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Scandal bigger than prison abuse { May 6 2004 }

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May 6, 2004. 01:00 AM
Scandal bigger than prison abuse


HAROON SIDDIQUI

Like a reluctant police chief forced to address the exposed wrongdoings of his underlings, George W. Bush says that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq was the work of a few bad apples. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says the torture was "totally unacceptable and un-American."

Unfortunately, breach of the rule of law has been the norm under the Bush administration: a pattern of abuse in Iraq, in American-controlled Afghanistan, and in America itself.

America has also been contracting out torture overseas. And it has been complicit in crimes committed by its allies in the war on terror, states with wretched human rights records.

The gruesome photographs out of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad provide "a window into the larger picture" of what has been happening since 9/11, says Reed Brody, special counsel for Human Rights Watch.

Addressing the Canadian Club Monday, he raised the spectre of war crimes by Americans.

The New York-based lawyer said that in Iraq, the U.S. has "failed to provide clear or consistent information on its treatment of some 10,000 civilians held there, and has provided no information on 200 so-called `high security detainees.'"

North Americans are only now beginning to pay attention to the issue. But for a year, American troops have been abusing, and sometimes killing, Iraqis during house searches and other sweeps; arresting people for the flimsiest reasons, and mistreating them in detention.

At one time, they were holding 40,000 Iraqis, a vast majority of whom had no criminal record.

One of the saddest sights of post-war Iraq has been that of hundreds of Iraqis — mostly women — outside prisons and police stations, begging officials for information on missing family members, only to be ill-treated and shooed away.

Within weeks of the U.S. occupation, European and Arab media were reporting inhumane conditions: detainees ordered to stand for hours in the blistering sun, thrown in the dirt on their stomachs on hot sand, or beaten. Amnesty International condemned such practices.

But U.S. politicians, media and the public paid little attention. That they are now seized of the issue — the army has several probes underway — speaks well of American democracy.

The Bush administration, true to form, hid the scandal and addressed it only when forced to.

Amid the furor, it is easy to forget we are talking mostly of those who lived to tell their tales. America doesn't count the Iraqi dead, estimated at between 9,000 and nearly 11,000. Will there ever be an inquiry into why many of them were killed long after Bush declared the war over?

In Afghanistan, Brody said, "the U.S. is holding civilians in a legal black hole at separate detention facilities at Bagram, Kandahar, Jalalbad and Asadabad — with no tribunals, no legal counsel, no family visits and no basic legal protections."

A Human Rights Watch report two months ago presented "compelling evidence suggesting that U.S. personnel have committed acts against detainees amounting to torture or cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment."

In America itself, there is the indefinite incommunicado detention of "enemy combatants," and there is Guantanamo Bay. The legality of both is now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Also, horror stories keep coming out from some of the hundreds detained and abused throughout the U.S. post-9/11. Virtually all were let go for lack of any terror-related evidence.

Abroad, many states have been citing the American example to "intensify their crackdowns on political opponents, separatists and religious groups," Brody said.

"By waving the anti-terrorism banner, governments such as Uzbekistan seem to act as if they had greater licence to persecute religious dissenters, while governments such as Russia, Israel and China seem to act with greater freedom as they intensify repression in Chechnya, the West Bank and Zinjiang." Malaysia, Eritrea, Tunisia, Uganda, Liberia, Australia and Azerbaijan have similarly rationalized human rights violations.

Brody spoke of "the globalization of abuse" at offshore prisons and through "cross-border arrests that verge on kidnappings."

With Maher Arar, the Canadian tortured in Syria, sitting at the head table, Brody said:

"Nationals of second or even third countries are being handed over and transferred from one country to another without due process, without resort to regular extradition proceedings and often in situations where they may face torture, cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, unfair trials or even the death penalty."

The U.S. has "rendered" suspects to Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Morocco where they were tortured or mistreated.

In Malawi, the CIA arrested five Muslims and, ignoring a judicial order, flew them out of the country to Zimbabwe for interrogation and dumped them in Sudan five weeks later.

In Bosnia, the government ignored its own supreme court's order and shipped off six Algerians to Guantanamo Bay, to oblige America.

"Human rights have been undermined at the very time they most need to be upheld," Brody said. This, "in the long run, will undermine the fight against terrorism."

It already has, as seen in the rise in terrorism and the sinking of American credibility, especially when Bush talks to Arabs of democracy.

Brody urged Canada to use "its close relationship with the United States to be critical of these self-defeating U.S. policies. A friend tells a friend when the friend is wrong."



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