By Anastasia Gomes, 7/3/07
In the latest scandal to
rock the Bush administration’s shameless attempt to cover up human rights
atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib, U.S. Army General Antonio M. Taguba breaks
his silence to The New Yorker this week, saying that not only did President Bush
and Rumsfeld know about the torture committed against innocent men, women and
children, but that they authorized it.
General Taguba, with almost four decades in the
military, was tapped to head the investigation after photos depicting torture
at the U.S. operated prison
in Iraq
were leaked to the media in January 2006.
Taguba told The New Yorker’s Pulitzer Prize
winning Seymour Hersh that the torture that occurred at Abu Ghraib was a direct
command from Bush and Rumsfeld, and dismisses the assertion that the acts were
the result of a few corrupt soldiers.
When questioned on the subject, President Bush
claimed to have learned about the torture through the media. Rumsfeld made
similar claims of ignorance, purporting to have only recently been briefed about
Abu Ghraib. But Taguba says senior officials at Rumsfeld’s office had been
informed of the pictures many months prior. Taguba even has the archived emails
to prove it.
The list of the atrocities committed at Abu
Ghraib is long and includes sexual acts forced between Father and Son, acts of
sodomy, rape, as well as other forms of sexual torture and humiliation.
Aside from the pictures that were shown to the
public, Taguba described other images depicting more graphic violence, which
were never released to the public. The unseen pictures involve female prisoners
and serve as a reminder that Abu Ghraib held not only men, but women and
children – 100 children under the age of 10, specifically.
Taguba says he had briefed members of the
military dozens of times over a span of weeks, and in March he submitted his
report outlining “systemic and illegal abuse” to the Pentagon in
March. Soon after, Taguba says, he began to feel as though he was being
stonewalled and intimidated by officials at the highest ranks of the Military
and CIA.
Those who claim that impeachment is off the
table, both within the general public and the congress, do so with the excuse
and rationality that Bush has very little time left. But the world can no
longer claim ignorance to the wide spread pervasiveness of these acts and
policies, and we must be confronted with our OWN consciences, the way Taguba
was.
At the time of his inquiry, Taguba was working
under the command of then head of Central Command in Iraq- General John
Abizaid. After Taguba filed his report documenting what went on at Abu Ghraib,
Abizaid delivered to him the following warning: “You and your report will
be investigated.”
This kind of “Mafia” style
intimidation is undoubtedly still being carried out today. Abizaid, Bush, and Rumsfeld have all operated
with complete impugnity. Rumsfeld was not held responsible for these traumatic
and sexual acts of violations.
We now know that the torture that was carried
out in Abu Ghraib was carried out upon a prison population that was made up of “90%
innocent” people – a figure quoted by Janet Karpinsky, who was Abu
Ghraib’s Brigadeer General at the time of the abuses.
Imagine you are an innocent person, snatched
from your family and thrown in one of the many U.S. jails presently holding tens
of thousands of nameless detainees today.
Imagine hours and weeks of torture, rape.
Imagine how long 18 months can feel to someone who’s being forced to act out
sexual acts with their own father. Then ask yourself if there is any moral
necessity in holding the Bush administration responsible for their role in all
of this. Ask yourself if there is any room for moral ambiguity.
The time has come to face the truth. The
disgusting acts depicted in those pictures from Abu Ghraib were not the actions
of a few bad apples; they were merely a physical documentation of what is
happening behind closed doors in Iraq,
Guantanamo Bay, and in secret prisons around the
world.
Those who question the point of a Bush
impeachment are essentially saying that an inquiry into these crimes, not just
to get the truth about crimes committed in retrospect, but in order to stop the
torture and brutal crimes TERRORIZING the population in Iraq NOW, is
not a worth while endeavor.
Even
well beyond the pictures from Abu Ghraib, the abuses of this administration
have been well evidenced and documented
through accounts by manifold reputable sources; former Generals, Human rights
organizations, U.N. Committees, the Red Cross, all of which have come forward
and have spoken clearly about the seriousness of the situation.
In
fact it seems that the only ones who continue to downplay and ignore the
gravity of these ongoing abuses are the Republicans AND the Democrats, who are
also aware of all this, and who are asking us to accept that its okay for the
torture to continue for just a measly 18 more months.
And
even then, the fact remains that the bi-partisan enacted Military Commissions
Act is rarely discussed in debates seriously, as if it is not urgent to reverse
the bill that opened the floodgates and armed President Bush with the right to
deem certain people outside of the rule of law and vulnerable to torture, even
after we’ve literally seen what he’s done with it.
If Bush and the architects of these policies
are not held responsible, what makes us think that there will be a better
chance of reversing this bill in the future, after having gone unchallenged for
so long, ignored willfully and some would argue criminally, by congress members
of both parties.
Military psychologists who’ve served in Abu
Ghraib have documented cases of torture where those who were tortured – including
those as young as 16 – become so traumatized they are unable to re-enter
society as functioning individuals. Is 18 months more of this acceptable?
Abu Ghraib has been closed, but Guantanamo Bay is still open. Hillary Clinton said
in the recent Democrat debate that we are safer since 9-11 and our waging of a
“war on terror”.
But safer for who? Does the safety of Iraqis
count? Does it matter that since the “new security plan” was
implemented in Baghdad, the prison count in Iraq has sky
rocketed? The “security” plan was described by the New York Times, as
a plan which includes mass block by block sweeps of ordinary Iraqi civilians.
The Washington Post reported last month that in
the past three months since the new Bush “security plan” was
implemented, there has been a dramatic increase in prisoners being held in U.S.
jails (those jails that we know of, at least.) The new security plan was put
into effect in February, and by March, 3,500 new prisoners were added to Baghdad’s already
suffocatingly cramped jails. In the same Post article, one U.N. Official in Baghdad reported that
prisoners complain of “routine beatings, suspension by limbs for long
periods, electric shock treatment to sensitive parts of the body, threats of
ill treatment of close relatives.”
An article that appeared in the New York Times
recently seemed to echo President Bush’s increasingly hostile war rhetoric
towards Iran, when it warned
its readers that Iran was
providing material support to insurgents in Iraq. The article, deceptively
titled “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq made in Iran, U.S. says”, quotes an anonymous
U.S. official and is written by Michael Gordon, who collaborated with Judith Miller,
back when she was busy building a case for war with Iraq.
In his article, Gordon casually explains that
the U.S. Officials who are making these claims, are corroborating their
accusations with information they’ve obtained through “interrogation reports”.
Now that we know the true nature of this
administration’s “interrogation” tactics, in other words TORTURE, and that
those tactics have never been limited to Abu Ghraib, we must ask ourselves a
poignant question: what kind of atrocities will we allow to occur in the next
18 months, under the guise of “interrogation” and what other atrocities and
crimes against humanity will they be used to excuse?
As long as we support the troops, and their
Commander in Chief is in favor of torture, either expressly or tacitly and
passively, we are also supporting the creation of monsters, the kind of monster
we saw personified in Kelly England. Will they forgive us, knowing we knew what
we knew?
The cries of tortured women, brothers, fathers,
children, being made into the prey for sick depraved war games and
intimidation, do not wake Bush and many of those in Washington.
Do they wake you?
The cries of Abu Ghraib are real, and knowing
what we know, we must act NOW. Disagreeing with Bush’s policy but rallying for
the next 2008 president while in 2007 innocent people are being hung up, raped
and humiliated, is passively enabling the people those who are
authorizing and committing these unspeakable acts.
Forget Barack, Clinton and Edwards, and come face to face with the now. Living
in the now, is the only choice for those existing second to second, tortured by
the hands of those whose faces they will never forget and deafened by the cries
of nearby prisoners, whose voices they will never be able to erase.
RIGHT NOW, for those cringing in pain, every
breath is labored, and every moment is a lifetime. To these tortured souls,
2008 is, and might as well be, an eternity away.