The Pentagon Archipelago

US runs the gulags of our times


The Henry M. Jackson Foundation, named for the late ultra-anti-communist Democratic senator (and mentor to Richard Perle and other current neocons), reconstructed Perm 36, one of Russia's most notorious gulags. Will human rights foundations of the future have the unhappy duty to reconstruct Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and other gulags in the Pentagon Archipelago?

First I want to give author Chris Floyd credit for coining the phrase ``Pentagon Archipelago, which appeared in a Counterpunch posting last year, before the Abu Ghraib photos broke. His pieces on US prison torture are shockingly eloquent, even to me, a person who has studied and opposed US-sponsored torture and torture schools for 25 years.

Today Amnesty International from the platform of its annual report weighs in on the distinct lack of interest by the Republican administration and its Congress in coming clean, seeking the truth, and ending the atrocities -- which continue to this day, despite the transparent lies perpetuated by mealy administration spokesman Scott McClellan.

Here is what Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty, writes in the forward to the 2005 Annual Report:

Despite the near-universal outrage generated by the photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib, and the evidence suggesting that such practices are being applied to other prisoners held by the USA in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere, neither the US administration nor the US Congress has called for a full and independent investigation.

Instead, the US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to ``re-define'' torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding ``ghost detainees'' (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the ``rendering'' or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practise torture. The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process.

Scotty M. says, ``We hold people accountable when there's abuse. We take steps to prevent it from happening again. And we do so in a very public way for the world to see that we lead by example and that we do have values that we hold very dearly and believe in.''

But this is exactly the problem, as Amnesty correctly points out. That public response shows exactly the ``values'' that America's Terror War ``hold very dearly.'' It is obvious to anyone who looks at the official public information with any scrutiny at all that no one higher than a few low-ranking soldiers seems to have any responsibility for these crimes.

Example: Afghanistan
A few months ago, The Guardian ran a story on Afghanistan, linked to in Deep Blade Journal, that the country is ``one big US jail.''

Last week, an appropriately-placed story on the front page of the New York Times revealed how that jail has operated over the last three years: ``Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.''

Zeynap at Under the Same Sun has a good piece on ``How Dilawar [from the Times story] died.'' Go there for the description of how this poor man fell into the clutches of bigoted interrogators who were part of the US forces occupying his country, and who then beat him to death -- for the apparent crime of driving his taxi too close to an American base.

Here is part of the story that is distressingly revealing about the culture of official disinformation concerning the real nature of US detention:

But documents and interviews reveal a striking disparity between the findings of Army investigators and what military officials said in the aftermath of the deaths.

Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died of natural causes, even after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides. Two months after those autopsies, the American commander in Afghanistan, then-Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said he had no indication that abuse by soldiers had contributed to the two deaths. The methods used at Bagram, he said, were ``in accordance with what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques.''

They lied. So why should anything on this issue that comes out of Scotty McClellan's mouth be believed? The Amnesty report is properly damning of US officials' lack of accountability for these war crimes.

Questions: Why so much violence? Why do US sweeps round up mostly innocents?
It has been known for over a year now that 70% to 90% of prisoners detained by the US in Iraq ``had been arrested by mistake,'' according to a confidential May 2004 Red Cross report.

This fact seems not to be of any concern to US commanders, who this week continued the round-up with Operation Squeeze Play where, ``Almost 300 suspected insurgents have been detained in the largest joint US-Iraqi military offensive in Baghdad.''

The numbers in the round-up are getting so bad that the US has already announced a new crash program of prison construction in Iraq. The linked May 10 Washington Post story says detainees numbered

11,350 last week, a nearly 20 percent jump since Iraq's Jan. 30 elections. U.S. prisons now contain more than twice the number of people they did in early October, when aggressive raids began in a stepped-up effort to crush the insurgency before January's vote.

Again, referring to a another recent posting in Under the Same Sun, the policy of indiscriminant round-up is accompanied by concentration camp marking and dehumanization of the detainees.



In ``How a man becomes K2,'' Zeynep writes with anguish,

that unnamed man's furrowed forehead is marked "K2" by the marine captures the fundamental process of dehumanization that you will find if you scratch the surface of all major 20th century atrocities. That man is no longer a man for those soldiers: he is a detainee, a number, a representation of the enemy, of the people who shoot at them, the people who they hate, people who they are scared of, people that aren't people. He can be blindfolded, marked, humiliated before his heartbroken family, taken away at will....The question facing us is whether we will stop before magic markers turn into tattoos.

Absolutely do click through and read Zeynep's entire post. If you are American, be careful looking in the mirror after you understand what is going on in Iraq. We must deal with that ugliness, before it permanently deals with us. It may be too late....

Now I want to ask why. Why is the US using its huge-sized net and overflowing its cages with so little concern about who is ``guilty'' of taking up arms against the occupation and who is not? Is this indiscriminant attack tantamount to war against the entire civilian population of Iraq?

Perhaps one clue to the answer may be found in a story Newsweek broke back in January. This important story is on Pentagon use of "The Salvador Option" in Iraq. Later stories gave more details about how the US is employing ex-Baathist militias to undermine Iraqi resistance to occupation with Sadaam-era methods. These policies have been insisted upon by the US, leading to severe questions about the operative sovereignty of the elected Iraqi government. See additional Deep Blade postings here, here, and here.

Then a couple of weeks ago this same question of actual lack of sovereignty of the Jaaffari government came to the surface when it expressed its desire to remove Maj. Gen. Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq's National Intelligence Service. According to the Knight-Ridder story,

The CIA has so far refused to hand over control of Iraq's intelligence service to the newly elected Iraqi government in a turf war that exposes serious doubts the Bush administration has over the ability of Iraqi leaders to fight the insurgency and worries about the new government's close ties to Iran.

The director of Iraq's secret police, a general who took part in a failed coup attempt against Saddam Hussein, was handpicked and funded by the U.S. government, and he still reports directly to the CIA, Iraqi politicians and intelligence officials in Baghdad said last week. Immediately after the elections in January, several Iraqi officials said, U.S. forces stashed the sensitive national intelligence archives of the past year inside American headquarters in Baghdad in order to keep them off-limits to the new government....

When the U.S.-led occupation authority ceded power to the semi-sovereign interim government last June, the official said, CMAD was split, with roughly half the agents going to the new interior ministry and the rest to work on military intelligence in the defense ministry. Both ministries' intelligence departments are led by Kurds, the most consistently U.S.-friendly group in Iraq, and report to the Iraqi prime minister.

But an elite corps of CMAD operatives was recruited into the third and most important Iraqi intelligence agency, the secret police force known by its Arabic name: the Mukhabarat. Its Iraqi director is Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, a Sunni general whose three sons were executed by Saddam in retaliation for his involvement in a botched, CIA-backed coup attempt in the mid-1990s. Shahwani's top deputy in charge of daily operations is said to be a Kurd; Shiites are believed to comprise just 12 percent of the force.

Unlike the defense and interior ministries, there is no provision in the Iraqi government's budget for the secret police. The Mukhabarat's money comes straight from the CIA.

Several Shiite politicians in the new government want Shahwani out, saying the Mukhabarat's ranks are filled with Saddam's former officers seeking revenge against the Shiite militias they fought in the 1980s. The Iraqi intelligence official said agents have complained the ex-Baathists use the word ``resistance'' instead of ``terrorists'' when describing Sunni insurgents in internal memos, raising serious doubts about the agents' loyalties.

Whew...Iraq has a CIA-funded Mukhabarat operating without the authority of the elected government?? What kind of sick joke is the US playing here? Who is really responsible for the increasingly sectarian attacks? In this light, US policy could be seen to be directly fomenting the endless bombings and horrendous death and destruction experienced in Iraq over the last many weeks.

Let's get back to the Newsweek story from January, and that clue to US policy, still shrouded in secrecy. Here is how Newsweek quoted Shahwani and unnamed Pentagon officials on the ``insurgency problem'':

the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, [Shahwani] said, ``are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them.'' He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won't turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. ``The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,'' he said. ``From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.'' [emphasis added]

I'll end for now with this speculation about US broad-sweep detention policy -- it is being used for intentional collective punishment and dehumanization of the entire Iraqi population.

These realities of US policy are sickening -- home invasions, indiscriminant round-ups, numbering of prisoners, stress interrogations, torture. It all reflects the brutal nature of the US taking of Iraq.