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Of course it's an outrage that American soldiers and mercenaries are torturing Iraqi prisoners. But ask anyone who has gone through military basic training and they might well ask you: "What did you THINK was going on in Iraq?"
What could be more naked abuse than cluster-bombing children and terrorizing whole cities? What could be more obscene than sending armless and legless GIs home by the planeload? Our leaders are outraged at what is happening inside
Abu Ghraib? When they know full well that next door in Fallujah our troops were killing so many people -- including women and children -- that the soccer stadium was turned into a cemetery? There have been pictures of all this, too. Not on 20th Century Fox, or other corporate news outlets, but there were pictures aplenty. In 1984, Orwell describes how Big Brother keeps the citizens of Oceania in line with a daily, televised "Two Minutes Hate" directed at the nation's Public Enemy #1.
"He was the primal traitor...all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching...(he) seemed like some sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the structure of civilization." Once the good people of Oceania work up a good hate, they're ready to let Big Brother do whatever he wants to "protect" them from their supposed enemies: bomb them, kill them young and
old, put them in places like Abu Ghraib. We of course don't do this personally. We prepare a vulnerable segment of our own population to do it for us. It's called basic training. We take kids hoping for college or looking for direction, heads full of myths about how Oceania always stands for freedom and democracy. We systematically dehumanize them in basic training and teach them how to dehumanize "others," "over there" until those
others become "the enemy." Surely whatever happens to the enemy is fair game. They are, after all, the enemy. Consider this from Hal Muskat, who went through basic training at Ft. Dix, NJ, describing a frightening scene during bayonet practice for 1,000 young men: "In between the call/response of, 'What's the spirit of bayonet?' 'Kill! Kill! Kill!' drill instructors (DIs) would pick up megaphones and scream, 'See those C-130s landing?
They are bringing in bodies of dead Americans killed by gooks. The gooks murdered our soldiers! Do you want to be a body on that plane? I can't hear you? What's the spirit of bayonet?' Every once in a while, a DI would pull several of us aside and give us lessons on the proper use of bayonet in performing a 'field abortion.' Stick the bayonet in the gook's cunt and pull up towards her throat. A dead gook in the womb saves Americans lives!'" Or this, from Roger Domagalski, describing what he
was told as a recruit and his duties after basic training: "From the first moment we arrived, we often heard the words, 'girls, ladies, sissies, pussies, and worse' when insulting us. Thus 'women' as a whole became a derogatory concept; very sexist and very dehumanizing...I had been dehumanized to such an extent that I completely lacked all empathy for these frightened, new trainees. Instead of treating them decently, I mistreated them as I had been mistreated. Once you dehumanize a person, you need to maintain control because such a person
is liable to do anything, from the relatively mild 'hazing' I engaged in, to the Nazi-like terror tactics used by the guards against Iraqi prisoners. Yes, basic training works...all too well sometimes." Should we be shocked that good American kids are filling Fallujah's soccer field with corpses, torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib, raping their own female comrades? While in Baghdad recently, more than one Iraqi asked me this tough
question: "How can your soldiers do these things for America? Don't you live in a democracy?" Perhaps some day we will live in a democracy and will no longer train soldiers to do these things in our name. But until then, we continue to live much closer to the condition Eugene Debs described in the closing months of World War One's butchery, in his famous Canton, Ohio speech: "...when the feudal lords concluded to enlarge their domains...they declared war upon one another. But they
themselves did not go to war any more than the modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war...The serfs had been taught to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another it was their patriotic duty to cut one another's throats...The working class who fight the battles and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace." George Bush can be outraged at the news from Abu Ghraib, but he is the one who unleashed the dogs of
war at the behest of our modern feudal lords. The result is never pretty. Are we shocked? ADDITIONAL atrocities
(This segment by Laura Dawn Lewis)
The Bush Administration and many in the military continue to state Abu Ghraib is isolated. Yet the following video was shot in 2003 showing US Soldiers beating a surrendered and shackled enemy combatant and executing him. October 26, 2003, CNN "This is not how
warriors behave but how thugs operate. If the Iraqi man was indeed laying in ambush or setting an IED, then it is entirely appropriate to shoot him and to shoot him until he is no longer a threat. Once he ceased combat operations however, it became the soldiers' job to treat him and give him the same aid they would have one of our wounded soldiers receive. To use him as a target and appear so joyful about it demonstrates that murder occurred and not combat operations. That is not a reflection of how callous all the soldiers are or what
is encouraged or allowed in units. That unit has a problem. Any commander that glosses over that incident is neglecting his duty." --1SG Perry D. Jefferies Stories coming out of Camp X-ray increasingly dispute America's position. The Red Cross and Amnesty International had been reporting abuses a full year in advance and the Bush Administration quickly
covered these up. The most heinous and under-reported being the Massacre at Mazar with the discovery of two mass graves containing over 3,000 Taliban soldiers an at least one thousand civilians near Mazar-i-Sharif in early 2002. Sheberghan Prison, Mazar i sharif According to
eyewitnesses, the captured Taliban soldiers in transit to Sheberghan prison were loaded into cargo containers, sealed and
driven out into the desert. The majority suffocated to death with no air, water or movement in the dessert heat. One driver who came forward describes the pleas and screams from inside, begging for water, air and to be released. They were told not to stop or join those inside.
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Three hundred were loaded into each container. Of these three hundred, only ten in the one container were still alive when the trucks stopped twenty hours later according to one captured soldier who managed
to escape by playing dead, upon arriving at their destination, the local US Commander ordered the Northern Alliance gunmen under his control to shoot into the containers as 30-40 US troops stood and watched. Witnesses describe the screams of those still alive as the soldiers under our command riddled the cargo containers with bullets from machine guns. Through these holes blood poured out, turning the sand red as those who survived the trip were murdered in mass. Jamie Doran, an award winning Scottish filmmaker filmed the footage of the graves and interviewed witnesses and the few survivors. One of his assistants nearly lost his life getting the footage. The US government does not want this story out. His
documentary illustrating the massacre reached the European Parliament and received coverage everywhere but the United States. Surprisingly, even with Abu Ghraib exposed, the US media continues to ignore this story. It shares terrifying similarities with the Nazi policy of loading buses with the mentally ill and gassing them with exhaust. |
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Interview with Jamie Doran, Director of "Massacre at Mazar"
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8,000 Taliban surrendered to Amir Jahn, who negotiated the surrender deal. In the film he says he counted the prisoners one by one, and there were 8,000 of them. 470 went to Qala-i-Janghi. The assumption is that seven-and-a-half-thousand went from Qala-i-Janghi to Sheberghan, and the result of that transport was that, according to his words, “Just 3,015 are left. Where are the rest?”
The rest turned up in the two mass graves.
Caged Prisoners.com |
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In a statement to UPI on August 29, 2002, referring to the denials of US involvement Doran states, "It is beyond a doubt that a number of American solders were at Sheberghan Prison. Either
they walked around blindfolded with earmuffs for eight days or they saw what was going on". This happened nearly two years before Abu Ghraib. Abu Ghraib is isolated only because they were caught. THE COST TO US SOLDIERS
Unfortunately for our soldiers, as these atrocities make the rounds, those captured pay for the brutality of others. Covering this up doesn't serve them. People will talk and the story will get out even if the New York Times fails to legitimize it. When atrocities
happen, the only recourse is to hold those accountable and imprison them to send a clear message, this is not acceptable behavior from Americans or anyone under our control. Nobody has ever got in trouble for confronting and dealing with an issue. It is always the cover-up that kills them. When soldiers get away with this, more events occur. When they don't, people stop and think before acting. We've shown through several instances now, we have no respect for International
Law. Amazing isn't it, we accuse them of immoral and terrorist behavior...3,000 people sealed in containers, suffocated and shot to death. I don't know about you, but that sounds like terrorism to me. And with that there is a silver lining. Since we're prohibited from funding terrorist organizations under the Patriot Act, with evidence like the Massacre at Mazar, I guess we no longer need to pay taxes. After all given our own government's
definition of terrorism applied to Saddam and Al Qaeda, since we're doing the same thing paying taxes is against the law. Ferner returned to Iraq this year for two months to write on developments since his trip just prior to the war with
Voices in the Wilderness. He served as a Navy Hospital Corpsman during Viet Nam, is a member of Veterans for Peace and a former member of Toledo City Council. © 2004 by Mike Ferner |
