Molly Ivins

Let's get real about the Iraqi abuse
By MOLLY IVINS | May 7, 2004

AUSTIN, Texas — Let's get real. On Fox So-Called News, former Army Sgt. Tony Robinson was allowed to claim without contradiction that what happened at the prison at Abu-Ghraib was no worse than "fraternity hazing." Rush Limbaugh concurs.

Let me speak up on behalf of the Kappa Sigs, K.A.s and even Dekes (where only "minor" branding incidents occurred when George W. Bush was the head Deke at Yale). This is straight from the report of Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba:

"Between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility, numerous acts of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force. ... The allegations of abuse were substantiated by detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence ... including the following acts:

— Punching, slapping and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
— Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
— Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
— Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
— Forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear;
— Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
— Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and jumping on them;
— A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee;
— Using military working dogs to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;
— Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees;
— Breaking chemical lights and pouring phosphoric liquid on detainees;
— Beating detainees with a broom handle and chair;
— Threatening male detainees with rape;
— Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps with a broomstick."

There it is. Just face up to it, and quit making excuses. I have spared you much disgusting detail.

In our continuing quest to understand how we got where we are, let us turn our attention to Ahmed Chalabi. He's a most plausible con man and comes with excellent credentials. Born to a prominent Iraqi family in 1944, exiled in 1958 with buckets of family money, went to MIT at age 16, got his Ph.D. in math from the University of Chicago, where he first encountered one of the founders of the neo-conservative movement, Albert Wohlstetter. According to a profile in Salon.com, he there met future neo-con leaders Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.

Salon reports, he is "charming, worldly and a skilled networker." (Someone needs to look into whether Chalabi studied with Leo Strauss, the neo-con guru at Chicago who reportedly had profoundly anti-democratic instincts, including the idea that it's fine for governments to lie to their people. That is second-hand information: I have not read Strauss myself.)

What follows is a complicated business-financial history, leading to the founding of the Petra Bank in Jordan in 1977. Chalabi had ties both to the Shia theocracy in Iran and the Shia Amal militia in Lebanon. He also helped finance Saddam Hussein's trade with Jordan during the 1980s, according to Salon. By 1986, Petra had $1 billion in annual trade with Iraq. The bank collapsed, and Chalabi was convicted of embezzlement and fraud. He fled Jordan for London.

As head of the Iraqi National Congress, funded by the United States, Chalabi continued to push for the overthrow of Saddam. The United States is still paying him and his organization $350,000 a month. His association with neo-con hawks continued, even though both the CIA and the State Department concluded he was untrustworthy. The "intelligence" he provided to the Bush administration before the war consistently proved wrong and fraudulent.

So why did the neo-cons trust him, despite his record? My theory is there is a terrible naivete about neo-cons that often deludes them into believing what they want to be true. Remember the time they convinced themselves Jonas Savimbi of Angola was a great freedom fighter? For anyone who knew Savimbi's record, it was "gag me with a spoon" city, but they kept insisting this disgusting human was a hero.

Other neo-cons so hated the Sandinistas in Nicaragua they backed drug-runners and creeps of all description against them. (Fat lot of good it did the Nicaraguans, who now have the worst health record in the hemisphere — worse than Haiti.)

The neo-cons fell for Chalabi for one reason: He said he would help Israel. Once Saddam was overthrown, he said he would reinstate the Iraq-Israel pipeline, recognize Israel, trade with Israel.

Chalabi, with our backing, became a member of the current Iraqi Governing Council. He has also made his nephews into power players in postwar Iraq. Gone are the promises about Israel. Whether justified or not, most Iraqis believe Chalabi corrupt beyond counting. Even some of the neo-cons who have so long discounted the CIA and State Department reports about Chalabi's essential dishonesty, are starting to doubt him. Could this entire disaster in Iraq be as simple as, "We wuz conned"?

Yep.

It's time to ask why Iraq prison abuse happened
By MOLLY IVINS, Creators Syndicate May 20, 2004

AUSTIN, Texas — It's pretty easy to get to the point where you don't want to hear any more about Abu Ghraib prison and what went on there. But there are some really good reasons why Americans should take a look at why this happened.

I suspect the division here is not between liberals and conservatives (except for a few inane comments made by some trying to be flippant), but between those who are following the story closely and those who are not. I particularly recommend both Sy Hersh's follow-up piece in the current issue of The New Yorker and the investigative piece in the current issue of Newsweek. What seems to me more important than the "Oh ugh" factor is just how easy it is for standards of law and behavior of slip into bestiality.

The problems go all the way back to the administration's refusal to abide by the Geneva Conventions. President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft "signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted in order to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Convention, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war," according to Newsweek.

Secretary of State Colin Powell and the military's lawyers objected. You may recall the military's objections (broadcast, as usual, by retired officers) were on the excellent grounds that if we didn't observe the Geneva Conventions neither would our enemies — the very reason they were signed in the first place.

The Pentagon still insists that "suspected Al Qaeda followers" have no rights under Geneva III, as they are "enemy combatants" rather than POWs. Geneva III also has procedures for what to do if the status of a detainee is in doubt — full Geneva rights apply until "a competent tribunal" decides. We have been holding 595 prisoners at Guantanamo for two and half years, not counting those we have already let go, in conditions in violation of Geneva. Only now are a few of these prisoners being assigned lawyers, and the lawyers are raising hell about the whole process.

The legal rationale came from White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, including the line, "In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."
According to Newsweek, Bush first signed a secret order granting new powers to the CIA, a directive authorizing it to set up secret detention facilities outside the United States and to question those held in them with unprecedented harshness. The agency also schlepped suspected terrorists off to other countries known to practice torture.

In addition to the fact that torture is morally repulsive, it also doesn't work. Of course you can torture information out of people. What you can't do is torture accurate information out of people who don't have it. The Defense Department's JAGs were so concerned they finally went to a New York lawyer who specializes in international human rights law and told him, "There is a calculated effort to create an atmosphere of legal ambiguity" about how Geneva should be applied.

These military lawyers named Assistant Secretary Douglas Feith and the Pentagon's general counsel William Haynes, since nominated for an appeals court judgeship by Bush.

Meanwhile, Gitmo had been taken over by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, under whose loving care the "72-point matrix for stress and duress" was developed, laying out as ugly a set of rules for of-course-it-is-torture-stupid as anyone could dream up.

You may recall Rumsfeld testifying before Congress that Miller had been sent to "inspect" Abu Ghraib in September 2003, as though that had been some step toward responsible oversight. In fact, Miller told the general then running the prison the place should be turned over to military intelligence.

Normally something like Abu Ghraib can be blamed in part on the Downward Communication Exaggeration Spiral, which afflicts most organizations. Someone at the top makes a mild suggestion, and by the time it reaches the troops, it's iron-clad law. This appears to be a rare case of a reverse spiral, with the orders coming from the very top and questions being raised about them all the way down, until finally Army Spc. Joseph Darby spoke out and set off the Taguba investigation.

In this case, there is more than sufficient evidence pointing to the culpability of those at the top. But at the same time, the Pentagon is putting out the word that it was "only a few bad apples," six low-level soldiers who have already been charged, with no one else involved. This just stinks of cover-up. Damned if I think these six low-level soldiers should be hung out there to take the blame for a set of explicitly written and signed policies made by people wearing expensive suits, getting paid big bucks and bearing some of the highest titles in the land.

You can read all the memos and documents for yourself.

It's important to know how fascism starts