Iraq Torture is a Prime Example of the MKUltra Mind Control

WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East : Iraq

Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate

“Bush and the Democrats are responsible for torture in Iraq”

1 May 2004

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The following is a statement by Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate Bill Van Auken in response to the recent revelations of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of the US military.

Photographs of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners subjected to torture, abuse and humiliation at the hands of their American captors have provoked a wave of outrage and revulsion around the globe.

They are hellish images. A ghostly figure in a hood forced to stand on a box with electrodes attached to his fingers, told that if he falls he will be electrocuted. Another prisoner, his hands behind his hooded head is posed naked with a female soldier pointing at his genitals. Naked men forced to climb upon each other in a pyramid or simulate sex acts.

There are reportedly worse pictures yet to be published. Men savaged by guard dogs. A prisoner with electrodes attached to his testicles.

These are not unfamiliar scenes. They recall the brutality of the fascist bully boys of the 1930s, the torture chambers of US-backed Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and the savagery of the French colonial war in Algeria or the US intervention in Vietnam.

The sadistic acts committed at the Abu Ghraib prison are not an aberration. They are the inevitable product of a criminal war launched on the basis of lies.

They are also symptomatic of the dehumanizing and demoralizing effect that the US occupation is having on a much wider layer of the American military, soldiers who find themselves trapped in a country that does not want them and who increasingly see every Iraqi as the enemy.

Bush’s claim Friday that he was “disgusted” by these pictures is entirely hypocritical. Both the White House and the Pentagon have known of these abuses for months, but have sought to conceal them, rightly fearing that they will only fuel antiwar sentiments among the American people as well as the hatred that is building up in Iraq and throughout the Arab world against the US occupation.

The attempt to pass off these crimes as the work of a half-dozen sick individuals will not wash. No doubt, those who enjoy such cruelty against fellow human beings are depraved. But soldiers have testified that this depravity was officially sanctioned. Physical abuse and humiliation of prisoners was standard operating procedure, a method encouraged by military and CIA interrogators to “break” them before they were subjected to the third degree.

Moreover, the state in which the pictures show the prisoners—naked and with bags over their heads—was not just staged for the cameras. Thousands have been kept in this degrading condition. Those familiar with the methods used at Abu Ghraib have recounted that Iraqis taken into custody by US forces are kept for days naked and without toilets, in unventilated, damp cells that measure 3 feet by 3 feet. This in itself is a form of torture.

Before declaring himself “disgusted” by the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison, Bush repeated his monotonous refrain that because of the US invasion, “there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms” in Iraq. But, as we now know, there indeed are; they have merely reopened under new management.

Among the most disturbing revelations is that some of the brutal acts at Abu Ghraib were carried out at the behest of private contractors, mercenaries hired for their expertise in terrorizing their captives during interrogations. One of these mercenaries, according to the Guardian newspaper, was allowed to rape a teenage boy held at the prison. Because he was not subject to military discipline and no Iraqi law applies to US soldiers or civilians, he was not even charged with a crime.

Who are the Iraqis subjected to this sadistic abuse? Thousands of them—ordinary workers, men and boys—have been dragged out of their homes for no other reason than being caught up in a military dragnet. They are held without charges, much less hearings. In many cases, their relatives are not even informed that they have been seized; they simply disappear.

In his statement Friday, Bush declared that the psychotic cruelty inflicted upon the Iraqi prisoners “does not reflect the nature of the American people.” True enough. It does, however, reflect the nature of this country’s ruling elite. It is the finished expression of a criminalized political establishment that has adopted methods of violence and terror to further the interests of the US financial oligarchy.

It is also a direct product of the reactionary politics and ideology propagated by the Bush administration and both major parties. The “war on terrorism,” supported by Democrats and Republicans, has been accompanied by a deliberate campaign to demonize Arabs and Muslims, casting them as “evil ones” and subhumans against whom any violence can be committed with impunity.

The message to US troops that they have a license to kill and torture has been communicated in a thousand different ways from the White House on down. When we call Bush a sadist, we mean it. This is a man who revels in killing and violence—from a safe distance—while claiming that he is doing “God’s will.”

The Democratic Party has adopted all the essential elements of this policy that now finds its revolting expression in the sadism at Abu Ghraib. Its presidential candidate John Kerry voted in the Senate to authorize this war and now insists that even more troops must be deployed to crush the resistance of the Iraqi people.

Thirty-three years ago, a young John Kerry was among those returning veterans who exposed and condemned the horrors that the US military was committing against the people of Vietnam, including the routine torture of prisoners. Today he shares responsibility for similar acts in Iraq.

In a speech on Iraq delivered Friday in Fulton, Missouri, Kerry would allow only that he was “troubled” by the photographs from the Iraqi prison, but insisted that “failure is not an option” and that “we do not have the choice just to pick up and leave.”

The “we” he speaks for is not the masses of American working people, who in ever-greater numbers insist that Washington do just that: withdraw the troops, stop the killing and leave the Iraqi people alone to determine their own destiny. The millions who oppose this war have been politically disenfranchised. The two-party system has worked to prevent them from even expressing their opinion on the war when they vote in November.

Kerry speaks for the corporate “we”—the bankers, CEOs and multimillionaires who control both major parties and who see their profit interests bound up with the seizure of Iraq’s oil wealth and America’s assertion of world domination by means of naked force. His aim is to convince them that he can do a better job of defending their interests and prosecuting this war.

The revelations of torture and sexual abuse against Iraqi prisoners come on top of the massacre of thousands of civilians in Fallujah. They have further inflamed a population for whom the occupation means daily humiliation and terror. They are just one more assurance that the resistance will end only when the last American soldier is brought home from Iraq.

The Socialist Equality Party is campaigning to place myself and Jim Lawrence on the ballot for president and vice president in order to raise the demand for the immediate withdrawal of all US troops and for holding those who conspired to launch this war criminally responsible.

We are also running candidates for US Congress and other offices to take this program to the broadest audience and to present a socialist alternative to the policies of war, social reaction and attacks on democratic rights that are shared by both major parties.

Our campaign is founded on the firm conviction that ever-wider layers of American working people are disgusted by the crimes being carried out in their name and are searching for such an alternative.

See Also:
US war crimes: Torture of Iraqi prisoners exposed
[30 April 2004]

WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East : Iraq

US war crimes

Torture of Iraqi prisoners exposed

By Richard Phillips
30 April 2004

Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author

On April 29, CBS television’s “60 Minutes II” program screened graphic images of Iraqi prisoners being tortured and sexually humiliated by US troops at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. The photographs, which show American soldiers—men and women—smiling, laughing or giving thumbs-up signs alongside naked Iraqi prisoners, expose the sadistic and brutal methods employed by American forces and provide more evidence of the catalog of war crimes being committed by US-led forces in Iraq.

One of the pictures shows an Iraqi prisoner standing on a box with a hood over his head. Electric wires are attached to his hands. He was told that if he fell off the box he would be electrocuted. Another photograph is of naked male detainees stacked in a pyramid shape, one of the men has a slur written on his skin in English. In some pictures, prisoners are positioned to simulate sex with each other while US troops point and laugh.

The photos have surfaced in connection with the suspension in March of 17 members of the 800th Military Police Brigade for mistreatment and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in November and December of last year. The jail was infamous for torture and executions under the Saddam Hussein regime.

Six of those suspended were charged with dereliction of duty, cruelty and maltreatment, assault and indecent acts—the military’s term for sexual abuse—and could be court-martialed and jailed.

Military investigators have also recommended that disciplinary action be brought against seven US officers in charge of the prison, including Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the 800th Brigade’s commander.

While the US Army revealed these violations last month, it has attempted to prevent any detailed information leaking to the media. Army officials, however, were forced to appear on the high-rating television program after other news outlets were given copies of the photographs.

The Army told “60 Minutes II” that it had numerous photos, including a picture of a detainee with electric wires attached to his genitals, a dog attacking an Iraqi prisoner and a dead Iraqi prisoner who had been badly beaten at the prison. One civilian interrogator had smashed several tables in order to “fear up” prisoners.

The television show also revealed that the Army is investigating allegations by an Iraqi detainee that a prison translator at Abu Ghraib raped a male juvenile detainee. Part of the prisoner’s testimony states: “They covered all the doors with sheets. I heard the screaming ... and the female soldier was taking pictures.”

These acts of sadism and cruelty constitute a blatant violation of the “UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment” and are war crimes as defined by Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of war prisoners.

Article 3 prohibits:

a. violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

b. taking hostages;

c. outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.

Army Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy chief of military operations in Iraq, told “60 Minutes II” that the torture was “reprehensible” and claimed that those facing charges were “not representative” of American soldiers in Iraq. “Don’t judge your army by the actions of a few,” he said. Americans “need to understand that is not the Army.”

These mendacious comments were refuted by CBS’s chilling interview with Army Reserve Staff Sergeant Chip Frederick, one of those facing court martial.

Frederick, a Virginia prison guard, is charged with assaulting detainees, ordering prisoners to strike each other and an “indecent act” for observing one of the sexual abuse incidents. He insisted, however, that his actions were not those of a rogue soldier, but were sanctioned and encouraged by military intelligence and the CIA.

Along with other reservist jail guards, he was directed to physically and mentally “prepare” Iraqi detainees for interrogation. He said that dogs were also used as “intimidation factors” against prisoners.

One of Frederick’s email messages said: “Military intelligence has encouraged and told us ‘Great job.’ They usually don’t allow others to watch them interrogate. But since they like the way I run the prison, they have made an exception. We help getting them [detainees] to talk with the way we handle them.... We’ve had a very high rate with our style of getting them to break. They usually end up breaking within hours.”

As these comments make clear, torture in US-run Iraqi prisons is an integral part of the illegal occupation. A systematic process of brutalization is being directed from the upper ranks.

At the same time, the fact that US soldiers are employing methods similar to those used by the Nazis in World War II is indicative of a deep-seated state of demoralization and degradation that the occupation has bred within the US military. Finding themselves in a hostile environment with the vast majority of Iraqis opposing the occupation, many American soldiers have come to see the country’s entire population as the enemy. Fed lies about the colonial intervention in Iraq being part of a global “war on terrorism,” some have also assumed a license to torture and humiliate their helpless captives.

Contrary to Kimmitt’s claims—slavishly echoed by the corporate media—this is the logic and modus operandi of imperialist conquest and colonial occupation. The pictures of torture, brutality and sexual sadism are representative of the entire criminal operation being conducted in Iraq.

Washington anticipated and prepared in advance for the war crimes now being committed against the Iraqi people. No criminal charges can be brought against a US soldier in Iraq because the puppet Iraqi Governing Council has given the American military a blanket amnesty from prosecution. Secondly, with the backing of Germany and a number of other countries, no US soldier or citizen can be prosecuted for war crimes in the International Criminal Court.