Iraq I
A former US guard at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib jail, Sergeant Sindar, has remarked, "It is a common thing to abuse prisoners. I saw beatings all the time". A Red Cross spokesperson has referred to a "pattern" and "broad system" of prisoner maltreatment. There have been highly suspicious deaths in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Major-General Antonio Taguba, who this year investigated offences in Iraq, describes "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton abuses". His damning report notes that, in late August 2003, a team of military intelligence officers went to Iraq. Soon after, the worst events occurred.
Taguba concludes that military intelligence interrogators "actively requested" that prison guards "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation". Remarks like, "Make sure he gets the treatment", were made.
Just a few low-level bad apples? Try a considered policy of cruelty initiated by high-level officers. Yet US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld didn't even read Taguba's report and George Bush won't dismiss Rumsfeld. Fabulous.
Brent Howard
Rydalmere, NSW
Iraq II
How reassuring that the alleged Baghdad sadists are safely back in town at such torture academies as Psy Ops (Fort Bragg) and the School of the Americas (Fort Benning), whose alumni include thousands of Latin American sadists and tyrants.
Other graduates include Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh and Indonesia's Captain Yunus Yosfiah, General Suharto's Information Minister. Yunus Yosfiah remains a major suspect in the Balibo murders of five Australian TV reporters, and of another murder in Timor of Australian journalist, Roger East. His militias in Timor and elsewhere in Indonesia carry out routine brutalities of great value to US oil companies.
Fort Benning is the relocation sanctuary of My Lai mass murderer, William Calley, a prosperous jeweller there.
So what are PsyOps-School of the Americas perverts doing, exactly, to the two Australians "detained" in George Bush's Tiger Cages at Guantanamo Bay?
Is their only protection to be had from the silly, squealing Australian foreign minister, himself notorious for being photographed with his chubby legs bulging out of fishnet stockings? Or must they look to the sinister and creepy Philip Ruddock, Colonel Klink of Australia's own insanely cruel and expensive refugee "detention" system?
And does Peter Costello's budget include costings of the Australian government's torture liaison officials in Washington?
Peter Woodforde
Melba ACT
Iraq III
People are outraged that prisoners are abused in Iraq. But no amount of punishment meted out to individual soldiers will wash away my despair. Despair that in January 2003, the prime minister of Australia encouraged his US bully boy friends to bomb without mercy people who had endured 13 years without adequate health care, food and water, pretending to bring them liberty and freedom.
We knew there were no weapons of mass destruction except ours while we watched on TV the babies bleeding and crying in pain and doctors forced to operate without anaesthetics. Would this be OK if the prisoners were not tortured? Perhaps we are outraged because we are caught out?
Yvonne Francis
Queanbeyan, NSW
Lest we forget
The passing of ANZAC Day celebrates once again the Australian state's penchant for invading other countries in partnership with other imperialist powers. The only time Australia went it alone was in 1883 when a group of Queenslanders invaded and annexed the south eastern coast of New Guinea for the crown.
But this year's commemoration failed to note the irony of the present military conjuncture — the first time Australian forces invaded a Middle Eastern country was at Gallipoli in 1915.
The lessons of that military debacle seems to have been forgotten by the stalwarts of Australian militarism. In 1915 the Turks were defending their homeland from an invading force just as today the Iraqi people have risen up to expel the occupiers of their country.
En route we are asked to get excited about French resistance fighters like Nancy Wake or marvel at the heroism of Charlotte Gray but are asked to look upon their Iraqi equivalents as "terrorists".
As they say at all the services — "lest we forget".
Dave Riley
Brisbane
Baby bonus
Far from encouraging Australians to breed more kids with one-off bonuses, potential parents should be aware that by age five, as Professor Fiona Stanley has shown, one in four children have intellectual, behavioural, social or physical delays which will stay with them for the rest of their school lives.
This potential time bomb has been linked to the lack of early childhood development resources in the community, including not valuing the people who care for our children, the stay-at-home parents and day-care workers, the lack of child-health nurses, the breakdown of community structures and the lack of early intervention remedial programs.
We cannot as a society care for the kids we have got — with childhood abuse, asthma, diabetes, autism, ADD all rising in prevalence over the last 20 years, while we have seen a gradual withdrawal of services over the same period. A budget that promotes procreation but ignores the health and early education of our future workforce is irresponsible in the extreme. It takes a village to raise a child not a one-off baby bonus.
Dr Colin Hughes
Greenmount WA
'Man of steel'
The world's major warmonger, George Bush, branded him "the man of steel". An intelligent Australian nominated him as "The Pentagon Parrot". Now he has snuck into and out of Iraq, thereby politicising ANZAC Day, he has done what no-one else has been capable of doing.
He has managed to cross the species divide. One minute the Pentagon Parrot. The next an American Ape.
Robert McCormick
Bridgewater, SA
Always the old...
When I see on TV the tired old faces of Bush, Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Howard and co., and contrast them with the young puzzled faces, black and white, under the lethal-looking helmets in Iraq, I am reminded of the immortal Phil Ochs song:
"It's always the old to lead us to the war,
It's always the young to fall.
Now look at all
we've won with a sabre and a gun —
Tell me, is it worth it all?
Oh, I flew the final mission in the Japanese war,
I was there at Little Bay Horn.
Call it peace or call it treason,
intelligence or reason,
But I ain't a-marchin' any more."
Have Messrs Rumsfeld, Powell and co. ever heard a bomb go off? No! They are (for want of a better phrase) sitting pretty.
Rosemary Evans
St Kilda, Vic
Nazis
"Australian Federal Police informant Kevin Eniss publicly admitted to arranging the scuttling of people-smuggling boats with people on board." (My emphasis, GLW #579). 353 people died when SIEV-X capsised in our search and rescue zone on October 19, 2001. If we allow our government to get away with this we are exactly as we claimed the Germans were under Hitler — compliant. More so, because we have here the chance to change our government (but changing the system will take longer).
The resemblances between our system and Nazism are strong. We do not build gas chambers, but we belong to a race and a system that habitually invades other people's lands, deliberately poisons people, removes their children from them, exploits their labour and slave conditions, bombs people, starves them through sanctions and preventable famines, causes their children to be born deformed through depleted uranium and denies them medical care, clean water, housing and education.
The British in the Boer War coined the phrase "concentration camp" for pens holding Boer prisoners. Hitler understandably admired the British empire. The American general Sherman called the railroad the "final solution" for the Indians (and Europeans then killed 40 million buffalo on which the Sioux lived). These phrases pre-dated Nazism, but were adopted by the Nazis.
Callous disregard for human life, both at home and abroad, is the hallmark of capitalism and Nazism. But if it is so, it doesn't have to be so. The many young people, and older, active today against war and other horrors state "Another world is possible" (and necessary). This will entail, for one thing, a very large-scale re-education of all those brain-washed or ignorant people within our system who accept such hypocrisies and double-talk as "free trade", "cradle of democracy", "market forces", "liberation" (for conquest), "axis of evil" (it used to be "red menace"), "Huns", the "yellow peril" and the "white man's burden" (for enslavement of other people and rape of their resources).
Then the victims of our depredations worldwide need to believe and participate in the making of a better world for them and us.
All this is possible and imperative. It only needs the will.
Marie McKern
Kings Cross, NSW [Abridged]
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, May 19, 2004.
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