The View from my Window

His book on the Nazi crimes against humanity was published in 1954 under the title “The Scourge of the Swastika”, followed a few years later by a companion volume on the Japanese atrocities in the East titled The Knights of the Bushido. Had Lord Russell been alive, he would found it difficult to resist completing a hat-trick with a third volume, this time on the unspeakable, indefensible behaviour of the Allied troops against their Iraqi captives.

The pictorial disclosures during the past few days in The New Yorker magazine and in Britain’s The Daily Mirror newspaper have been an assault on the senses of every decent-minded human being, whichever side of the Iraqi divide they happen to be on.

The cumulative effect of each horrific image, piled one on top of the other, like the naked Iraqi prisoners forced to create a human pyramid for their captors to surmount, has been to release a reservoir of revulsion against a war that had no cause, and brutality shown to defenceless prisoners that has no precedent, except during the days of the Nazis and their infamous concentration camps.

No Iraqi, however gullible, could have been satisfied to hear the evasive, bland, almost callous admission of responsibility by Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld during his testimony before a Congressional hearing on Capitol Hill on May 7. It was less an admission of guilt than a forewarning that the Pentagon had yet more horrific photographs and even videos up its sullied sleeve.

Only the Pentagon would know what they contain. It might be best that only the Pentagon knows. Any more images, however cathartic they may be for the psyche of the Americans or titillating for viewers, could only serve to inflame human consciences. Mankind is not wood nor stones, but men.

Never in the history of human conflict has there been a clash without pain or suffering, a wound without blood, a death without grief. What has been happening at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad though has nothing to do with human conflict.

Everything that happened to the inmates in the jail was not the result of impulsive behaviour by bored prison guards. It was deliberate, it was organized, it was orchestrated, and then systematically photographed and filmed, a soft-porn S & M video set in an Iraqi jail.

That it was done - as Secretary Rumsfeld has explained - not by US regular troops but by prison security guards hired by the Pentagon to do their dirty work has been offered as a sop to the American people. That is a specious, callous evasion.

In effect, the Pentagon is saying that it has, as it has other services during this war (profitable for profiteers), subcontracted acts of inhumanity. It has used the US taxpayer’s dollars to pay for perversion.

After 1945, the German people claimed that they knew nothing of the horrors being perpetrated in their name within the concentration camps. They never knew of the Jews arrested in their neighbourhoods.

They never heard the trains transporting them to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. They never saw the smoke from the chimneys of overworked crematoria. They never smelt the corpses left rotting for the Allied soldiers to find and bury, using bulldozers to push stacks of bodies into mass graves.

The American public will never be able to make that excuse. Every atrocity has been photographed and filmed for their benefit. Sixty years ago, in July 1944, there was a botched assassination attempt by a Col.

Count von Stauffenberg and his accomplices on the life of Hitler. The conspirators were hanged from hooks, using piano wire to prolong their agony. Their suffering was filmed by the Gestapo to show Hitler. The humiliation of the Iraqi prisoners is the modern equivalent.

It is clear that the use of subcontractors in this war has not been out of operational exigencies, nor to free fighting troops for the front. It is part of a strategy that extends from the United States to Iraq and Afghanistan, with a stopover at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, a stratagem to hoodwink the American public and keep justice blindfolded. It is the headstone of a policy to keep everything indefensible about the war out beyond the jurisdiction of the US or international courts.

The American base at Guantanamo Bay was obtained by the United States as a quid pro quo for withdrawing its forces from Cuba in 1901. The Platt Amendment, as it is known, under which the base was acquired was repealed in 1934, but for the past 70 years the United States has remained there, an unwelcome tenant. That base is now like Monaco or Liechtenstein, a legal haven, providing legal immunity to those who need it, which in this case is the United States government that can keep citizens of any country (including Pakistan) beyond the reach of any authority save its own arbitrary one.

The wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, no matter what western leaders may maintain, are not for the rights of the Iraqi or the Afghani people. Power may well come though the barrel of a gun. Democracy does not, as every military discovers to his own cost and the cost of his hapless nation. The traumas in Iraq and Afghanistan are one-sided sallies, the unrestrainable actions a strong bully intimidating a weaker victim. They are not even media wars. They are wars fought to catch the attention of the media. The pen may on occasions be as mighty as the sword, but the mightiest weapon of all in modern warfare obviously is the tell-tale camera. Through its images, the world has become more than a distant participant; it has become a voyeur, an accomplice in man’s deliberate inhumanity to fellow man.

Time will never erase the image of a hooded Arab prisoner, arms held akimbo, like some figure of in a crucifixion, with electrodes attached to his hands in place of metal nails. Two thousand and four years ago Pontius Pilate was required to adjudicate in a case on a matter of jurisdiction. Like Rumsfeld, he washed his hands of culpability in public. US Gospel singers once sang a Negro spiritual reminding their audience of that earlier atrocity: Where were you when they crucified my Lord?

The ghost of Vietnam comes haunting