[Mb-civic] Guardian Unlimited: Abuses of power

[harry.sifton at sympatico.ca]

Harry spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it.

-------
Note from Harry:

Abuse of power - ignornace, imaturity, fear and poor training!
-------

To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk

Abuses of power
Leader
Saturday May 21 2005
The Guardian


Pictures of Saddam Hussein in his underpants - splashed all over yesterday's Sun and New York Post - may have breached his right to privacy, according to US military spokesmen. It is not clear if the images reached the tabloids by unauthorised initiative or were leaked by officials to humiliate the former Iraqi dictator, perhaps to help draw the sting from the insurgency. Even "high-value" prisoners have rights, before and after they stand trial, and the principle should not be ignored to score propaganda points, wage psychological warfare - or sell Rupert Murdoch's newspapers. 

Wrongs, though come in different shapes and sizes, and by coincidence some far more serious and apparently systemic outrages by US servicemen were also reported yesterday. The New York Times' account of the mistreatment and killing of two Afghan prisoners at the Bagram airbase near Kabul is a shocking addition to a grim catalogue that includes well-documented abuses at Abu Ghraib jail and Guantánamo Bay.  

Some of the facts were already known and have been called "isolated cases". But the New York Times article, citing a 2,000-page military investigation file, names interrogators and victims and graphically describes the routine actions of young, poorly trained soldiers that   resulted in criminal charges against seven. Methods included chaining prisoners in painful positions (ignoring warnings from the Red Cross), as well as beatings and verbal and sexual abuse. Many Bagram personnel, led by the same officer, were redeployed to Baghdad and used similar interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib. Crucially, the soldiers believed - following a determination by President Bush in early 2002 - that the Geneva conventions on prisoners of war did not apply to al-Qaida and Taliban fighters. Detainees were to be considered "terrorists" until proved otherwise.  

These findings are a reminder of the need for combative media in wartime - and an antidote to high-minded outrage from the administration over Newsweek magazine's story, later retracted, about the desecration of a Qur'an at Guantánamo. Universal justice and American values require that the perpetrators - and those who authorised their acts - are held to account. As so often with Iraq and the "war on terror", some will retort that however regrettable, such abuses are overshadowed by the mass, random brutality of terrorists and the murderous Ba'athist regime. That is utterly irrelevant to these cases - though not of course to the old man in underpants washing his socks in a small prison cell. 

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited