Sanctioning Torture From The Top

"THE RULES were, ‘Grab who you must. Do what you
want’." That was a former US intelligence officer, explaining the
official army attitude towards the torture and maltreatment of Iraqi
prisoners. It shot an enormous hole in the official story of what went on in
Abu Ghraib prison.

The official line that, purely on their own initiative,
‘rogue soldiers’ did things like standing a hooded, "wired-up" man
on a box and threatening him with electrocution never convinced many people.

Now an article by Pulitzer prize-winning reporter
Seymour Hersh quotes senior US state operatives. They confirm US Defence
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s approval of a secret interrogation regime for
Iraqi prisoners. These methods, involving physical force and sexual
humiliation, were intended to get more information about insurgents.

The tactics, first used in Afghanistan to find out about
al-Qa’ida operatives, were then used on Iraqi prisoners, many of them picked
up on random arrests.

A Pentagon operation "encouraged physical coercion
and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners" and used photos of sexual
abuse to blackmail detainees into informing.

This and other news has pushed support for Bush to new
lows. In Britain, however, Blair hopes that Trinity Mirror’s sacking of
Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan for publishing staged pictures of British
troops’ atrocities in Iraq has got him off the hook. But it won’t last.

Morgan has been forced to resign because his paper
published a lying photograph. But the government’s whole war effort was
based on a massive lie about weapons of mass destruction. This won’t be
forgotten by the electorate.

An Amnesty International report says the British army
has been killing civilians in areas of southern Iraq that it controls. In
March the Red Cross reported grave violations against civilians and abuse of
prisoners.

These allegations of maltreatment and murder of Iraqi
civilians can’t so easily be denied. The best way to safeguard the lives of
British soldiers is to withdraw them from Iraq.