They kill ‘em for their sport

The horrifying things done to Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were not aberrations so much as condoned behaviour, since it was overlooked if not actually encouraged by those in charge of the detention facility whose very name has now become a byword for sub-human treatment of prisoners.

One has to salute the American press which unearthed the atrocities being perpetrated at Abu Ghraib, in the same way as it has exposed the inhuman conditions in which prisoners were kept, at least initially, at Guantanamo. To its great credit, the American press continues to shine the light on what the establishment would prefer to remain under wraps.

Exposure, a report in the New Yorker magazine in March this year by journalist Philip Gourevitch and filmmaker Errol Morris, whose documentary Standard Operating Procedure is due for release this month, records what soldiers of a reserve military police unit saw when they first arrived at Abu Ghraib.

“It’s nothing but rubble, blown up buildings, dogs running all over the place, rabid dogs, burnt remains. The stench was unbearable.” The prison squatted on the desert, a wall of sheer concrete traced with barbed wire, picketed by watchtowers.

They write that the great number of Iraqi prisoners seized by the military were designated “security detainees”, a label that had gained currency in the war on terror to describe “unlawful combatants,” as well as others who had been denied POW status and could be held indefinitely in isolation and secrecy without judicial recourse. The great number of Abu Ghraib prisoners were placed under the authority of military intelligence officers who instructed MPs how to treat them. When the Abu Ghraib photographs became public, it was the MPs who were blamed. Low-ranking soldiers who took and appeared in the pictures were singled out for opprobrium and punishment. They were represented as rogues who acted out of depravity.

“Yet the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was de facto United States policy,” Gourevitch and Morris point out. “The authorisation of torture and the decriminalisation of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of captives in war time have been the defining legacies of the current Administration; and the rules of interrogation that produced the abuses documented...in the fall of 2003 were the direct expression of hostility towards international law and military doctrine that was found in the White House, the Vice President’s office, and at the highest levels of the Justice and Defence Departments.”

The Abu Ghraib rules were designed to create far more licence than restriction for interrogators who sought to break prisoners. The MPs were enlisted as enforcers for such practices as sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, sensory deprivation and the imposition of physical and psychological pain. There was no standard operating procedure that could draw the line between what was permissible and what was not. The MPs followed instructions given to them by military intelligence officers. The absence of a code was the code at Abu Ghraib.

The high value security detainees were held during and pending interrogation in single cells. Most of them were kept naked; others had their heads wrapped in women’s panties; still others were kept handcuffed in stress positions in cells with no lights and no windows. When a soldier would ask why, he would be told, “Hey! That’s the MI (military intelligence). That’s what MI does. That’s the MI thing.”

A Red Cross team that visited Abu Ghraib in October 2003, found many obstacles placed in its way. And what they saw only horrified them, especially when the abuses were justified as necessary to obtain information. The team returned two weeks later and in its report said that the military intelligence operation at the prison was plagued by gross and systematic violations of the Geneva Conventions. Some of the punishments ranged from squat thrusts and low-crawling in a naked state over concrete to being slapped and knocked around while hooded and made to stand on a cardboard box all night.

Sabrina Harman, the non-com who took most of the pictures that brought Abu Ghraib to the world’s attention had started out as a person who would not even have an ant stamped on; but brutality ends up brutalising those who witness it, which is what happened to her. She took pictures of dead prisoners and in every picture that she would have somebody take of her, she would flash a big smile and make the thumbs-up sign.

But ultimately it got to her. She wrote to a friend in the States, “Not many people know this s—t goes on. The only reason I want to be there is to get the pictures and prove that the US is not what they think. But I don’t know if I can take it mentally. What if that was me in their shoes. These people will be our future terrorist...I thought I could handle anything. I was wrong.”

Harman was court-martialled, given a six-month sentence, reduced in rank and given a bad-conduct discharge. The only person ranked above a staff sergeant to face a court martial for what went on at Abu Ghraib was cleared of criminal wrongdoing. No one has ever been charged for abuses at the prison that were not photographed.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s chilling poem written after the killings in Karachi following Ayub Khan’s election victory says it all: Kahin nahin hai, kahin bhi nahin lahoo ka suragh (Nowhere but nowhere is there any trace of the blood that was shed).

Khalid Hasan is Daily Times’ US-based correspondent