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Torture’s Part Of The Territory

by Open-Publishing - Monday 13 June 2005
2 comments

Wars and conflicts International Prison USA

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion...

Torture’s Part Of The Territory
Naomi Klein
June 07, 2005

Brace yourself for a flood of gruesome new torture snapshots. Last week, a federal judge ordered the Defense Department to release dozens of additional photographs and videotapes depicting prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

The photographs will elicit what has become a predictable response: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will claim to be shocked and will assure us that action is already being taken to prevent such abuses from happening again. But imagine, for a moment, if events followed a different script. Imagine if Rumsfeld responded like Col. Mathieu in "Battle of Algiers," Gillo Pontecorvo’s famed 1965 film about the National Liberation Front’s attempt to liberate Algeria from French colonial rule. In one of the film’s key scenes, Mathieu finds himself in a situation familiar to top officials in the Bush administration: He is being grilled by a room filled with journalists about allegations that French paratroopers are torturing Algerian prisoners.

Based on real-life French commander Gen. Jacques Massus, Mathieu neither denies the abuse nor claims that those responsible will be punished. Instead, he flips the tables on the scandalized reporters, most of whom work for newspapers that overwhelmingly support France’s continued occupation of Algeria. Torture "isn’t the problem," he says calmly. "The problem is the FLN wants to throw us out of Algeria and we want to stay.... It’s my turn to ask a question. Should France stay in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences."

His point, as relevant in Iraq today as it was in Algeria in 1957, is that there is no nice, humanitarian way to occupy a nation against the will of its people. Those who support such an occupation don’t have the right to morally separate themselves from the brutality it requires.

Now, as then, there are only two ways to govern: with consent or with fear.

Most Iraqis do not consent to the open-ended military occupation they have been living under for more than two years. On Jan. 30, a clear majority voted for political parties promising to demand a timetable for U.S. withdrawal. Washington may have succeeded in persuading Iraq’s political class to abandon that demand, but the fact remains that U.S. troops are on Iraqi soil in open defiance of the express wishes of the population.

Lacking consent, the current U.S.-Iraqi regime relies heavily on fear, including the most terrifying tactics of them all: disappearances, indefinite detention without charge and torture. And despite official reassurances, it’s only getting worse. A year ago, President Bush pledged to erase the stain of Abu Ghraib by razing the prison to the ground. There has been a change of plans. Abu Ghraib and two other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq are being expanded, and a new 2,000-person detention facility is being built, with a price tag of $50 million. In the last seven months alone, the prison population has doubled to a staggering 11,350.

The U.S. military may indeed be cracking down on prisoner abuse, but torture in Iraq is not in decline - it has simply been outsourced. In January, Human Rights Watch found that torture within Iraqi-run (and U.S.-supervised) jails and detention facilities was "systematic," including the use of electroshock.

An internal report from the 1st Cavalry Division, obtained by the Washington Post, states that "electrical shock and choking" are "consistently used to achieve confessions" by Iraqi police and soldiers. So open is the use of torture that it has given rise to a hit television show: Every night on the TV station Al Iraqiya - run by a U.S. contractor - prisoners with swollen faces and black eyes "confess" to their crimes.

Rumsfeld claims that the wave of recent suicide bombings in Iraq is "a sign of desperation." In fact, it is the proliferation of torture under Rumsfeld’s watch that is the true sign of panic.

In Algeria, the French used torture not because they were sadistic but because they were fighting a battle they could not win against the forces of decolonization and Third World nationalism. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s use of torture surged immediately after the Shiite uprising in 1991: The weaker his hold on power, the more he terrorized his people. Unwanted regimes, whether domestic dictatorships or foreign occupations, rely on torture precisely because they are unwanted.

When the next batch of photographs from Abu Ghraib appear, many Americans will be morally outraged, and rightly so. But perhaps some brave official will take a lesson from Col. Mathieu and dare to turn the tables: Should the United States stay in Iraq? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences.

Forum posts

  • Perhaps a more important issue to raise is why does this happen and what operational structures and motivations are behind it.
    Let me explain as the basis of nation state economics come into play and as such nation states with powerful economies and buying power are attractive for investors but to extract profit for those investors into that economy a profitable scenario of resources, land, or trade must be established. This is where multinational corporations and banking come it. To establish a profit the investors must put money into "deals" that when completed will yield a profit. Well let me explain to you one of the "sweetest profit centers" of any nation state is the TAX PAYER supported national treasury of the government. This is the basis of the Federal Reserve systems and each US note of money that is circulated is a debt note from this private corporation that represents a loan to operate the public infrastructure of the country. When thier is a surplus in the breasury as was the case before Bush took his first term the US government did not OWE the Fed but was in a surplus, that means the GNP tax base exceeded and payed back any debt of circulated and loans monies. Well this is BAD for the Banks they can ONLY PROFIT when the STATE is in debt as the flow of payments are going to them and the TAXES paid are paying down the interest (PROFIT on the DEBT) and the principle money borrowed to circulate as investment in the economy. So here is what really happend and why we are in IRAQ.
    1. The defense industry is in the hole under the dot.com boom and the US economy is BOOMING.
    2. The political left is taken power under Clinton and is moving to expand social programs and developing public infrstructure.
    3. The US tach jobs industry is providing the US government with massive tax base from the high paid tech jobs.
    4. The middle class is expanding buying more property, stock in corporations, and is becoming a stronger voice and owner in America
    5. THe investments of the right wing war machine corporations are in the toilet and the Oil industry is flat with technolgies like solar and wind being perfected it is only a small time that zero pollution vechnicles and homes may start appearing and that would put a huge dent in the profit of oil companies, and their influence in the government.
    6. It is realized that Iraq woudl be a good Oil target and Military target for corporation profits if a pretext could be established to gain control of the resources from "war scenario" and "liberator perspective" to enable concent from the public.
    7. To profit the corporations must sieze control of the white house and congress. They work to get the democrats out with Monica Lewinsky and to cast shadow of doubt on socially progress agendas.
    8. They establish the need to WIN the next election so they can controll the agenda and establish the policy basis of the government.
    9. They WIN the office and need to establish the motives for their profit scheme with a "terrible Event" 9/11 and amazingliy the Iraq governemnt and Al-QUeda are behind it — and not only that they tell the public they have WMD to create the needed fear to enage the pretext and start the war. They pay millions to support this with lobbing in Washington, and setup massive stock deals for those in seats of power to support it.
    10. They invade and carry out their objective to gather control of the oil resources for profit, and establish a 4 base military structures to create a permenant presence and a ongoing pretext to stary their an continue to rape Iraqi oil for the profiteers who set
    this scheme up at Haly Burton, and BechTel and others to insure the profits would be had from the oil sales, the national treasure plundered, etc..
    11. By starting the war they gain the pretext to sell the American TaxPayer the technologies and weapons systems to ensure they can protext their investment and they make the US taxpayer pay for the support of this corporation profit agenda.
    12. The profits of the sales to the government go directly to the Offshore untaxed accounts in Belize and other places this military corporations are established so as not to pay tax on profits, and to transfer the DEBT of the war to the American tax payer and all the profits to the croprations inveters in this multianational corporations WAR DEAL of PROFIT and Middle class and working class peoples death. Remember the people scheming this are not going to fight for it themselves, they are going to only provide the pretext events, the "FEAR" sales factor, and the ongoing basis of occupation which is "an insuregent force" so they can stay
    and continue to RAPE the Iraqi peaople Using US Taxpayer dollars.

    The torture thing is a terrible "distraction to throw the focus off the real issues". The profit explained above and the debt to the American taxpayer whose jobs have largely been exported to assure that support of any progressive canidates will be limited.

    That is what is happening and people need to understand that.

    7b out. Peace.

    • It’s easy to dismiss all of this at the Corporate Level or the Multi-National Level or whatever the current term is in vogue.

      But you are forgetting that it is the people, the citizen who is part and parcel as well.

      You can explain all of the structures of the economy but at the most basal level is the citizen. And the American citizen has many more parts than mere consumption of goods and severices at the expense of other nations/peoples. Including each other citizen.

      But what is driving this nation is not so much the uptake of resources as the innate hatered of all that is not them. Should this "hate" energy be directed at something else... That is, converted to something else; a different focus then it can solve its own problems of recourses. But, alas, hate comes easy to Americans and prevents them from leaving the old model of kill, steal.

      What you want as stated/implied in your post will never happen. America will slowly but surely burn itself out.