Under Attack

This week we present the documentary by Sarah Olson and Not in our Name, "Under Attack: Arab, Muslim & South Asian Communities Since September 11th".

Listen to the documentary here.

Intro:

Yesterday an article was posted on the New Yorker’s web site that is included in the May 24th issue. The article titled “The Gray Zone” by Seymour Hersh (who you may remember as the author of the article “Torture at Abu Ghraib” in the May 10th edition of the New Yorker) reads as follows:

“The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.”

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s spokesman Larry Di Rita has widely been quoted responding to this article by saying

Quote:

"Assertions apparently being made in the latest New Yorker article on Abu Ghraib and the abuse of Iraqi detainees are outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture."

In considering this response, it wouldn’t hurt to note a recent article in Newsweek that quotes a memo written by White House council Alberto Gonzales. Writing in a memo to President Bush as early as January of 2002, Gonzales began making justifications for the bad behavior of U.S. operatives in the future:

Quote (and note … this a memo to the president… Donald Rumsfeld’s boss):

"As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians ... In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

So …. despite the fact that the US announced on Friday in solemn tones it’s elimination of certain interrogation techniques including

Quote:

“sleep and sensory deprivation and keeping prisoners in stressful positions for periods of time.”

(I’ve yet to get definitive confirmation of whether sexual humiliation is on the list of recently banned techniques)

And despite the fact that U.S. officials released some 315 people from Iraqi prisons on Friday…
(don’t forget what Saddam Hussein did with his prisons just before his time was about to run out)

Despite these minor appeasements..let’s be aware that these changes in short term policy should not distract from our understanding that the abusive conditions and permissive atmosphere that led to the events at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere throughout Iraq and Afghanistan were very likely calculated well in advance and as we shall soon see this attitude was expressed at home as well as abroad.

With this in mind we turn to a documentary produced by Sarah Olson in collaboration with Not in Our Name called “Under Attack; Arab Muslim and South Asian Communities since September 11th” which documents abuses perpetrated by our government well before the publicity of Abu Ghraib forced officials into false paroxysms of shock and outrage.

Listen to the documentary here.

Posted by lee at May 16, 2004 06:35 PM
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