News Analysis
White House - torture centreWORKERS, NOV 2006 ISSUE
The USA continues to run a global system of secret CIA prisons that have operated, on executive authority, since the start of the war on terror. And it has fought in courts and Congress to preserve executive prerogatives of arbitrary arrest, unrestrained interrogation, and endless incarceration.
There are 41,000 detainees in Iraq, 1,100 detainees are being systematically tortured at Guantanamo and Bagram, and there have been at least 150 extraordinary renditions to, for example, Uzbekistan and Morocco. At least 94 detainees have been killed.
This is not abuse by "rotten apples", but government-sanctioned systematic torture. As The New York Times wrote in an editorial on 18 March 2005, "The atrocities that occurred in prisons like Abu Ghraib were the product of decisions that began at the very top, when the Bush administration decided that Sept. 11 had wiped out its responsibilities to abide by the rules, including the Geneva Conventions and the American Constitution."
Torture is illegal, immoral and impractical. It is also counter-productive: a regime that tortures people loses support. Tom Parker, a former MI5 agent, pointed out, "The US is doing what the British did in the 1970s, detaining people and violating their civil liberties. It did nothing but exacerbate the situation. Most of those interned went back to terrorism. You'll end up radicalising the entire population."
Failure
The USA's National Intelligence Estimate recently concluded, "the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and...the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks."
Bush senior's National Security adviser, General Brent Scowcroft, warned that attacking Iraq would be a priceless gift to Islamic terrorists. Blair says this is enemy propaganda. These wars against Iraq and Afghanistan are traditional colonial wars for power and resources, not a rerun of the Second World War, as Blair and Bush would have us believe. 64 per cent of Americans now think the attack on Iraq was a mistake.
In September, 776 US soldiers were wounded in Iraq, the fourth highest casualty rate for a month since the spring 2003 invasion, the highest rate since the November 2004 attack on Fallujah. Overall in this war, 21,600 US soldiers have been wounded and 2,741 have been killed. In January US forces encountered 1,454 explosive devices, in July 2,625.
The Iraq Study Group, chaired by former US Secretary of State James Baker, is calling for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. William Buckley, editor of the conservative magazine The National Review, admits, "The US objective in Iraq has failed."
The Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, said of Iraq, we should "get ourselves out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems. ... I don't say that the difficulties we are experiencing around the world are caused by our presence in Iraq, but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them."