Rohan Pearce
The exposure of the brutal policy of torture carried out by the US occupiers in Iraq is just the latest political debacle for the governments of the US-British-Australian invasion coalition. Just like the scandal over Iraq's non-existent arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, all three governments have again been caught out waging a campaign of deceit to try to halt the collapse in public support for their occupation of Iraq.
In the US, leaked documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek have revealed that a post-9/11 policy of torture was approved at the highest levels of government — signed off on by Attorney-General John Ashcroft, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and President George Bush.
In Britain, a handful of soldiers are facing charges over abusing Iraqi civilians they detained. Like the scandal embroiling the US guards at Abu Ghraib, the charges against the British troops include sexual abuse of prisoners.
In Australia, the federal Coalition government has tried, unsuccessfully, to wash its hands of the scandal. While there is no public evidence Australian soldiers had a direct hand in the torture of Iraqi prisoners, there is considerable evidence that the government knew of the abuse of prisoners in Iraqi jails, including Abu Ghraib. Prime Minister John Howard's government is clearly morally and legally responsible for the violence of the occupation regime of which Australia is part.
On June 16, defence minister Senator Robert Hill finally acknowledged the extensive opportunities the government had to find out about what its US partners were up to at Abu Ghraib. There were 25 reports on the abuse of Iraqi prisoners sent to the defence department in Canberra. Yet Hill and Howard still maintain that they only inadvertently misled the Australian public when they claimed that no Australians were aware of the torture of Iraqi prisoners until the scandal broke in the US mass media.
Defence department officials revealed on June 17 that Hill had made public only a fraction of the findings of the department's investigation into the torture scandal.
Hill and Howard have responded with yet another government whitewash. Much of the controversy about the government's knowledge of prisoner torture has centred on Australian military lawyer Major George O'Kane, who helped the US military "justify" ruling the Geneva Conventions inapplicable to some Iraqi prisoners.
O'Kane helped draft a response to accusations of torture raised by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in October 2003. Despite this, Hill refuses to allow O'Kane to appear before the Senate committee that is investigating Australia's role in the torture scandal — probably because he could reveal the extent of the government's knowledge of torture before it became public.
In a comment piece in the June 17 Sydney Morning Herald, Paul McGeough noted that the "issue has never been about what individual Australians did or didn't do to prisoners in Iraq. It's been about what Australia, an occupying power, did — and didn't do."
In his June 16 statement to the Senate committee, Hill admitted that Australian soldiers had been involved in the capture of some 120 Iraqis who were then "officially" detained by US troops.
A briefing on the legal prohibitions against torture prepared by US Human Rights Watch argues: "Article 3 of the Convention Against Torture expressly prohibits sending a person to another state 'where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture'. Human Rights Watch believes that the US government would be complicit in torture — in essence, aiding and abetting torture — if it sent detainees to another country aware that they might be tortured there."
The same legal responsibility applies to Australia — which ratified the anti-torture convention in 1989 — turning over Iraqis to the US military.
Kevin Rudd, Labor's foreign affairs spokesperson, released a legal opinion on June 4 provided to him by Professor Gillian Triggs, the director of Melbourne University's Institute for Comparative and International Law. Triggs argued that "Australia has a legal responsibility to all detained persons, whether prisoners of war or civilians, as a joint Occupying Power in Iraq and as a member of the Coalition" and that "Australia has an obligation to bring any breaches to an end, to prosecute for grave breaches and to seek an enquiry into alleged violations".
In parliament on June 16, Greens Senator Bob Brown attacked Hill's claims that Australian soldiers are guilt-free. Brown quoted a June 7 report by the US News and World Report magazine. The article revealed that far from facilitating ICRC inspections at Abu Ghraib (as the government claims), O'Kane had briefed US staff at the prison on January 2. O'Kane's purpose was ostensibly "to ensure a more coordinated visit by the ICRC" later that month.
However, the article continued: "Two days later, O'Kane wrote [in a memo obtained by the magazine], he and Maj. Laura Potter, deputy commander of the [US] 205th MI Brigade, briefed the Red Cross visitors. 'The purpose of the inspection briefing ... was to control the inspection for security purposes.' He went on: 'It was briefed to the ICRC that their free access would be restricted in accordance' with the Geneva Conventions, 'but only to those security internees undergoing interrogations in Units 1A, 1B [the 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ of the prison in which the infamous photos of torture were taken] and interrogation booths.'
"After negotiations with the 205th MI Brigade, O'Kane said, the Red Cross was denied 'free access' only to the 'security internees' then being interrogated. The inspectors, he added, were given immediate access to prisoners in 1A and 1B."
Responding to Hill's claim that O'Kane facilitated ICRC inspections, Brown argued: "What in fact happened was that Major O'Kane became part of a conspiracy to block the Red Cross from its right under the Geneva Convention to visit all prisoners at Abu Ghraib when it wanted to and without notice. He went to the prison on January 2 and forewarned the authorities that the Red Cross was seriously alarmed about abuse and was coming again and he had put them off until January 4.
"On January 4, he ensured not only that the Red Cross would come to a prison that was warned to get its act in order but, moreover, that the Red Cross would not get access at all to that particular contained part of the prison where the worst abuses had occurred. That is a breach of the Geneva Convention. How can Senator Hill come in here and say that Major O'Kane upheld the Geneva Convention when he did not?"
The atrocities committed in Iraq's political prisons need to be seen in their broader context. They are not "aberrations" or just a single "bad" policy decision of the occupation forces. Rather, they are an integral part of the US-led occupation regime in Iraq, whose central goal is to terrorise a hostile population to abandon all resistance to its imperial masters.
On June 10, the US Center for Economic and Social Rights released a report that bluntly put the torture scandal into perspective. "The Bush administration", it stated, "is committing war crimes and other serious violations of international law in Iraq as a matter of routine policy."
The corporate media coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal doesn't reflect some newfound adherence to defence of human rights by the corporate media. If this was the case, the credible reports of torture conducted by US soldiers in Afghanistan in 2001 would have generated a similar outcry. Instead, the current corporate media criticism of the governments that make up the Iraq occupation coalition represents a division in the capitalist political elite in these countries over how best to conquer Iraq and secure corporate control of its oil wealth.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, June 23, 2004.
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