Tag Archives ⇒ Abu Ghraib prison

War is Just Another Racket

July 20, 2004
· Martin Kelley

In the LA Times, “Advo­cates of War Now Prof­it From iraq’s Reconstruction”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-advocates14jul14,1,614346.story?coll=la-news-politics-national
bq. For­mer CIA Direc­tor R. James Woolsey is a promi­nent exam­ple of the phe­nom­e­non, mix­ing his busi­ness inter­ests with what he con­tends are the coun­try’s strate­gic inter­ests. He left the CIA in 1995, but he remains a senior gov­ern­ment advi­sor on intel­li­gence and nation­al secu­ri­ty issues, includ­ing iraq. Mean­while, he works for two pri­vate com­pa­nies that do busi­ness in iraq and is a part­ner in a com­pa­ny that invests in firms that pro­vide secu­ri­ty and anti-terrorism services.
In Under the Same Sun, “Is This Any Way to Run an Occupation”:http://www.underthesamesun.org/content/2004/07/index.html#000110, links and com­men­tary about how politically-connected U.S. com­pa­nies are pil­fer­ing iraqi oil mon­ey with­out audits, com­pet­i­tive bid­ding or oversight.
Belt­way lawyers might find all this per­fect­ly legal, but where I come from we call these kind of kick­backs good ol’ boy cor­rup­tion. And the rest of the world will just see the famil­iar pat­tern of modern-day colo­nial­ism: a rich Amer­i­can elite get­ting even rich­er by extract­ing third-world resources at gun­point. iraqis will pay for all the Hal­libur­ton yachts with the schools, hos­pi­tals and high­ways they won’t be able to build. “Amer­i­can sol­diers are pay­ing for it by dying”:http://news.google.com/news?q=american+soldiers+killed+iraq&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF‑8&c2coff=1&output=search and the “iraqi chil­dren may or may not be pay­ing for it with sodimized abuse at Abu Ghraib prison”:http://lincolnplawg.blogspot.com/2004/07/is-this-sy-hershs-october-surprise.html. We will all pay for it for gen­er­a­tions because of all the ill-will we’re earn­ing and the igno­rance we’re sow­ing. How many times do we need to prove that war is just anoth­er racket?

Exporting Prison Abuse to the World?

May 8, 2004
· Martin Kelley

An arti­cle on “abuse of pris­on­ers in the U.S.”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08PRIS.html?hp in the _NY Times_ shows that Lane McCot­ter, the man who over­saw the reopen­ing of the Abu Ghraib prison in iraq, was forced to resign a U.S. prison post “after an inmate died while shack­led to a restrain­ing chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suf­fered from schiz­o­phre­nia, was kept naked the whole time.” It was Attor­ney Gen­er­al John Ashcroft who hand-picked the offi­cials who went to iraq.
As an Amer­i­can I’m ashamed but not ter­ri­bly sur­prised to see what hap­pened in the U.S.-run pris­ons in iraq. Mil­i­taries are insti­tu­tions designed to com­mand with force and only civil­ian over­sight will ulti­mate­ly keep any mil­i­tary insi­tu­tion free from this sort of abuse. The “Red Cross had warned of pris­on­er mistreatment”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=3&u=/ap/20040508/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_prisoner_abuse but was large­ly ignored. Abu Ghraib is in the news in part because of a leaked Pen­ta­gon report, yet it’s only after CBS News aired the pic­tures and the New York­er quot­ed parts of the reports and turned it into a scan­dal that Pres­i­dent Bush or Defense Sec­re­tary Rums­feld admit­ted to the prob­lems and gave their half-hearted apologies.
_This is not to say all sol­diers are abu­sive or all prison guards are abusive_. Most sol­diers and most guards are good, decent peo­ple, serv­ing out of call to duty and (often) because of eco­nom­ic neces­si­ties. But when the sys­tem is pri­va­tized and kept secret, we allow for cor­rup­tion that put even the good peo­ple in posi­tions where they are pres­sured to do wrong.
It is pre­cise­ly because the Pen­ta­gon instinc­tive­ly keeps reports like the one on the abuse con­di­tions inside the Abu Ghraib prison secret that con­di­tions are allowed to get this bad. That prison, along with the one at Guan­tanamo Bay remain large­ly off-limits to inter­na­tion­al law. It was prob­a­bly only a few Amer­i­cans that gave the orders for the abuse but it was many more who fol­lowed and many many more – all of us in one way or anoth­er – who have gave the go-ahead with our inat­ten­tion to issues of jus­tice in prisons.