Mick Hartley

The pictures of US forces humiliating Iraqi prisoners are of course a public relations disaster, and inexcusable even though, as David Aaronovitch points out, far worse crimes are committed on a regular basis by other Arab regimes:

The editor-in-chief of al Jazeera, Ahmed al-Sheik predicted – surely correctly – that the photographs would cause immense trouble. On Newsnight he claimed that the scenes were ‘humiliating not only to the Iraqis, but to every Arab citizen around the world’. And yet, as H[uman R[ights] W[atch] suggests, it wasn’t a necessary outcome of fighting a war in Iraq.

Yet there are some other hard facts to contemplate. The most obvious is that much worse torture has been – and in some cases still is – used by countries with whom we have good relations and whose human rights abuses never make it to the front page. And the editor-in-chief of al Jazeera may like to contemplate that much of this happens in Arab countries, as well as in Israel.

I could find nothing on al-Jazeera’s English website, for example, covering the story, carried in the Guardian on Thursday, that the head of the Iranian judiciary has just issued an order banning the use of torture in Iranian prisons. Amnesty recently took up the case of Arzhang Davoodi, ‘who has been imprisoned, tortured and denied medical treatment after he talked to a Channel 4 Dispatches television team last year’. The team was making a documentary about the death in custody of an Iranian woman journalist.

Torture of dissidents has been routine in Tunisia, where al-Jazeera does not maintain an office. Just two months ago, HRW reported: ‘The Egyptian government continues to arrest and routinely torture men suspected of consensual homosexual conduct.’ The report contained testimonies of torture victims who were tied up, suspended in painful positions, burnt with cigarettes, submerged in ice-cold water, and given electric shocks to arms, legs and genitals.

And I haven’t even mentioned Saudi Arabia, Syria or what goes in in the cellars of various militias, from Lebanon to Afghanistan. There is some selective horror being expressed here. It is unconvincing, to say the least, to complain that there is something particularly horrible about non-Arabs treating Arabs badly, if little is said about Arabs treating other Arabs even worse.

But it is precisely the Arabs who do complain about their own governments who are so undermined by our failures. One Arab democrat recently told a Bush official: ‘Every dictator in the region is pointing to America’s example [over Guantanamo] as an excuse to crack down on dissent.’

If, last week, someone had put it to me: okay, coalition forces have been a year now in Iraq: do you think that there have been cases where they’ve behaved brutally, where they’ve gone beyond acceptable norms of military behaviour? I’d have said yeah, given what people are like, especially given the stresses that soldiers operate under, I would imagine that has happened. Soldiers aren’t any better than the rest of us. What I would not have expected was that they’d be so stupid as to record it all on video, and then let the pictures be published. What were they thinking? What were their commanding officers thinking? Didn’t anyone say: hey, pictures of Iraqis being humiliated – perhaps we should, you know, destroy them. The chilling thought here is that this sort of behaviour was so commonplace that nobody considered there might be a problem.

As for the Mirror’s supposed revelations about British brutality, I would want to see some independent corroboration. Piers Morgan isn’t exactly Mr. Integrity, and has run a strongly anti-war campaign. Let’s hope we get the truth soon, one way or another.