By William Fisher | Inter Press Service
NEW YORK, May 11 (IPS) – Civil libertarians are condemning a call by two influential U.S. senators for the White House to block the impending release of photographs showing detainees being abused by U.S. military personnel at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at other U.S. detention facilities in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The plea to intervene to stop the expected May 28 release of the photos came in a letter to President Barack Obama from Senators Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham.
“The release of these old photographs of past behavior that has now been clearly prohibited will serve no public good, but will empower al Qaeda propaganda operations, hurt our country’s image, and endanger our men and women in uniform,” the Senators wrote.
Release of the photos is expected in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“We urge you in the strongest possible terms to fight the release of these old pictures of detainees in the war on terror, including appealing the decision of the Second Circuit in the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] lawsuit to the Supreme Court and pursuing all legal options to prevent the public disclosure of these pictures,” the senators wrote.
Their letter said, “We know that many terrorists captured in Iraq have told American interrogators that one of the reasons they decided to join the violent jihadist war against America was what they saw on al Qaeda videos of abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib.”
As a result of the ensuing actions by Congress, “America’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines have made great progress in improving detention and interrogation procedures,” they wrote.
Senator Graham is a conservative Republican from South Carolina, a member of the Armed Services Committee, and a military lawyer in the U.S. Air Force Reserve.
Lieberman was a lifelong Democrat until he lost his party’s primary contest in 2006, after which he ran and won as an Independent from Connecticut. He is chairman of the powerful Senate Homeland Security Committee. The two senators were among the most ardent supporters of the recent unsuccessful presidential campaign of Senator John McCain.
Civil libertarians were virtually unanimous in their opposition to withholding the photographs.
Gabor Rona, international legal director of Human Rights First, told IPS, “Sen. Lieberman and Graham’s claims might carry more weight had the U.S. government been consistently honest about the mistreatment it authorised.”
“But as long as the American people are kept in the dark about what crimes were committed in their name, they cannot intelligently exercise their democratic right and obligation to call for corrective measures,” he said.
Rona added, “To elevate fear of al Qaeda’s reactions over faith in our democratic ideals and structures is unfortunate and counterproductive.”
Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild, told IPS, “The more evidence that emerges to document the Bush policy of torture and abuse, the more likely that investigations and prosecutions will take place.”
Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School told IPS, “The release of these photos will further document torture, abuse and other war crimes inflicted by U.S. military personnel in Iraq, the orders for which go all the way up the military chain of command to the Commander in Chief President Bush, the Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, none of whom has yet been held accountable.”
He said, “Senators Lieberman and Graham are simply running interference for all three of them. Yet under the terms of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Convention against Torture, the Obama administration has an obligation to open an investigation and to prosecute them. Failure to do so is a war crime in its own right.”
“These photographs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib,” said attorney Amrit Singh of the ACLU, the organisation that originally brought the lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
“Their disclosure is critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorising or permitting such abuse,” she said.
Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, now retired, served as the V Corps commander of coalition forces in Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004. When he retired in November 2006, he called his career a casualty of the Abu Ghraib scandal.
The disagreement over release of the photos reflects conflicting assessments of which is more dangerous and objectionable – the release of the photographs or the abusive behaviour that they depict.
It also turns on unresolved questions concerning the scale of prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel, and the nature of the public accounting that can or should be required.
The original Abu Ghraib photos were first exposed to the public in a 2006 segment of the television program, “Sixty Minutes,” and shortly thereafter in an extensive article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine.
The images showed Iraqi prisoners hooded, with electrodes attached to their bodies, being menaced by dogs, forced to walk with dog collars around their necks, and made to form pyramids of naked bodies. Existence of the images was first reported by a low-level U.S. Army soldier.
The military conducted more than a dozen investigations of the abusive practices, which then Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attributed to the aberrations of “a few bad apples.” A number of low-level soldiers were convicted and sentenced to terms in military prisons, a few others were given official reprimands, and the brigadier general who was in charge of the prison was demoted to colonel.
The Defence Department investigations concluded that no one higher up in the military or civilian leadership of the Pentagon bore any responsibility for the abuses.
While the contents of the new photos have not been made public, it is known that members of Congress viewed them in a classified setting when the original Abu Ghraib images were released. Some have said publicly that the new photos paint an even grimmer picture of prisoner abuse, not only at Abu Ghraib but also at other U.S.-controlled prisons in the Middle East.
It is unclear whether the new crop of photos includes those taken by psychologist Philip Zimbardo. As an expert witness in the defense of an Abu Ghraib guard who was court-martialed, he had access to many of the images of abuse that were taken by the guards themselves.
Zimbardo assembled some of these pictures into a short video. Many of the images are explicit and gruesome, depicting nudity, degradation, simulated sex acts, and guards posing with decaying corpses.
The original Abu Ghraib photos were broadcast around the world long before it became known that U.S. authorities, including the Central Intelligence Agency, were using waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” at the Navy detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Afghanistan, and at secret prisons in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
By Vandana Shiva | 
Vandana Shiva
Obama’s Policies Making Situation Worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan
May 11, 2009For all the talk of “smart power,” President Obama is pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush. The realities suggest need for drastic revision of U.S. strategic thinking.
— Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.
— The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban — like them or not — as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.
— It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The “Durand Line” is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has already inflamed Pakistan’s 28 million Pashtuns.
— India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan must therefore always maintain Afghanistan as a friendly state. India furthermore is intent upon gaining a serious foothold in Afghanistan — in the intelligence, economic and political arenas — that chills Islamabad.
— Pakistan will therefore never rupture ties or abandon the Pashtuns, in either country, whether radical Islamist or not. Pakistan can never afford to have Pashtuns hostile to Islamabad in control of Kabul, or at home.
— Occupation everywhere creates hatred, as the U.S. is learning. Yet Pashtuns remarkably have not been part of the jihadi movement at the international level, although many are indeed quick to ally themselves at home with al-Qaida against the U.S. military.
— The U.S. had every reason to strike back at the al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan after the outrage of 9/11. The Taliban were furthermore poster children for an incompetent and harsh regime. But the Taliban retreated from, rather than lost, the war in 2001, in order to fight another day. Indeed, one can debate whether it might have been possible — with sustained pressure from Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and almost all other Muslim countries that viewed the Taliban as primitives — to force the Taliban to yield up al-Qaida over time without war. That debate is in any case now moot. But the consequences of that war are baleful, debilitating and still spreading.
— The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the U.S. war raging on the Afghan border. U.S. policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations — the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?
— The deeply entrenched Islamic and tribal character of Pashtun rule in the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan will not be transformed by invasion or war. The task requires probably several generations to start to change the deeply embedded social and psychological character of the area. War induces visceral and atavistic response.
— Pakistan is indeed now beginning to crack under the relentless pressure directly exerted by the U.S. Anti-American impulses in Pakistan are at high pitch, strengthening Islamic radicalism and forcing reluctant acquiescence to it even by non-Islamists.
Only the withdrawal of American and NATO boots on the ground will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to subside within Pakistan, and for the region to start to cool down. Pakistan is experienced in governance and is well able to deal with its own Islamists and tribalists under normal circumstances; until recently, Pakistani Islamists had one of the lowest rates of electoral success in the Muslim world.
But U.S. policies have now driven local nationalism, xenophobia and Islamism to combined fever pitch. As Washington demands that Pakistan redeem failed American policies in Afghanistan, Islamabad can no longer manage its domestic crisis.
The Pakistani army is more than capable of maintaining state power against tribal militias and to defend its own nukes. Only a convulsive nationalist revolutionary spirit could change that — something most Pakistanis do not want. But Washington can still succeed in destabilizing Pakistan if it perpetuates its present hard-line strategies. A new chapter of military rule — not what Pakistan needs — will be the likely result, and even then Islamabad’s basic policies will not change, except at the cosmetic level.
In the end, only moderate Islamists themselves can prevail over the radicals whose main source of legitimacy comes from inciting popular resistance against the external invader. Sadly, U.S. forces and Islamist radicals are now approaching a state of co-dependency.
It would be heartening to see a solid working democracy established in Afghanistan. Or widespread female rights and education — areas where Soviet occupation ironically did rather well. But these changes are not going to happen even within one generation, given the history of social and economic devastation of the country over 30 years.
Al-Qaida’s threat no longer emanates from the caves of the borderlands, but from its symbolism that has long since metastasized to other activists of the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the Pashtuns will fight on for a major national voice in Afghanistan. But few Pashtuns on either side of the border will long maintain a radical and international jihadi perspective once the incitement of the U.S. presence is gone. Nobody on either side of the border really wants it.
What can be done must be consonant with the political culture. Let non-military and neutral international organizations, free of geopolitical taint, take over the binding of Afghan wounds and the building of state structures.
If the past eight years had shown ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for U.S. policies could be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only continued deterioration and darkening of the prognosis. Will we have more of the same? Or will there be a U.S. recognition that the American presence has now become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate.
Graham E. Fuller is a former CIA station chief in Kabul and a former vice-chair of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. He is author of numerous books on the Middle East, including The Future of Political Islam.
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Tags: Afghanistan, al-Qaida, Graham E. Fuller, India, Pakistan, Pashtuns and Taliban, President Obama, U.S. military, U.S. policies, U.S. war in Afghnistan
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