'Good Guys' Should be Ashamed
by Robert Fisk
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We now depict Arabs in our films as the Nazis once depicted Jews.
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Why are we surprised at their racism, their brutality, their sheer
callousness toward Arabs? Those American soldiers in Saddam's old prison at
Abu Ghraib, those young British squaddies in Basra came — as soldiers often
come — from towns and cities where race hatred has a home: Tennessee and
Lancashire.
How many of "our" lads are ex-jailbirds themselves? How many support the
British National Party? Muslims, Arabs, "cloth heads," "rag heads,"
"terrorists," "evil." You can see how the semantics break down.
Add to that the poisonous, racial dribble of a hundred Hollywood movies that
depict Arabs as dirty, lecherous, untrustworthy and violent people — and
soldiers are addicted to movies — and it's not difficult to see how some
British scumbag will urinate into the face of a hooded man, how some
American sadist will stand a hooded Iraqi on a box with wires tied to his
genitals & hands.
The sexual sadism — the bobby-sox girl soldier who points at a man's
genitals, the mock orgy in Abu Ghraib prison, the British rifle in the
prisoner's mouth — might be a crazed attempt to balance all those lies about
the Arab world, about the desert warrior's potency, the harem, polygamy.
Even today, we still show the revolting "Ashanti" on our television
stations, a feature film about the kidnapping of the wife of an English
doctor by Arab slave-traders, which depicts Arabs as almost exclusively
child-molesters, rapists, murderers, liars and thieves. It stars — heaven
spare us — Michael Caine, Omar Sharif and Peter Ustinov and was made partly
in Israel.
Indeed, we now depict Arabs in our films as the Nazis once depicted Jews.
But Arabs are fair game. Potential terrorists to a man — and a woman — they
must be softened up, "prepared," humiliated, beaten, tortured. The Israelis
use torture in the Russian Compound in Jerusalem. Now we torture in
Saddam's old jail outside Baghdad and — for this is where British soldiers
beat a young Iraqi to death last summer — in the former office of Saddam's
most murderous chemical warfare fascist, the awful "Chemical" Ali.
And the officers? Didn't the British lieutenants and captains and majors in
the Queen's Lancashire Regiment know that their lads were kicking to death a
young Iraqi hotel worker last summer?
That man's fate — and the documentary evidence proving that he was murdered
— was first revealed by The Independent in January. Didn't the CIA boys at
Abu Ghraib know that Ivan "Chip" Frederick and Lynddie England, two of the
American soldiers in the photographs published last week, were obscenely
humiliating their prisoners?
Of course they did. The last time I saw Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski,
commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade in Iraq, she told me she had
visited Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo and found nothing wrong with it. I should
have guessed then that something had gone terribly wrong in Iraq.
I remember how in Basra, on the eve of a visit by British Prime Minister
Tony Blair, I visited the British Army's press office in the city to ask
about the death of 26-year-old Baha Mousa. The dead man's family had given
me British documents proving that he had been beaten to death in custody,
that the British Army had itself tried to pay off the family if they would
give up any legal claim against the soldiers who so cruelly killed their
son.
I was met with yawns and a total inability to furnish information about the
event. I was told to call the Ministry of Defense in London. The officer I
spoke to appeared weary, even impatient about my inquiry. There was not a
single word of compassion for the dead man.
Back in September last year, Karpinski was with a small group of journalists
in Abu Ghraib — the same ghastly prison in which thousands were put to death
by Saddam, the same jail in which Frederick and England and their American
buddies were standing their hooded Iraqi prisoner on a box with supposed
electrodes on his hands — and Karpinski took some delight in escorting us to
the old Saddam execution chamber.
She led the way into the concrete room with its raised dais and gallows, and
triumphantly pulled the gallows lever so that the trap door clanged down.
She urged us to read the last messages scrawled on the walls of the
neighboring death row by Iraqis awaiting Saddam's vengeance. But there was
something wrong about her prison tour.
There was no clear judicial process for the prisoners, and there was no
mention — until I brought it up — of the mortar attack on the American-held
jail that killed six of the inmates in their tents in August, when Karpinski
was already in command of Iraq's 8,000 prisoners. "They seemed to think we
had been using them as some kind of sand-bag," she told us. Insurgents were
then attacking Abu Ghraib four of every seven nights. Now it is attacked
twice every night.
She claimed, in answer to a question of mine, that there were "six prisoners
claiming to be American and two claiming to be from the UK." But when Gen.
Ricardo Sanchez, the senior Iraqi officer in Iraq, later denied this, no one
asked how the confusion had arisen. Was Karpinski making it up? Or was
Sanchez not telling us the truth?
Prisoners' names were often confused, Arabic script was mistransliterated,
men went "missing" from the files. It spoke of a whole culture in which
Iraqis — especially Iraqi prisoners — were somehow not worthy of the same
rights as us Westerners; which is why, I suppose, the occupying powers in
Iraq always give us the statistics of Westerners' deaths but care not the
slightest to discover the statistics of the deaths of Iraqis, the very
people they are mandated to protect and care for.
A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a young American soldier off Saadoun
Street in the center of Baghdad. He was giving sweets to street kids and
mimicking the Arabic for "thank you": sukran. Did he know Arabic, I
innocently asked. He grinned at me. "I know how to shout at them," he
said.
And there you have it.
"They" are on the side of "evil." So we can do no wrong.
Or so it appeared until those shameful pictures last week tore apart the
whole bandwagon and proved that race hatred and prejudice is an old
historical inheritance of ours. We used to call Saddam the Hitler of Iraq.
But wasn't Hitler one of "us," a Westerner, a citizen of "our" culture? If
he could kill six million Jews, which he did, why should we be surprised
that "we" can treat Iraqis like animals? Last week came the photographs to
prove we can.
Back to Peace Talk Index, Summer, 2004