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May 13, 2004
I've mentioned the spin adopted by the Howard Government senators that endeavours to disconnect Australia from the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Here is how it is being done in the US. The line is that Donald Rumsfeld was deeply committed to the Geneva Conventions protecting the rights of prisoners, that everyone knew it, and that any deviation had to come from "the command level."
In both countries the administration/government is determined to avoid taking any concrete steps that might convince the world it is serious about dealing with the underlying systemic roots of the scandal. So both Canberra and the White House continue to keep repeating how shocked, horrified and disgusted, etc etc. everyone is. They would never condone the torture.
That then is the Karl Rove strategy to deal with the problem—a political and public-relations disaster for the imperial presidency. Up to this point the general strategy to deal with the problem had been keep the issue quiet for the first months of this year and to restrict knowledge of what had happened to a small group.
The official chain of command flows from General Sanchez, in Iraq, to General John Abizaid, who is in charge of the Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, and on to Rumsfeld and President Bush. It was that chain of command which would have decided that the Army prisons to be first and foremost geared to interrogations, and the gathering of information needed for the war effort. Hence military-intelligence operatives were placed in control of the prison system, instead of the usual procedure of military-police units being in control.
It is to the credit of Robert Hill, the Defence Minister, that he refused to follow the Howard/Downer line, which qualifies their condemnation of the torture of prisoners by the US in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Howard's version of line says the torture commited by Saddam Hussein was far worse, so we need to keep a sense of perspective. Downer's version is that there are a lot of barbaric people in Iraq. In Downer's moral universe that makes the American's civilized. So what is civilized about sexual brutality and torture that is designed to humiliate another culture?
Hill, in contrast, rejected out of hand the argument that some torture was justified by the need to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation.
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Easy for Hill to say. Nary a hair on the head of a single digger has been mussed in Iraq.