I saw our failure through the bars of Abu Ghraib

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-1098486,00.html


When I visited Abu Ghraib prison last November I could not understand why the Americans had not flattened it the day after liberation. They flattened so much else. This was Saddam’s Bastille. Surely it would have been better to record this epitome of inhumanity in the desert and then destroy it? Why empty its torture chambers of Saddam’s victims only to fill them with the Pentagon’s own?

My visit was part a half-hearted search for a teenager named Omar Hamodi, the son of a Baghdad art college lecturer of my acquaintance. The scene was pure neo-Saddam. The boy had vanished from a wedding party in June when a passing American patrol heard guests letting off guns in traditional salute. His desperate parents assured me he was utterly pacific and had never fired a gun in his life. I have no reason to disbelieve them. For six months the only trace they had had of him was a prison number, 116417, and the grim news that he might be in Abu Ghraib. There had been no visit allowed, no lawyer, no trial, nothing. The family’s biggest fear was that their son might now join the Mujahidin.

The scene outside the jail was chaotic. A crowd stood waving bits of paper with names or numbers. They pleaded with a single Iraqi official for news of the inmates. All asserted this was far worse than under Saddam. The only American soldier I encountered, hiding in a bunker, said he was a Nestlé soft-drink salesman from San Francisco. A reservist, he said he had nothing to do with what was happening inside. He described his job in a series of expletives.

I trust he is safely home. His notional boss, the governor of Abu Ghraib, has been suspended and replaced, appropriately, by the boss of Guantanamo Bay. I have no news of Prisoner 116417. He is probably facing another scorching summer in this desert Guantanamo while his parents sign up to every anti-American, anti-British cause in town. Thus do George Bush and Tony Blair now mean to rule Arabia.

Simon Jenkins

in the still Murdoch-owned Times. He ends:
"Of course there is no excuse for what happens in Iraq’s jails. But who needs excuses amid this rush to violence? Iraq was invaded illegally on the excuse that someone in London and Washington thought the country posed an immediate threat. Anarchy was created in Iraq on the excuse that Ahmed Chalabi boasted he would be welcomed as a liberator. Torture is committed in jails on the excuse that a link must be found with al-Qaeda. Is blinkered idiocy by château generals more “excusable” than obscene antics by prison guards?

When I see gruesome photos, real or faked, I can be duly revolted. But these are moral flesh wounds on the decaying corpse of American and British operations in Iraq. And let us leave America out of this for a change. I am writing this in Britain, a full member of the coalition, jointly in command and jointly accountable. We should ask Tony Blair, Jack Straw and Geoff Hoon what they knew of these abuses and what they did to stop them."