An illegal and immoral war, betrayed by images that reveal our racism

by Robert Fisk

First, our enemies created the suicide bomber. Now, we
have our own digital suicide bomber, the camera. Just
look at the way US army reservist Lynndie England holds
the leash of the naked, bearded Iraqi. Take a close look
at the leather strap, the pain on the prisoner’s face.
No sadistic movie could outdo the damage of this image.
In September 2001, the planes smashed into the
buildings; today, Lynndie smashes to pieces our entire
morality with just one tug on the leash.

The Muslim suicide bomber cries Allahu Akbar, God is
great. And what does Specialist Charles Graner -
Lynndie’s partner-in-crime, the man who appears in
several of the torture photographs posing with Lynndie
behind a pyramid of naked Iraqi prisoners - do back home
in Pennsylvania. Why, his garden is plastered with a
legend from the Book of Hosea, about sowing and
righteousness and ploughing.

Could ever Islam have come so intimately into contact
with the sexuality of the Old Testament? Could neo-
conservative Christianity - Lynndie is also a churchgoer
– have collided so violently, so revoltingly, so
obscenely with Islam?

And who were the innocent in these vile photographs? The
American torturers and humiliators? Or the Iraqi
victims?

President Bush is fearful of Arab reaction to these
pictures. Why? For a year now, Iraqis have been trying
to tell journalists of the brutal treatment they are
receiving at the hands of their occupiers. They don’t
need these incriminating photographs to prove to them
what they already know to be true.

But, in the history of the Middle East, these pictures
already have the status of those most damaging snapshots
of the Vietnam war: the police chief in Saigon executing
his Vietcong prisoner, the naked girl burnt by napalm,
the pile of bodies at My Lai. For Arabs, read Deir
Yassin and the corpses piled in the Palestinian refugee
camp of Sabra and Chatila in 1982.

Not long after the occupation of Baghdad in April of
last year, we got our hands on videotape of the whipping
of Iraqi prisoners by Saddam’s security police.

I’m not sure which circle of hell the victims were
enduring in the 45 minutes of sadism which I still have
on one tape. They are whipped, they are kicked into
sewers and they cower like dogs. And why were these war
crimes filmed? I thought at first that it was intended
for the enjoyment of Saddam or his disgusting son Uday.
But now I realise the videos were taken so that the
prisoners could be humiliated. Their suffering, their
pathetic pleas for mercy were to be recorded - to add
the final layer of degradation to their fate. And now I
realise, too, that the pictures of the Iraqis so cruelly
treated - so tortured - by the Americans, were taken for
precisely the same reason.

Someone decided that the photos would be the final
straw, the breaking point, the moment of capitulation
for these young men. Make them simulate oral sex. Make
them look at the penis of their best friend. Get a girl
to admire their attempted erection. This was truly
Saddamite in its perversity. So let’s, as the Americans
say, get real. Who taught Lynndie and her boyfriend and
the other American sadists of Abu Ghraib prison to do
this?

I used to ask who taught the Syrian and Iraqi secret
police to do this. The answer to the latter question was
simple: the East German secret police. But the answer to
the first question? Well, we have been told that there
were "contracted" interrogators at Abu Ghraib.

I have reason to believe General Janis Karpinski, the
luckless prison commander who is going to be dumped out
of the army for interrogations over which she had no
control, knew "outsiders" were questioning her inmates.
She was never allowed into the interrogation room. And I
can see why. So, no doubt, can she.

So who were these mysterious "interrogators"? If they
were not CIA or FBI staff, who were they? Several names
are already doing the rounds - journalists claim they
have no final proof - and a number, I understand, hold
more than one passport. Why were they brought to Abu
Ghraib? Who brought them? How much are they paid? And
who trained them?

Who taught them it was a good idea to get a girl to
point at an Arab who was being forced to masturbate, to
humiliate an Iraqi by hooding him with a girl’s
lingerie?

We are not just talking "sick" here. We’re talking
professionals. President Bush at last apologised
yesterday to the Arab world for this filth - only, no
doubt, because of the latest picture on the front of The
Washington Post - but the constant, insistent refrain
from US officers that these were a tiny group of
unrepresentative Americans makes me very suspicious.

Lynndie and her boyfriend were not part of a "rogue"
unit. They were told to do these despicable things. They
were encouraged. This was an order from someone. Who?
When can we see their pictures, their identity, their
passports, their orders?

Yes, it’s part of a culture, a long tradition that goes
back to the Crusades; that the Muslim is dirty,
lascivious, unChristian, unworthy of humanity - which is
pretty much what Osama bin Laden (now forgotten by Mr
Bush, I notice) believes about us Westerners. And our
illegal, immoral, meretricious war has now brought forth
the images that betray our racism.

The hooded man with the wires attached to his hands has
now become an iconic portrait, every bit as memorable as
the picture of the second aircraft flying into the World
Trade Centre. No, of course, we haven’t killed 3,000
Iraqis. We’ve killed many more. And the same goes for
Afghanistan.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=518951