Iraq - six years after United States led invasion:

Torturing and killing innocent civilians

Latheef FAROOK

“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” - The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5 (1948)

Shortly after the United States invasion of Iraq in March 2003 thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and teenagers were indiscriminately herded into prison camps and subjected to the most sadistic forms of torture imaginable.

The world came to know of this crime with the publication of few disturbing pictures of naked prisoners piled on top of each other, others hooded and wired with electrodes. Later there emerged pictures of female prisoners being forced to pose for indecent pictures besides reports of rape about which most victims were reluctant to talk about due to the devastating consequences on their lives in this conservative society.

Then came the chilling reports showing American soldiers beating prisoners almost to death, apparently raping a female prisoner, acting inappropriately with a dead body and taping Iraqi guards raping young boys.

At the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, women were abused and tortured continuously. One woman was forced to walk on all fours and her knees and elbows were in a terrible state. Another woman had been forced to separate faeces from urine, using her bare hands. The soldiers frequently forced them to drink water from the toilet bowl.

A woman of sixty, who had said she was a virgin, was continually threatened with rape. Sometimes they made a hundred or more prisoners lie on the ground and then trampled them underfoot.

The British Forces had also been involved at all levels in the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners and civilians throughout Iraq. In Basra, the British constructed their own Abu Ghraib, called ‘Camp Bread Basket’. Despite the high level of crimes committed against the Iraqi people, the British occupiers managed to conceal their crimes until very recently.

British media, which has a history of deception and imperialist propaganda, performed its usual duty in keeping the British people well entertained and poorly informed of their government’s war crimes.

However pictures smuggled from inside ‘Camp Bread Basket’ graphically showed how Iraqi prisoners were abused, tortured and murdered by British soldiers who have “shared values” with US soldiers.

According to reports, an Australian man contracted to rebuild oil pipelines in Iraq witnessed terrible abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers. The man, who identified himself as ‘Harry’, said pictures of American soldiers torturing prisoners are just the ‘tip of the iceberg’.

“You think about it, these pictures [are ones] that they’ve published on the net to send to their friends, the real stuff that’s going on there is far, far beyond this”. I had seen far worse pictures while working in Tikrit” he said.

Washington also developed a system of contracting out its torture through a procedure discreetly referred to as “rendering.” Some detainees in US custody were rendered to oppressive regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Uzbekistan, Syria and among other countries where local police torture them, often with US interrogators present.

According to reports, the practice of abuse and torture has been approved and facilitated by both the White House and Whitehall. It is not simply an isolated behaviour of a “few bad apples” that suddenly appeared in the US-British military in Iraq, as propagandized by the mainstream media.

The document shows that the George Bush administration is guilty of gross violations of human rights and of a “systematic decision to alter the use of methods of coercion and torture that lay outside of accepted and legal norms”.

Speaking of these atrocities one begins to wonder whether Bush and his British partner in crime, Blair and their troops were normal people brought up in decent families with reasonable human values and feelings.

The million-dollar question is: Where were the good Americans and Europeans? And where were the Muslims around the globe who failed to express their solidarity with suffering Iraqis? Even the Arab dictators turned a blind eye.

Mostly, Arabs and Muslims all over the world ought to be ashamed of themselves for their indifference to the plight of Iraqis. While people of other religions and ethnicities world over, came out in demonstration demanding that Bush and Blair end the war and end the atrocities, few Muslims came out on such demonstrations.