US military atrocities and the moral choice facing the American people
By David North and David Walsh
24 May 2005
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/may2005/nyt-m24.shtml
A New York Times editorial May 23 accused the president of the United
States, along with other members of his administration, of grave crimes
in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
“Patterns of Abuse” first takes note of a comment by George W. Bush to
the effect that the American government’s handling of the brutality at
the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq would be a model of transparency and
accountability and that those responsible would be punished. This made
for a fine photo opportunity, comment the Times editors, “Unfortunately,
none of it is true.”
In other words, the president is a liar.
The editorial—published in conjunction with a two-part series detailing
the horrifying murder of two Afghans at the Bagram prison by US military
personnel—proceeds to accuse the administration of withholding reports
and stonewalling inquiries. Moreover, “The administration has prevented
any serious investigation of policy makers at the White House, the
Justice Department and the Pentagon by orchestrating official probes so
that none could come even close to the central question of how the prison
policies were formulated and how they led to the abuses.”
The Times asserts that “what happened at Abu Ghraib was no aberration,
but part of a widespread pattern. It showed the tragic impact of the
initial decision by Mr. Bush and his top advisers that they were not
going to follow the Geneva Conventions, or indeed American law, for
prisoners taken in antiterrorist operations.”
The administration then is guilty of war crimes, contravening
international law.
A policy that officially mandated humane treatment, but only when it
suited “military necessity,” leading interrogators to believe that they
“could deviate slightly from the rules,” created a situation in which the
US military’s “slight deviations included killing prisoners, and then
covering up the reason they died.”
The Times, although it does not care to spell this out, is charging the
president, vice president, secretary of defense and various military
officials with sanctioning torture and murder. The facts are unambiguous.
In reality, the entire political and media establishment (including the
Times itself), which endorsed and supported the invasion of Iraq, is
implicated.
Everyone knows that the murders at Bagram and abuse at Abu Ghraib are
only the tip of the iceberg. One can say without fear of contradiction
that crimes are being committed on a daily basis in Iraq, Afghanistan and
the US internment camp in Cuba. If there is not more exposure of the
atrocities, and outrage at their commission, that must be explained by
the general support such methods find within the American ruling elite.
The greatest fiction, which the Times editors continue to maintain, is
that the truly savage treatment of ordinary Afghans and Iraqis can be
considered apart from the character of the war as a whole. As though
systematic and homicidal cruelty, part of “a widespread pattern” in the
newspaper’s own words, were a mere blemish on the face of an otherwise
noble, democratic cause.
On the contrary, the episodes at Bagram provide the most appropriate
basis for evaluating the character of US policy. They sum up one of the
central aims of the American project in Afghanistan and Iraq: to
terrorize subject, colonial peoples.
The US invasion and occupation of Central Asia and the Middle East have
been criminal enterprises from the beginning, in all their aspects. The
lies justifying the ongoing conflicts and the lies covering up their
crimes flow from the same source: the attempt by American imperialism to
bring the entire world under its reactionary sway. Resistance, or even in
some cases the mere presence of a conquered population, will be met with
brute force.
Prior to the Iraq war any serious investigation would have proven that
the Bush administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s regime were lies.
If there was anyone in the American media who didn’t know, it was because
he or she chose not to know. They were all in on the crime, from the neo-
fascist “base” of the Republican Party and the ultra-right Murdoch press
to John Kerry, the Democratic Party and the “liberal” Times and
Washington Post.
Now the lies are unraveling, as monstrous lies always do, as they
especially do in America. The horrors at the Bagram Collection Point and
Abu Ghraib confront the American people with a stark moral choice.
The first responsibility, and the first step toward addressing the
problems, is to tell the truth about the present state of affairs.
The “honorable” US military has been unleashed on defenseless peoples in
the Middle East and Asia with horrifying consequences. Much of what is
foul and backward in American society has been encouraged and cultivated
in the armed forces, inviting or producing a considerable crowd of
sadists, psychopaths and, frankly, perverts. These are often lumpenized
elements of the population, given nothing culturally or morally, exposed
to the most reactionary influences—religious fundamentalism, nationalism,
the cult of blood and guns.
The description of the physical and psychological torture of the
prisoners at Bagram renders one physically ill. And one encounters the
same porno-sadism over and over again in the exploits of this military
all over the world!
Administration personnel are confident that they will never be held to
account for their crimes. This confidence rests on the fact that a broad
consensus of support exists for such conduct within the ruling elite.
Both government spokesmen and liberal pundits like Alan Dershowitz, Ted
Koppel and Michael Ignatieff have been explicitly or tacitly advocating
torture since the events of September 11, 2001. Genuinely democratic
consciousness has almost entirely disintegrated within the upper echelons
of American society. Today, anything goes.
The argument that barbaric methods are needed to combat “terrorism” and
extract information that could “save lives,” the time-honored claim of
every authoritarian regime, is both spurious and illegal, especially
given that the US government had considerable prior knowledge about the
2001 terrorist hijackings and refused to act on it. Moreover, this
argument ignores the political reality: torture is never about specific
pieces of information, it is one element of an overall policy. It is
meant to break the will of a resisting movement or population. So it was
with the Nazi authorities, so it is today with the American military.
The absence of widespread and loudly voiced revulsion to the crimes in
Afghanistan and Iraq is shameful. It speaks to the degraded state of
American public opinion.
There is no shortage of blame for this. Political structures entirely
dominated and, in fact, strangled by corporate power have polluted the
air. The filthy atmosphere is the moral, political reflection of the
workings of American capitalism in the 1990s and 2000s, pervaded by
parasitism, corruption, criminality.
The current wave of politicians is the inevitable product of these
processes: individuals such as Rick Santorum, the ultra-right Catholic
senator from Pennsylvania, considered a contender for the 2008 Republican
presidential nomination. A recent piece in the New York Times Sunday
magazine brought out the fact that when their first child, months
premature, died at birth, Santorum and his wife, in an act the article’s
author notes timidly some might find “discomforting, strange, even
ghoulish,” refused to “let the morgue take the corpse of their newborn;
they slept that night in the hospital with their lifeless baby between
them. The next day, they took him home” for their other children to hold.
(“The Believer,” May 22, 2005) This is clearly an individual who needs to
be pursuing psychiatric help, not public office.
In their commitment to the interests of big business, the Democratic
Party and its leading constituencies cede nothing to the Republicans. The
so-called labor movement, the AFL-CIO trade unions, is a principal
culprit. The union bureaucracies have done all that lay within their
power to deaden class consciousness, promote chauvinism and create a
climate inhospitable to humane and progressive ideas. Nowhere in the
advanced capitalist world has the working class been left so unprepared
for the assault of big business, nowhere has the official labor movement
left behind it a greater cultural and political wasteland.
The right-wing media is a cesspool of political violence and pornography;
the publication of photographs of Hussein in his underwear in the Sun and
the New York Post, two Murdoch-owned tabloids, sums up the mentality of
these people. The appearance of the photos, obviously leaked by American
military officials, is a violation of the Geneva Conventions against
degrading treatment of prisoners. Even the Nazi leaders, guilty of the
greatest crimes in history, were accorded basic rights by their captors.
Confronted with the photographs’ illegality and inflammatory character,
Graham Dudman, managing editor of the Sun, vociferously defended their
publication. “They are a fantastic, iconic set of news pictures that I
defy any newspaper, magazine, or television station who were presented
with them not to have published.” No one seriously challenges him.
The notion also that such images, which disgusted Arab and world public
opinion, will deal a serious blow to the anti-US insurgency in Iraq
simply reveals something about the unreality that dominates the American
political and military mind.
Meanwhile, cowed and insincere, the liberal media endlessly retreats in
the face of the right’s provocations. One might say that the Times, what
remains of liberalism on the television networks and the various organs
of Democratic Party opinion are the congealed expression of such a
retreat. Convinced that the extreme right is invincible, the population
hopelessly reactionary, the liberal press gives a mile for every inch
taken by the right-wing forces. The latter have the upper hand at
present, above all, by default.
There is great disgust, registered in private conversations, encountered
accidentally on the street, but people keep this largely to themselves.
To whom should they turn? The political establishment, every wing of it,
is impervious to genuine popular sentiment and concerns.
Black and Hispanic politicians, still comically dubbed “civil rights
leaders,” along with other sections of the post-1970s ‘radical’ and
liberal middle class, have jumped on the corporate and stock market gravy
train, enriching themselves while the inner cities have decayed into near
Third World conditions.
The culture industry has played its deplorable part. Films, popular
music, video games promote, or, rather, embody brutalization and
desensitization. Confused by events, unaware of social and historical
realities, too many permit themselves to be pacified by the mind-numbing
products of America’s entertainment industry.
In the post-September 11 world Hollywood has turned increasingly to
torture and bloody revenge as key themes or motifs, lending legitimacy to
the ravings of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of them. The average
studio “action” blockbuster is as indifferent to body counts as the
Pentagon.
As part of its ideological rationale for colonial subjugation of
‘uncivilized’ peoples, the American media loves to declare that “life is
cheap” in Baghdad or the West Bank or the mountains of Afghanistan. Can
life anywhere be much cheaper than it is in American popular culture?
Killing, torture and other forms of mayhem are simply not taken
seriously—they are “no big deal.” And this has had an impact.
This is the culture that has been produced by American capitalism in its
crisis. Behind this lies the industrial decline, the vast social
inequality, the obscene pile of wealth that has been created at one pole
of society at the expense of the lives and conditions of everyone else.
Appalling crimes are being committed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo
in the name of the American people. The working class has to choose a
different course, a different policy, one based on solidarity, compassion
and an understanding of the need for a socialistic reconstruction of
society.
--
Jez, MBA.,
Country Dancing and Advanced Astrology, UBS.
'Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable
notion that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often
led to accept, without much questioning, someone else's version of what
that reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be
skeptical of someone else's description of reality.'-
Howard Zinn
.
|
