Coalition comrades will pay in blood for this barbaric idiocy

[thedrifter]

05-03-2004

Coalition comrades will pay in blood for this barbaric idiocy



By Andy McNab
The Telegraph (London UK)

Andy McNab, the former SAS officer who was himself tortured in Abu Ghraib prison, says punishment must be swift.

I was shocked when I saw the appalling pictures of the American soldiers humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners - but I wasn't surprised. The uncomfortable reality is that many soldiers could do what those men and women did. In Bosnia, the Canadians were alleged to have roasted prisoners over fires. The French in Algeria tortured their victims horribly. And yesterday there were fresh allegations that British soldiers had tortured an Iraqi prisoner, urinating on him and leaving him for dead after they chucked him out of a moving vehicle. The Army is saying that six corporals are likely to face charges related to the incident. But then what should we expect? Soldiers are trained to kill. They are required to be violent and aggressive. In a war, you see your friends die. Your emotions - anger, fear, desire for revenge - become almost overpowering. The majority are able to handle this but, sadly, a few are taken over the edge.

In a properly run army, however, an effective chain of command is precisely what prevents soldiers' baser instincts from running riot. That is the whole point of military discipline: to ensure that soldiers who are placed in situations that generate extreme emotions never let those emotions take them over. Army orders and procedures exist not just to help soldiers to kill the enemy ruthlessly and effectively, but also to prevent them from giving in to the urge to abuse and humiliate capitives.

The pictures shown on television in the US and published in the newspapers here demonstrate a lamentable failure of discipline and leadership within at least one unit of the US Army. If the latest allegations against the British soldiers also prove to be true, they will indicate that there are parts of the British Army which suffer from the same failing. Every commander knows this sort of thing can happen if he does not keep his troops under very tight control. That individual soldiers have been allowed to behave in so disgraceful a fashion in Iraq shows that some officers have lost control of their own troops. There must be swift, and very severe, punishment for that failure. And it should not just be the lowly ranks pictured participating in the torture who are punished. There must be more than a mild reprimand for the senior officers who are supposed to ensure that nothing of this kind ever takes place.

But the coalition forces have yet to demonstrate that they are capable of swiftly disciplining their own troops when they abuse prisoners. Nearly nine months after the first allegations against eight British soldiers emerged, the British Army has still not made up its mind whether to charge the men with any offence. An investigation was originally triggered when Private Gary Bartlam took photographs to a high street store for developing. The film turned out to show British soldiers forcing Iraqi prisoners to simulate sex with each other, and showed one suspended by a rope from a truck. The staff in the shop handed the prints to the Army authorities - who have yet to charge anyone.

Still, even severe punishment publicly meted out to those responsible would not be able to undo the damage done by the pictures of the US soldiers abusing Iraqis. The horribly grinning US soldiers have undermined everything the coalition claimed it invaded Iraq in order to achieve. The Americans said they were going into Iraq to end a regime of torture and terror. And yet here they are, operating one themselves, right in Abu Ghraib prison, the centre of Saddam's republic of fear.

It sickens me to see it. I have been in Abu Ghraib prison: I was taken there when I was captured fighting behind enemy lines during the first Gulf war. The place was truly terrifying, a monument to the animal brutality of Saddam's tyranny.

I was whipped by my "interrogators". They beat me with planks of wood. I wasn't electrocuted, it is true - but that was only because there was no electricity. Improvising novel methods of cruelty, the Iraqis would heat spoons on the paraffin heaters in the interrogation rooms and use them to burn my legs. I had my back teeth pulled out. I was stripped and forced to eat my own excrement. The humiliation was part of the torture.

Of course what the Americans did to their Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib was not as bad as that. But the photographs of the Americans taunting and insulting their Iraqi prisoners, stripping them naked and forcing them to undergo mock-executions and to simulate sex with each other, will have convinced thousands of Iraqis that the Americans are just as bad as Saddam's torturers. If there were any Iraqis who believed the coalition's claim that they were benign liberators, there won't be many now.

The soldiers responsible for the abuse have guaranteed thousands of new recruits to the organisations such as al-Qaeda which want to kill as many coalition troops in Iraq as possible. The images of torture they have created will have stiffened the resolve of the Iraqi militants and encouraged those Iraqis who were wavering to join the resistance against the coalition. So more young American soldiers will be blown apart by booby-trapped cars and shot by snipers. Their unnecessary deaths will have been caused by the stupidity of their own comrades.

There have been claims that the US interrogations resulted in valuable information. I doubt this. Whatever was going on when those pictures were taken, it was not the interrogation of prisoners by the US Army. It was some stupid kids bullying their captives for the sheer hell of it. You can tell that by the smiles on the faces of US soldiers - and indeed by the fact that there are any pictures at all of what happened. Those soldiers are anyway too young to be trained interrogators. Moreover, the woman wears a watch, which no serious interrogator ever does, because denying your victim any sense of time is an essential part of any properly-conducted interrogation.

No, this was just a group of fools determined to have fun by humiliating their prisoners. That they were allowed to do it is an indictment of the discipline and leadership in their unit. I hope someone sorts the mess out soon - otherwise something similarly horrible will happen again. And the Americans will lose Iraq permanently, with dreadful consequences for the rest of us.


http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/...3.9128489676762


Ellie