Posted 4:30 AM by Paul
History Speeds Up

The news from Iraq has left me speechless. Even the harshest critics of US and British policy, could not have predicted the kind of torture and degradation we have seen over the last few days. The main BBC portal had a link to The Memory Hole, an excellent American website dedicated to freedom of information. I had to log off after a couple of minutes as it felt like I was viewing a hard core S&M site. It is the same with the newspapers. I find myself debating whether to buy them. The pictures are so horrific that I don't want the kids to see them.

Apparently there is worse to come. It is rumoured that snuff videos of Iraqis prisoners being murdered are in existence.

Predictably both the US and UK Governments have been following a strictly co-ordinated media strategy. The line from London and Washington is identical. The abuses (they don't use the T word) was the work of "rogue elements" who did not "represent the values of the coalition". The individuals responsible for the abuses would be "tracked down and punished". Nobody does righteous indignation better that Tony Blair, but a day after it was launched this PR "line to take" has already fallen apart because it has run up against the published facts.

The Red Cross warned that abuse in British and US jails was systematic and co-ordinated. The White House received its first warnings over a year ago. Downing Street received a report in February. They refuse to publish it saying "Red Cross Reports are always confidential". I give it a week before it appears on the Net.


British military personnel conducted interrogations at the Abu Ghraib jail. The Ministry of Defence, claims that these people knew nothing of the abuse taking place at the time. They were obviously deaf to the howling of the attack dogs.

Most importantly US soldiers who are now under arrest have stated clearly that they were carrying out explicit orders to "soften up" prisoners prior to interrogation by private contractors. This is a new departure. The privatisation of torture. Previously you had to be an employee of the state to apply electrodes to someone's genitals. Now you can do it as an employee of a company quoted on Wall Street. In the old days torture was conducted by surrogates. Sinister looking Argentinians or Guatemalans who could be demonised after the event, in a show trial designed to demonstrate to the world that local abuses were being confronted. May 2004 and the torture is being handed out by young men and women who look as though the last major event of their lives was the High School Prom. The American Dream is tainted.

However, it is self evident that these fresh faced soldiers from small town America did not improvise these novel methods of terror and humilitation. They were following a manual. Nice looking kids from small towns in the US heartland with a standard of living similar to parts of Lithuania. These kids thought they were doing the right thing for their country. Identical to the kids from Smallsville Siberia who worked in the Gulags softening up counter revolutionaries for the KGB.

In this hell there was at least a glimmer of hope in the shape of the senate hearing attended by a jittery Donald Rumsfeld. Much is made of the superiority of the British system whereby the Prime Minister of the day has to face Parliament every week to account for himself. This is self-serving British conceit. In reality Blair has been able to get away with a great deal because his own side will back him up fearful that they will lose their seats if they do not. An effective rebellion in the House of Commons against a sitting PM happens around once every 30 years. For now Blair is safe and he knows it. Buy maybe, just maybe we have come around to a situation like that which saw Chamberlain deposed because of his mis-handling of the Nazi invasion of Norway.

Members of Bush's cabinet can be brought to account more quickly and are subjected to a far higher standard of sustained forensic questioning. The most effective question came from John McCain. Effective because it was short and simple.

"Who ordered this?"

That will become the mantra.

I could swear I saw McCain twitching as he repeated his verbal assault. Perhaps the photos brought back terrible memories of his own torture at the hands of the Viet Cong. Rumsfelt looked lost. I doubt if he can use a computer and was bewildered that the internet and digital technology had landed them in such a fix. He was in revolt against the modern world. Torture he could understand, but not this internet thingy.

This is the core of the problem for the White House. History has speeded up. 20 years ago they could have buried it. The truth would have finally surfaced decades later in a dusty report filed in the Library of Congress. Now the same events are slashed across prime time news. It took a week, but now the images are on the front page every newspaper in America. Why the delay? My guess is that Bush held off commenting until Karl Rove had brought him the bad news from the focus groups. The sexual element must have really hit home in the Bible Belt. No... they could not gloss over this as high jinx which got out of hand. Main Street USA may hate criticism of the Military but it hates being hated even more. Something had to be done.

I also suspect that CBS ratings shot up after the revelations. Other networks could no longer afford to avoid the story. Sooner rather than later their advertising revenue would be hit.

Over the new few days there will be more revelations and the British Army will not be exempt. There are too many unexplained cases of acute renal failure under interrogation. Who knows where this will take us, but the world has changed. We will not view ourselves in the same way. Even left wing critics like me had the smug idea that we in The West were somehow a little better than the barbarians of the East.

Now it seem that we were just better at self deception.