THE TRUE FACE OF WAR JUST WON’T GO AWAY

By Stephen Hume

…Denying public acknowledgment of the return of those who have made `the ultimate sacrifice’ began as a directive from the White House

[This article was published in the Vancouver Sun, May 8, 2004.]

Not so long ago, there was the fuss over The Seattle Times running photographs of flag-draped coffins of American soldiers coming back from Iraq.

The pictures first ran on a provocative little website that got them by accident through a freedom of information request. The Times’ decision finally prompted other big media players to nervously dip a toe into the waters of truth, too.

Generals huffed and puffed that their policy of censoring such pictures protects the privacy of families at a time of loss and grief. Wait a minute, isn’t loss and grief and cemeteries what war is all about?

It turns out, of course, that denying public acknowledgment of the return of those who have made “the ultimate sacrifice” began as a directive from the White House.

President George W. Bush, it seems, prefers those pictures of himself carrying fake turkeys browned with a blowtorch into the mess at Thanksgiving or swanning about on the decks of aircraft carriers in full flight gear.

In other words, in the U.S., the glitzy fake trumps the ugly reality.

Which is why on the eve of the Iraq invasion, the Pentagon issued a directive that “there will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein (Germany) or Dover (Delaware) base, to include interim stops.” These two bases are the major expediting points for the shipment home of dead soldiers.

In the aftermath, the running of the pictures was deemed a triumph of free speech but it begged the question why it had taken the biggest and best media organizations so long to start showing their audience the real face of war, which is not the sanitized Hollywood version preferred by the Pentagon but kids without heads, disemboweled mothers and civilians with their jaws shot off.

Perhaps if we saw more of the true face of war in all its disgusting horror we’d be a little less quick to accept its necessity from politicians.

There’s an object lesson in the current revulsion over the photographs, which show Iraqi prisoners being tortured and sexually abused by American military police. Already it begins to look like it might be President George W. Bush’s political Waterloo.

Images of hooded prisoners standing on boxes with electrodes attached, or handcuffed in contorted positions and paraded naked in front of grinning female soldiers who point lewdly at their private parts are bad enough.

That they should have been taken in the very prison that was used for the same purposes by Saddam Hussein, the bloodstained tyrant from whom the Americans were supposed to be liberating Iraq, adds megatons to their symbolic blast radius – and not just in the Arab world, in the self-perception of American voters, too.

The chilling photographs of bound, hooded, naked prisoners have the potential to reverse public sympathy for the occupation of Iraq in the same way that a photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm blast marked a tide change in support for the Vietnam war.

These are not the images of liberators bringing democracy and freedom. They are the images we associate with brutal oppressors of the jackbooted variety. For what other purpose can this kind of treatment have than to deliver the message: “We are omnipotent. You are conquered – submit or be treated as less than human.”

To say the Americans’ moral authority in this increasingly ill-fated Iraq adventure is now in full meltdown is the understatement of the week.

The revelations of a pattern of prison abuse which was ostensibly unknown to the commanders – despite repeated warnings from both Amnesty International and the Red Cross – has set off a firestorm.

And so it should.

Lest anybody forget, what has occurred is a direct violation both of the Geneva Convention and the United Nations Convention against torture.

Article one of the UN document defines torture as any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as intimidation, coercion or obtaining from that person or from a third party information or a confession.

Nor it is legal to inflict this kind of stress in order to punish a prisoner for any act of which the prisoner is suspected.

What’s most important here is that the UN convention establishes the responsibility of the state for acts of torture inflicted “at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official.”

Which means that the buck stops on the desk of President Bush, since he’s the official head of state.

Judging from the parade of ashen-faced senators from both parties, Bush will also have to deal with an increasingly restive public which has just had any of its remaining illusions about the righteous nobility of the on-going Iraq occupation dealt a blow.

To be sure, every official in sight has been in apology overdrive. The president went on Arab television to say he was sorry. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice apologized. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld apologized. Brig.-Gen. Mark Kimmitt apologized.

But are apologies enough? I doubt it. Generals suffering reprimands and being pensioned off to a cushy life on the golf course while the privates they command go to jail is something the cynical public has seen before.

So for Bush to really retrieve this, a few laurelled heads will have to roll along with those of the foot soldiers. Whose? How about Rice, Rumsfeld and his hawkish advisors, and the military chiefs of staff for starters?

Because the apologies don’t address one crucial point. Why didn’t the president know about this sooner? If his advisors knew and didn’t tell him, they have to go. And if they didn’t know about it, they also have to go because it was their job to know.

Brig.-Gen. Janis Karpinski, the officer who commanded the prison, is now reported as saying that the situation was known back in January. This is such an incendiary event, why didn’t Bush know then?

I suspect it’s because, as Karpinski is quoted as saying, her superior officers didn’t want to know. They wanted it to go away. Well it didn’t and it won’t. Just like the true face of war won’t, however much we pretend otherwise.

 shume@islandnet.com