âThe rot starts at the topâ
All News is Lies
17th May 2004
John Laughland
There can be few more boring things to hear from a writer than âI told you so,â but the temptation is impossible to resist in my case and now. Among the welter of revelations about torture and abuse of prisoners committed in the American and British-run prisons of Iraq, and against Iraqi civilians generally, I have felt puzzled. Newspapers are full of âreportsâ and âallegationsâ made by big, famous organisations like the Red Cross and Amnesty International, but no one paid any attention when, in early 2002, the British Helsinki Human Rights Group was (to my knowledge) the only NGO to report on the use of torture and detention without trial in US military bases in the Balkans. (For that report for Sanders Research Associates see http://www.sandersresearch.com/Sanders/NewsManager/ShowNewsGen.aspx?NewsID=630 )
My colleagues and I travelled to Kosovo then to interview a number of men who had been rounded up in the Balkans shortly after the proclamation of the war on terror. In late 2001, several Muslim charities suddenly found themselves accused of being front organisations for the financing of terror. Their lowly workers in Kosovo became terror suspects, even though NATO had itself bombed Christian Serbia in support of the mainly Muslim Albanians only two years previously.
I met one man who arrived at his office one morning to find it surrounded by tanks and NATO troops. The troops behaved very violently towards him, beating him and bundling him off, in a helicopter, to Camp Bondsteel, the huge base which the US army constructed in Kosovo shortly after the 1999 war. There, he was stripped naked, made to stand in a cold room, and then transferred to solitary confinement, where he was to spend more than 30 days. For the first week, he was woken every fifteen minutes; later it was every 30 minutes. When he was eventually released, without charge or trial, he was a gibbering psychological wreck.[i]
He was he not the only person to suffer in this way. A Swede was detained under similar circumstances. A Saudi-financed charity had all its computers impounded: the Kosovo Albanian charity workers told me that NATOâs seizure of their property had been more brutal than that practised by the Serbian police themselves. In neighbouring Bosnia in early 2002, six Algerian men who had been detained by the Bosnian authorities were released without charge. The Americans kidnapped them on the spot, and transported them to Guantanamo Bay, where they presumably still remain.
Nor was the abuse confined to the Balkans. Remember Mike Span? He was the CIA operative who was torn to pieces in a prison riot at Qala-i-Janghi in Afghanistan in November 2001. He was given a heroâs funeral in the National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, attended by President Bush, because he was the first American to die in Afghanistan. But the riot had been started by Span, who was caught on camera threatening to kill a prisoner if he did not answer his questions. Span did eventually shoot dead two or three prisoners, according to witnesses, but it is not clear whether they had started to riot by then. When they did, American warplanes were called in and they bombed some 400 prisoners to death. In vain did the UN Human Rights Commissioner call for an inquiry into torture and other abuses committed in Afghanistan.
In Iraq, accusations of torture and abuse started to be raised as soon as the âcoalitionâ captured Baghdad. In May 2003, Amnesty International started to investigate claims that detainees had been beaten and electrocuted by British troops.[ii] In July, Amnesty International reported that âAmnesty staff heard complaints that included prolonged sleep deprivation and detainees being forced to stay in painful positions or wear hoods over their heads for long periodsâThe organisation made several requests to visit detention centres but were denied access by U.S. forces.â[iii]
So this kind of thing has been going for years. Indeed, the British Channel 4 has even started to talk about âa Gulag archipelagoâ of US military bases around the world which are also used as detention centres. So Channel 4, like other members of the politically-correct class, has grasped the point that George Bushâs âwar on terrorâ is going badly wrong. But in its report, it noticeably failed to mention any of the US bases in the Balkans. This is doubtless because right-on left-wing opinion still clings to the belief that US intervention against Yugoslavia under Bill Clinton was good, while US intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, under George Bush, was bad. This, in turn, is because people do not understand that the underlying foreign policy assumptions are the same in both cases.
For the âwar on terrorâ grows out of Bill Clintonâs foreign policy philosophy as night follows day. Following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, American policy-makers did not, as one might have expected, rejoice in the new-found freedom of states. Instead, they regarded this prospect with trepidation. Politically correct opinion at the time harped on the âdangersâ which ânationalismâ supposedly represented, including in totally docile and undangerous places like the Baltic states. There was a scramble to re-create some kind of supranational control to keep all these newly independent states in check. Bodies like the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe were set up, the âsecurityâ in their name betraying which organisations their officials really worked for. The purpose of these initiatives was to manage the new democracies of Eastern Europe, a disastrous policy which the British Helsinki Human Rights Group has spent a decade documenting.
Above all, the assumption was that international relations were naturally in a state of chaos, and that only the imposition of order by brute American force could prevent anarchy. American power was literally understood as the only way to bring order out of a Hobbesian âstate of natureâ in international relations. The neo-conservatives who grew to such influence under Bush all assumed that the choice was between â as Richard Perle and David Frum put it â âvictory or Holocaustâ.[iv]Â Like Hobbes, they convinced themselves that will itself would be sufficient to re-shape the world. In statements which almost seem to echo the philosophy of The Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahlâs famous documentary film about the Nuremberg rallies, Charles Krauthammer was typical when he wrote that, with enough determination, America could re-shape the world: âAmerica is the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome. Accordingly, America is in a position to reshape norms, alter expectations and create new realities. How? By unapologetic and implacable demonstrations of will.â [v]
And, as in Hobbes, the creation of order out of chaos was something which occurred ex nihilo. There is, in the neo-conservative view, no natural order in international relations. Order must be deliberately created in order to exist. Neo-cons, in other words, commit precisely the mistake of âconstructivismâ which Friedrich von Hayek so brilliantly analysed an attacked. In particular, the neo-con revolutionaries â for it is as the heirs of Jacobinism that they are rightly understood[vi] â denied, in effect, that it was natural for the world to be divided up into different states. George Bush has repeatedly said that American values are the values of the whole of humanity â âright and true for every person in every societyâ [vii] true for all people everywhere,â and that the end of the Cold War showed that there is âone single model for national successâ.[viii] Under such conditions, it is obvious that there is no real room for national sovereignty.
Bush, indeed, has proved to be as hostile to the concept of national sovereignty as his predecessor, who fought a war (over Kosovo) specifically to show that âuniversal human rightsâ should trump the existing rules of the international system. His friend Tony Blair has given two speeches saying why the rules should be changed, not changing his tune between the two American presidencies.[ix]Â Above all, Bush and Blair both regard the war on terror in exclusively moral and even religious terms, never in political ones. By definition, therefore, they do not consider their enemies to be legitimate. They depict them instead as criminals by definition, and it is because they criminalise the enemy that enemy captives, such as in Iraq, are treated as convicts - simply in virtue of the fact that they have fought.
Above all, it is Bushâs religious and apocalyptic vocabulary which is so striking. Having said that American values are universal values, Bush has also said that America is fulfilling a divine mission. He is, as such, the direct inheritor of that long tradition of American Messianism which includes John Winthrop, Hermann Melville and Woodrow Wilson.[x] Bush has said that American incarnates liberty, that âliberty is Heavenâs plan for humanityâ and that Americaâs enemies are the enemies of liberty. The logical corollary of this is that they are the enemies of humanity and, as such, not human themselves. With the President of the United States de-humanizing his countryâs enemies in this overt way, is it any wonder that Lyndie England treated her captives like dogs?
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