Iraq Prison Abuse story in the Guardian an elsewhere ¹ What can I say? It makes me want to puke:
One civilian contractor was accused of raping a young male prisoner but has not been charged because military law has no jurisdiction over him. ²
I see. I guess these are lawless areas just like the prison of Guantánamo Bay:
Human Rights Watch described the 1.8m by 2.4m open-sided wire cells in which the men are being held as “a scandal”. ³.
Some of the offenders have offered such silly excuses as “not [having] had the opportunity to read the Geneva Conventions before being put on guard duty” ⁴. Right, so now **you need to read the Geneva Conventions to know that sexually assaulting prisoners is wrong!?**
Oh, and did you know that one of the fellows involved (and the one with the lousy excuse I cited above) worked in the USA as a prison ward?
Frederick, at thirty-seven, was far older than his colleagues, and was a natural leader; he had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of Corrections.
Well, US citizens, I sure hope you’re not in prison when these guys and gals are guarding *you*. But then again, you have the second largest prison population on earth ⁵ – **1 in 142 US residents now in prison** ⁶
In his defense, this man also claims that he was repeatedly reassured by superiors “Don’t worry about it.” I’m almost sure that they’ll just want to blame the lowest elements in the system, the ones with the least credibility, the ones that others have successfully involved in the abuses. Involving lower ranking people that you can sacrifice as pawns in times of need is a common pattern. That’s how allegations about child abuse in various countries such as Belgium have been diverted away from the entire network towards a small number of the lowest ranking offenders.
We also talked about dead prisoners...
Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men. There is the battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of another prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood. ⁷
The WOZ had two interesting points, which got me thinking. In fact, I’ve talked about this horror with Claudia for hours, whenever we passed a newstand and saw new pictures, in fact.
1. The stupidity of the perpetuators was the only thing that let us uncover the the entire scandal. First: Why are these people so totally unaware of the horrible crime they are committing? Second: Appeals without real checks and balances in the system are useless. We need **neutral third parties monitoring prisons, reporting abuse, and bringing offenders to trial!**
2. To think that this is the exception is wrong. Where you have absolute power, and where people are afraid, torture happens. In German prisons, in Spanish prisons, in US prisons, in Israeli prisons, in Syrian prisons, etc. The list is long. It happens in every war. When men are trained to maim and kill, you can’t expect them to model citizens and noble prison wards. They are killing machines and dangerous. **They are not peace keepers, they are not policemen, they are not investigators. If we’re not fighting a war, we don’t need soldiers!**
#Iraq