The human rights group Amnesty International described the actions shown in
the photographs as just "the tip of the iceberg." In a 2003 report, it
stated: "Many detainees have alleged they were tortured and ill-treated by
US and UK troops during interrogation. Methods reported often include
beatings; prolonged sleep deprivation; prolonged restraint in painful
positions, sometimes combined with exposure to loud music; prolonged hooding
and exposure to bright light." The organization has documented a number of
cases in which detainees have been beaten or tortured to death.
On the same day the Times published its editorial, the New Yorker magazine's
web site posted a story by Seymour Hersh citing a 53-page report prepared by
an Army general that concluded that "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal
abuses" were commonplace at Abu Ghraib.
Among the crimes, Major General Antonio Taguba recounted in his report:
"Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees;
pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle
and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape...sodomizing a detainee
with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working
dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one
instance actually biting a detainee."
Hersh points out that many of the thousands of detainees held at Abu Ghraib
were there simply because they were caught up in sweeps of neighborhoods or
grabbed at military checkpoints.
The article includes a chilling indication of the extent to which the
military has inculcated the attitude among the troops that Iraqis-and for
that matter all Arabs and Muslims-are subhumans against whom cruelty can be
inflicted with impunity. One soldier-who testified against other members of
his unit-told of seeing another soldier "hitting one prisoner in the side of
its ribcage." Not "his" ribcage, but "its." The Iraqi detainee was not seen
as a human being.
General Taguba's report also concludes that the military police
reservists-including the six who are the only ones facing prosecution at
this point-were instructed by military intelligence and CIA interrogators to
"set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of
witnesses." That is, use torture and abuse to "break" the prisoners.
Witnesses cited in the report quote military intelligence officers praising
those carrying out these criminal acts. "Good job, they're breaking down
real fast," said one.
Responsibility for these crimes go right up a chain of command-Taguba calls
for reprimanding a colonel and lieutenant colonel responsible for military
intelligence interrogations-that ends with the president himself.
In solidarizing themselves with Bush, the Times editors note that the vile
actions of US soldiers at Abu Ghraib defy "the accepted conventions of war."
But the entire Iraqi invasion and occupation has been carried out in
defiance of "accepted conventions of war." Washington carried out an
unprovoked war aimed at conquering an independent country that posed no
threat to the United States, in order to subdue its people and seize control
of its oil resources.
The Bush administration has prided itself on its arrogant refusal to be
bound by any tenet of international law, repudiating the International
Criminal Court and demanding that countries where its military operates
agree to hold US soldiers as well as civilians immune from any charges of
war crimes or human rights violations.
Bush himself glories in illegal acts of violence, boasting of US
assassinations as a means of bringing Washington's enemies "to justice." To
proclaim such an individual as the voice of "conscience" speaking for "all
Americans" is an obscenity.
For its part, the Washington Post, the authoritative voice of the Washington
political establishment, published an editorial headlined "Rule of
Lawlessness." Again, while ostensibly condemning the acts at Abu Ghraib, the
editorial is crafted in a manner designed to minimize and even justify them.
"Taken together, the photographs demonstrate some of the most demeaning,
humiliating and shameful treatment of prisoners imaginable, short of actual
physical torture," the Post writes.
Forcing naked men with bags over their heads to climb onto each other in a
pyramid, or attaching electrodes to a man's body and telling him he is going
to be electrocuted if he falls off a box, is indeed torture. A number of
Iraqis have come forward to say that they found the kind of degenerate
sexual humiliation carried out by their US captors worse than the physical
torture inflicted by the secret police of the Saddam Hussein regime.
The Post laments the existence of the photographs for the "the damage they
have done to America's image in the world, to the cause of stability in Iraq
and even to the cause of democracy in the Middle East."
In reality, these images have provided a graphic expression of the criminal
character and aims of the US intervention in Iraq. The war and occupation
have nothing to do with democracy. The type of cruelty seen in these
pictures is a feature of every war waged by an imperialist power against the
people it seeks to colonize.
The Post goes on: "The fact that some of the soldiers in charge of the
prison have now been suspended or penalized will surely be overlooked by
foreign audiences, and the fact that the prisoners had attacked US troops
matters not at all."
This argument, meant to exonerate the US military, consists of inventions
and lies. Those who are being prosecuted were not "in charge of the prison";
they consist of a handful of low-ranking reservists who are, from the
standpoint of the Pentagon, entirely expendable. As for the prisoners having
"attacked US troops," how do the Post editors know that? Have they the names
and records of the naked men with sacks on their heads? The bulk of those
who are being held at the US prisons and torture camps were grabbed on the
flimsiest grounds by US troops and are being held indefinitely without
hearings or even charges.
Finally, the newspaper chides the Bush administration for failing to provide
"adequate legal processes" for detainees held without charges not only in
Iraq, but in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.
"Better than any legal treatise, these photographs demonstrate the
potentially corrupting effect of the atmosphere of lawlessness in these
prisons," the editorial concludes. "It must not be allowed to continue."
But the "corrupting...atmosphere of lawlessness" did not begin in the
military's prison camps. The torture carried out there is only the refined
expression of the corrupt and lawless character of the US ruling
establishment and the policy of armed conquest it has pursued in Iraq,
Afghanistan and elsewhere.
America's ruling elite, both the Democratic and Republican parties, and in
particular the corporate-controlled media are all implicated in the shameful
and repulsive crimes carried out at Abu Ghraib and other US concentration
camps and prisons around the world. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others are
guilty of war crimes for the actions carried out by their military
subordinates.
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