Torture Pictures Highlight Hypocrisy of Bush
The Universe
(May 30, 2004)
The large antiwar poster showed one of the terrible photos from the US operated Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
A man standing on a crate, electric wires attached to each hand, his head hooded as he is subjected to physical and mental torture. The many more photographs taken by dozens of US soldiers of acts of sexual perversion, humiliation and abuse of prisoners is morally repulsive and a betrayal of the respect for human life the US says it stands for.
The responsibility for these violations of human rights cannot be laid at the feet of a few untrained prison guards as Bush and Rumsfeld are trying to do. There is no escaping the fact that the responsibility goes to the top.
The Bush administration was aware of these abuses in January but was desperate to get more military information about the uprising in Baghdad that was taking the lives of US troops and damaging the President’s reelection.
The International Red Cross established that 70 to 90 percent of the prisoners had done nothing wrong and were arrested and abused in a routine and systematic way. Their families were threatened and the Iraq police under the control of the US occupation forces, have done even worse by burning, beating and sending them to concentration camps.
This is more than shocking it is outrageous. The illegal war was supposedly justified because of the immediate threat of weapons of mass destruction which were never found. That was one painful lie. Then it was to remove the tyrant Saddam Hussein because of his oppressive regime. That justification is falling apart as the stream of photos showing more or less the same human rights abuses and torture techniques used by the dictator they deposed.
Nothing justifies wrongdoing and evil. The Bush administration said US troops are not the subject to the International Court of Justice. Now we know why and see the results. They have an arrogance that they claim puts them above the law.
America was respected and esteemed under the presidency of Jimmy Carter, his respect for human rights was a beacon for hope and light for the world .The influence of America was seen as a positive force for change in the world.
This view has been betrayed in this war that has no justification. It is a fiasco from begging to end and we can only trust the good sense and moral rectitude of the American people of conscience to bring it to a swift end.
