That is the BushCo agenda.
Felicity Arbuthnot: The “Contract Interrogator”
2007-02-13 | “I have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them too well, they imitated humanity so abominably.” (Shakespeare: Hamlet.)
“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them but to be indifferent to them; that is the essence of inhumanity.” (George Bernard Shaw: The Devil’s Disciple.)
The “Contract Interrogator”
Writing in the Washington Post (9th February 2007) Eric Fairm writes of: “an interrogator’s nightmare”. “A man with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I am afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.”
Fairm is plagued by nightmares. He was a “contract interrogator”, for the 82nd Airborne Division, in Falluja during part of 2004, one “… of two civilian interrogators, assigned to the division interrogation facility”.
The man who returns to torment his dreams was “… a suspected associate” of a Ba’ath Party leader in Anbar province… who had been captured two months earlier”. In other words, he was a possible pan-Arab nationalist, living in his own country. “Nationalist” becomes a pejorative word when used by Western politicians, in fact, it has the same meaning as patriot (“a person who vigorously supports his country and its way of life”, Collins.) .
The haunted Mr Fairm has “long since forgotten” the name of his nocturnal visitor – something one would have thought might also haunt – but not his instructions: “I was to deprive the detainee of sleep .. forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes.” There will be many that will applaud honesty in admitting Abu Ghraib-like torment, “mistakes” and failing to “uphold the standards of human decency”. Instead: “I intimidated, degraded a man who could not defend himself”, writes Fairm.
He also watched naked prisoners, forced to stand through the night, shivering; saw degradation, deprivation, punching, kicking “used daily”. “Appalled”, he admits lacking the courage to stand up and challenge “friends and colleagues”. With “friends” like these …
Fairm argues, that unless “myriad mistakes” are addressed “there can be no hope of success in Iraq.”
One thing is clear, the man does need help. There is no hope of success in Iraq. Popping round with $2,500 a head (seemingly the current going rate) for blowing families to bits in their beds and blasting their homes over them, or blowing in the door of the family home, to invade in boots, then say “sorry”, or visit the family of the illegally snatched detainee (you are illegal invaders, please remember) is not going to win hearts and minds in millennia. The “damage” done to the people of Iraq, described, hardly addresses the enormity. “Damage” is car dent, a cracked window, an accidental act, not pre-meditated torment, physical damage, physical assault and humiliation.
Fairm and his colleagues were surely taught some of the laws that apply, in war – and pertaining to illegal invasions – he had, statedly, been formerly in the army (1995-2000.) “Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law, if carried out as a widespread or systematic attack on any civilian population is a crime against humanity.” The Charter of the International Criminal Court of 1998. It could have been written for the actions of America’s latest rampage.
Read all of it here.
