Torture Revelations: Shock Turns To Anger

NEW REVELATIONS hit the headlines daily about the brutal
treatment of prisoners in Iraq by occupying forces. To listen to Bush,
Rumsfeld and Labour ministers speaking, you’d think these barbaric acts were
just some kind of blip on the part of some ‘rogue’ soldiers and private
contractors.

Chris Newby

However the grim reality is that torture is used regularly
and has been used throughout history by states around the world, particularly
during wars. The British state is no stranger to torture as its bloody history
shows.

During the 1950s Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, British troops
killed 10,000 Kenyans. In the concentration camps used there, conditions were
so bad that 402 imprisoned Kenyans died in one month.

In fact, concentration camps were initiated by the British
military in the Boer war. In Northern Ireland Irish prisoners were regularly
tortured by British state forces.

US troops in Vietnam tortured the local population by
dragging them to death behind a jeep with a rope tied round their neck while
special forces officers kept human skulls in their huts inscribed with the
words "one down, a million to go". In the 1991 Gulf War one US commander said
"we count every screwdriver but we don’t count dead Iraqis."

Imperialism uses racist ideas to incite troops into these
barbaric acts by describing the forces opposing them, and the local
population, as less than human.

The level of torture and the techniques used by British
and American troops in Iraq, called R21 and including the sexual humiliation
of Iraqi prisoners, is high. During training, some troops being trained in
these methods have had to walk away – some have had breakdowns.

The US commander in charge of military jails in Iraq says
that they use more than 50 special "coercive techniques" to help make the
prison staff "more able to garner intelligence as rapidly as possible".

The way these prisoners are captured shows how the
occupying troops are brutalising the local population. One private contractor,
working at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison as an interrogator for the US,
described a report that he had read from US units gone out to capture
prisoners:

"The target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see
what was going on and we grabbed him." Private contractors are used as
interrogators as part of capitalism’s attempts to privatise everything that
moves. But this contractor’s evidence shows that this systematic torture is
sanctioned from the very top.

In spring 2003, the Pentagon approved new techniques for
interrogations at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. These included making
detainees stand for long periods, depriving them of sleep and having female
interrogators question male prisoners.

The arrest and subsequent torture and killing of a hotel
porter has lifted the lid on the British troops’ involvement in these
scandals. None of the people arrested in this raid have been charged but they
were subjected to vicious beatings whilst hooded. The porter killed was so
badly disfigured by the beating that his father could hardly bear to look at
him.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross,
even coalition military intelligence officers believe that 70%-90% of Iraqi
detainees were "arrested by mistake".

Both the US administration and British government have
been trying to keep these actions from the public eye despite Amnesty and the
Red Cross’s attempts to publicise them.

But now the news is out, it has stirred a huge wave of
anger that will reverberate not only in Iraq but around the world.