Torture’s out. Now they call it abuse

Torture’s out. Now they call it abuse
No screaming, no cries of agony, no shrieks of pain. Yes, it sounds
much better, doesn't it?

By Robert Fisk

11/12/05 "The Independent" -- --

"Prevail" is the "in" word in
America just now. We are not going to "win" in Iraq - because we did
that in 2003, didn't we, when we stormed up to Baghdad and toppled
Saddam? Then George Bush declared "Mission Accomplished". So now we
must "prevail". That's what F J "Bing" West, ex-soldier and former
assistant secretary for International Security Affairs in the Reagan
administration said this week. Plugging his new book - No True
Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah - he gave a
frightening outline of what lies in store for the Sunni Muslims of
Iraq.

I was sitting a few feet from Bing - plugging my own book - as he
explained to the great and the good of New York how General Casey
was imposing curfews on the Sunni cities of Iraq, one after the
other, how if the Sunnis did not accept democracy they would
be "occupied" (he used that word) by Iraqi troops until they did
accept democracy. He talked about the "valour" of American troops -
there was no word of Iraq's monstrous suffering - and insisted that
America must "prevail" because a "Jihadist" victory was unthinkable.
I applied the Duke of Wellington's Waterloo remark about his
soldiers to Bing. I don't know if he frightened the enemy, I told
the audience, but by God Bing frightened me.

Our appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations - housed in a
58th Street townhouse of deep sofas and fearfully strong air
conditioning (it was early November for God's sake) - was part of a
series entitled "Iraq: The Way Forward". Forward, I asked myself?
Iraq is a catastrophe. Bing might believe he was going to "prevail"
over his "Jihadists" but all I could say was that the American
project in Iraq was over, that it was a colossal tragedy for the
Iraqis dying in Baghdad alone at the rate of 1,000 a month, that the
Americans must leave if peace was to be restored and that the sooner
they left the better.

Many in the audience were clearly of the same mind. One elderly
gentleman quietly demolished Bing's presentation by describing the
massive damage to Fallujah when it was "liberated" by the Americans
for the third time last November. I gently outlined the folk that
Bing's soldiers and diplomats would have to talk to if they were to
disentangle themselves from this mess - I included Iraqi ex-officers
who were leaders of the non-suicidal part of the insurgency and to
whom would fall the task of dealing with the "Jihadists" once Bing's
lads left Iraq. To get out, I said, the Americans would need the
help of Iran and Syria, countries which the Bush administration is
currently (and not without reason) vilifying. Silence greeted this
observation.

It was a strange week to be in America. In Washington, Ahmed
Chalabi, one of Iraq's three deputy prime ministers, turned up to
show how clean his hands were. I had to remind myself constantly
that Chalabi was convicted in absentia in Jordan of massive bank
fraud. It was Chalabi who supplied New York Times reporter Judith
Miller with all the false information about Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction. It was Chalabi's fellow defectors who persuaded the
Bush administration that these weapons existed. It was Chalabi who
was accused only last year of giving American intelligence secrets
to Iran. It is Chalabi who is still being investigated by the FBI.

But Chalabi spoke to the right-wing American Enterprise Institute in
Washington, refused to make the slightest apology to the United
States, and then went on - wait for it - to meetings with Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice and national security adviser Stephen
Hadley. Vice-President Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
also agreed to see him.

By contrast, Chalabi's gullible conservative dupe was subjected to a
truly vicious interview in The Washington Post after she resigned
from her paper over the Libby "Plame-Gate" leak. A "parade of Judys"
appeared at her interview, Post reporter Lynne Duke wrote. "Outraged
Judy. Saddened Judy. Charming Judy. Conspiratorial Judy. Judy, the
star New York Times reporter turned beleaguered victim of the gossip-
mongers ..." proclaiming her intention to make no apologies for
writing about threats to the United States, Miller did
so "emphatically almost frantically, her crusading eyes brimming
with tears". Ouch.

I can only reflect on how strange the response of the American media
has become to the folly and collapse and anarchy of Iraq. It's
Judy's old mate Chalabi who should be getting this treatment but no,
he's back to his old tricks of spinning and manipulating the Bush
administration while the American press tears one of its reporters
apart for compensation.

It's like living in a prism in New York and Washington these
days. "Torture" is out. No one tortures in Iraq or Afghanistan or
Guantanamo. What Americans do to their prisoners is "abuse" and
there was a wonderful moment this week when Amy Goodman, who is
every leftist's dream, showed a clip from Pontecorvo's wonderful
1965 movie The Battle of Algiers on her Democracy Now
programme. "Colonel Mathieu" - the film is semi-fictional - was
shown explaining why torture was necessary to safeguard French
lives. Then up popped Mr Bush's real spokesman, Scott McClellan, to
say that while he would not discuss interrogation methods, the
primary aim of the administration was to safeguard American lives.

American journalists now refer to "abuse laws" rather than torture
laws. Yes, abuse sounds so much better, doesn't it? No screaming, no
cries of agony when you're abused. No shrieks of pain. No discussion
of the state of mind of the animals perpetrating this abuse on our
behalf. And its as well to remember that the government of Lord
Blair of Kut al-Amara has decided it's quite all right to use
information gleaned from this sadism. Even Jack Straw agrees with
this.

So it was a relief to drive down to the US National Archives in
Maryland to research America's attempts to produce an Arab democracy
after the First World War, one giant modern Arab state from the
Turkish border to the Atlantic coast of Morocco. US soldiers and
diplomats tried to bring this about in one brief, shining moment of
American history in the Middle East. Alas, President Woodrow Wilson
died; America became isolationist, and the British and French
victors chopped up the Middle East for their own ends and produced
the tragedy with which we are confronted today. Prevail, indeed.