Western Terrorism 3

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-shaming-of-america-2115111.html 


Robert Fisk: The shaming of America

Our writer delivers a searing dispatch after the WikiLeaks 
revelations that expose in detail the brutality of the war in Iraq - 
and the astonishing, disgraceful deceit of the US

Sunday, 24 October 2010

As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the 
promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power 
against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, 
the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they 
were the victims.

Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could 
counter every claim, every allegation against the Americans or 
British with some worthy general - the ghastly US military spokesman 
Mark Kimmitt and the awful chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, 
come to mind - to ring-fence us with lies. Find a man who'd been 
tortured and you'd be told it was terrorist propaganda; discover a 
house full of children killed by an American air strike and that, 
too, would be terrorist propaganda, or "collateral damage", or a 
simple phrase: "We have nothing on that."

Of course, we all knew they always did have something. And 
yesterday's ocean of military memos proves it yet again. Al-Jazeera 
has gone to extraordinary lengths to track down the actual Iraqi 
families whose men and women are recorded as being wasted at US 
checkpoints - I've identified one because I reported it in 2004, the 
bullet-smashed car, the two dead journalists, even the name of the 
local US captain - and it was The Independent on Sunday that first 
alerted the world to the hordes of indisciplined gunmen being flown 
to Baghdad to protect diplomats and generals. These mercenaries, who 
murdered their way around the cities of Iraq, abused me when I told 
them I was writing about them way back in 2003.

It's always tempting to avoid a story by saying "nothing new". The 
"old story" idea is used by governments to dampen journalistic 
interest as it can be used by us to cover journalistic idleness. And 
it's true that reporters have seen some of this stuff before. The 
"evidence" of Iranian involvement in bomb-making in southern Iraq was 
farmed out to The New York Times's Michael Gordon by the Pentagon in 
February 2007. The raw material, which we can now read, is far more 
doubtful than the Pentagon-peddled version. Iranian military material 
was still lying around all over Iraq from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war 
and most of the attacks on Americans were at that stage carried out 
by Sunni insurgents. The reports suggesting that Syria allowed 
insurgents to pass through their territory, by the way, are correct. 
I have spoken to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers whose 
sons made their way to Iraq from Lebanon via the Lebanese village of 
Majdal Aanjar and then via the northern Syrian city of Aleppo to 
attack the Americans.

But, written in bleak militarese as it may be, here is the evidence 
of America's shame. This is material that can be used by lawyers in 
courts. If 66,081 - I loved the "81" bit - is the highest American 
figure available for dead civilians, then the real civilian mortality 
score is infinitely higher since this records only those civilians 
the Americans knew of. Some of them were brought to the Baghdad 
mortuary in my presence, and it was the senior official there who 
told me that the Iraqi ministry of health had banned doctors from 
performing any post-mortems on dead civilians brought in by American 
troops. Now why should that be? Because some had been tortured to 
death by Iraqis working for the Americans? Did this hook up with the 
1,300 independent US reports of torture in Iraqi police stations?

The Americans scored no better last time round. In Kuwait, US troops 
could hear Palestinians being tortured by Kuwaitis in police stations 
after the liberation of the city from Saddam Hussein's legions in 
1991. A member of the Kuwaiti royal family was involved in the 
torture. US forces did not intervene. They just complained to the 
royal family. Soldiers are always being told not to intervene. After 
all, what was Lieutenant Avi Grabovsky of the Israeli army told when 
he reported to his officer in September 1982 that Israel's Phalangist 
allies had just murdered some women and children? "We know, it's not 
to our liking, and don't interfere," Grabovsky was told by his 
battalion commander. This was during the Sabra and Chatila refugee 
camp massacre.

The quotation comes from Israel's 1983 Kahan commission report - 
heaven knows what we could read if WikiLeaks got its hands on the 
barrels of military files in the Israeli defence ministry (or the 
Syrian version, for that matter). But, of course, back in those days, 
we didn't know how to use a computer, let alone how to write on it. 
And that, of course, is one of the important lessons of the whole 
WikiLeaks phenomenon.

Back in the First World War or the Second World War or Vietnam, you 
wrote your military reports on paper. They may have been typed in 
triplicate but you could number your copies, trace any spy and 
prevent the leaks. The Pentagon Papers was actually written on paper. 
You needed to find a mole to get them. But paper could always be 
destroyed, weeded, trashed, all copies destroyed. At the end of the 
1914-18 war, for example, a British second lieutenant shot a Chinese 
man after Chinese workers had looted a French military train. The 
Chinese man had pulled a knife on the soldier. But during the 1930s, 
the British soldier's file was "weeded" three times and so no trace 
of the incident survives. A faint ghost of it remains only in a 
regimental war diary which records Chinese involvement in the looting 
of "French provision trains". The only reason I know of the killing 
is that my father was the British lieutenant and told me the story 
before he died. No WikiLeaks then.

But I do suspect this massive hoard of material from the Iraq war has 
serious implications for journalists as well as armies. What is the 
future of the Seymour Hershes and the old-style investigative 
journalism that The Sunday Times used to practise? What is the point 
of sending teams of reporters to examine war crimes and meet military 
"deep throats", if almost half a million secret military documents 
are going to float up in front of you on a screen?

We still haven't got to the bottom of the WikiLeaks story, and I 
rather suspect that there are more than just a few US soldiers 
involved in this latest revelation. Who knows if it doesn't go close 
to the top? In its investigations, for example, al-Jazeera found an 
extract from a run-of-the-mill Pentagon press conference in November 
2005. Peter Pace, the uninspiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 
Staff, is briefing journalists on how soldiers should react to the 
cruel treatment of prisoners, pointing out proudly that an American 
soldier's duty is to intervene if he sees evidence of torture. Then 
the camera moves to the far more sinister figure of Defence Secretary 
Donald Rumsfeld, who suddenly interrupts - almost in a mutter, and to 
Pace's consternation - "I don't think you mean they (American 
soldiers) have an obligation to physically stop it. It's to report 
it."

The significance of this remark - cryptically sadistic in its way - 
was lost on the journos, of course. But the secret Frago 242 memo now 
makes much more sense of the press conference. Presumably sent by 
General Ricardo Sanchez, this is the instruction that tells soldiers: 
"Provided the initial report confirms US forces were not involved in 
the detainee abuse, no further investigation will be conducted unless 
directed by HHQ [Higher Headquarters]." Abu Ghraib happened under 
Sanchez's watch in Iraq. It was also Sanchez, by the way, who 
couldn't explain to me at a press conference why his troops had 
killed Saddam's sons in a gun battle in Mosul rather than capture 
them.

So Sanchez's message, it seems, must have had Rumsfeld's imprimatur. 
And so General David Petraeus - widely loved by the US press corps - 
was presumably responsible for the dramatic increase in US air 
strikes over two years; 229 bombing attacks in Iraq in 2006, but 
1,447 in 2007. Interestingly enough, US air strikes in Afghanistan 
have risen by 172 per cent since Petraeus took over there. Which 
makes it all the more astonishing that the Pentagon is now bleating 
that WikiLeaks may have blood on its hands. The Pentagon has been 
covered in blood since the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima in 
1945, and for an institution that ordered the illegal invasion of 
Iraq in 2003 - wasn't that civilian death toll more than 66,000 by 
their own count, out of a total of 109,000 recorded? - to claim that 
WikiLeaks is culpable of homicide is preposterous.

The truth, of course, is that if this vast treasury of secret reports 
had proved that the body count was much lower than trumpeted by the 
press, that US soldiers never tolerated Iraqi police torture, rarely 
shot civilians at checkpoints and always brought killer mercenaries 
to account, US generals would be handing these files out to 
journalists free of charge on the steps of the Pentagon. They are 
furious not because secrecy has been breached, or because blood may 
be spilt, but because they have been caught out telling the lies we 
always knew they told.

US official documents detail extraordinary scale of wrongdoing

WikiLeaks yesterday released on its website some 391,832 US military 
messages documenting actions and reports in Iraq over the period 
2004-2009. Here are the main points:

Prisoners abused, raped and murdered

Hundreds of incidents of abuse and torture of prisoners by Iraqi 
security services, up to and including rape and murder. Since these 
are itemised in US reports, American authorities now face accusations 
of failing to investigate them. UN leaders and campaigners are 
calling for an official investigation.

Civilian death toll cover-up

Coalition leaders have always said "we don't do death tolls", but the 
documents reveal many deaths were logged. Respected British group 
Iraq Body Count says that, after preliminary examination of a sample 
of the documents, there are an estimated 15,000 extra civilian 
deaths, raising their total to 122,000.

The shooting of men trying to surrender

In February 2007, an Apache helicopter killed two Iraqis, suspected 
of firing mortars, as they tried to surrender. A military lawyer is 
quoted as saying: "They cannot surrender to aircraft and are still 
valid targets."

Private security firm abuses

Britain's Bureau of Investigative Journalism says it found documents 
detailing new cases of alleged wrongful killings of civilians 
involving Blackwater, since renamed Xe Services. Despite this, Xe 
retains extensive US contracts in Afghanistan.

Al-Qa'ida's use of children and "mentally handicapped" for bombing

A teenage boy with Down's syndrome who killed six and injured 34 in a 
suicide attack in Diyala was said to be an example of an ongoing 
al-Qa'ida strategy to recruit those with learning difficulties. A 
doctor is alleged to have sold a list of female patients with 
learning difficulties to insurgents.

Hundreds of civilians killed at checkpoints

Out of the 832 deaths recorded at checkpoints in Iraq between 2004 
and 2009, analysis by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggests 
681 were civilians. Fifty families were shot at and 30 children 
killed. Only 120 insurgents were killed in checkpoint incidents.

Iranian influence

Reports detail US concerns that Iranian agents had trained, armed and 
directed militants in Iraq. In one document, the US military warns a 
militia commander believed to be behind the deaths of US troops and 
kidnapping of Iraqi officials was trained by Iran's Islamic 
Revolutionary Guard."