WASHINGTON, 22 May 2004 — A few days ago while waiting for a flight, a young soldier sat next to me at an airport. He was reading a newspaper and looking at the torture pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. As we started a conversation he commented that it was very difficult for the soldiers in Iraq and the Gulf. He stated that his fellow military compatriots were feeling great amounts of stress and that they had lost a lot of buddies in the war to the Iraqis. That, to him, seemed to explain the justification for the abuse and torture of the prisoners.
At a recent rural West Virginia press interview, a friend of female army Pte. Lynndie England, who gained fame with the pictures of her pointing at and leashing Iraqi prisoners, was quoted as saying that a lot of people in their home town area think that they ought to just blow up the whole of Iraq and went on to say that country boys there feel that if you are of a different nationality or race, you are subhuman. Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib story in the New Yorker, quotes a US Army military policeman referring to an act of abuse on an Iraqi prisoner called the prisoner an “it” rather than “he”. This all points to one basic concept persistent in the Iraqi prisoner scandal, the dehumanization of the Arab.
When US Army Gen. Anthony Taguba issued his now famous report detailing the abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison, he made reference to “third-country nationals”. When questioned at a subsequent US Senate hearing, he again referred to at least three “third-country nationals” who were interrogators at Abu Ghraib. Third-country nationals refer to nationals of countries other than the United States or Iraq. However, no one bothered to ask Taguba which third country he meant. It is quite possible that third country is Israel.
Many years ago in one of my college classes, we were introduced to an Israeli author, Rafael Patai, who had written a book entitled “The Arab Mind”. Many in the class immediately denounced the book as a racist work. Patai made references in the book to shame, particularly through sexual humiliation, in Arab culture. It was pointed out that if someone wrote a book entitled “The Jewish Mind” with the same type of references, they would be called anti-Semitic. Though some traits in a cultural or racial group might have some basis of reality, to label an entire group with those traits is usually racist in nature.
David Leo Gutman, emeritus professor of psychology and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University, apparently picked up on the Patai model and wrote a paper published by the American military last year which enhanced the concept of shame and sexual humiliation in Arabs. That paper and its methods seemed to have found a way into Abu Ghraib prison. Additionally, there have been many historical reports of Israeli sexual humiliation and torture with Palestinian prisoners.
At least two US military contractors, CACI and Titan, have supplied translators for the Abu Ghraib prison. In the Taguba report, at least two of those translators are named. Taguba notes that these translators are complicit in the abuse of prisoners and recommends discipline. At least one of those translators, John Israel, no longer seems to be available, and even if he were, it appears that these contactors don’t fall under military law or the Geneva Convention so we may never know who John Israel and the other contractors named by Taguba are.
There are currently many other unanswered questions regarding the prisoner abuse scandal. It has been little noted that the Iraq Survey Group was also one of the entities involved in the interrogation of the prisoners. The Iraq Survey Group is the American contingency responsible for finding weapons of mass destruction. And it is also likely that another set of interrogators were pushing the Iraqi prisoners to establish a link between Iraq, Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. We must remember that still unproven but alleged WMD and the Al-Qaeda-Iraq links were two of the administration’s main rationale for the war in Iraq
In another article we may pursue other examples of torture and abuse in previous wartime conflicts. We might talk about the US Simpson-Van Rhoden Commission, which investigated atrocities and German prisoner of war torture and the subsequent execution of scores of German prisoners during World War II. We might also study Operation Phoenix, an alleged CIA operation that assassinated and tortured tens of thousands of mostly innocent South Vietnamese civilians between 1967 and 1970 during the Vietnam War. However, we are likely to find that a persistent concept reappears — the dehumanization of human beings.
And maybe someday someone will tell the soldier from the airport that even though we might understand his concerns about the stress and frustrations of his fellow soldiers, there is nothing more sacred than human rights and human life.
— Dr. Michael Saba is the author of “The Armageddon Network” and is an international relations consultant.
