Torture, Slaughter and Lies

Brian Cloughley
12/24/2008

In September an Afghan journalist, Jawed Ahmad, was released from a US military prison in Afghanistan where his jailers ” broke two of my ribs during the beatings.” He worked for Canadian TV and the BBC, among other media outlets, and he had done nothing wrong. That is obvious, because he was freed without charge after a year of hellish treatment at the hands of uniformed filth whose claim to being human is at best feeble. If there had been the slightest genuine suspicion that he had committed a crime he should have been put on trial, but that is not the way the US system works, in these horrible days. Bush policy in Iraq and Afghanistan is never to admit that anyone can be innocent because everyone arrested is automatically guilty. But will it get any better under Obama? Can he alter what has become normal behavior on the part of the robotic minions of the commander-in-chief?

In February Jawed Ahmad was declared an “enemy combatant,” which is a glib catch-all description used by Washington’s foulest to describe any foreigner who, in shades of the horrible McCarthy years, they suspect of possibly being involved in what they term anti-American activities. These victim of hysteria, of whom there are countless thousands around the world, are locked up in prisons where their treatment varies from casual brutality to hideous torture. From the British-owned, US-leased island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to the US colonial enclave at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, by way of Bagram and Kandahar in Afghanistan and equally horrible prisons in Iraq, the misery of innocent – or even guilty – detainees casts a dreadful blot on what the world used to think was a fair and free democracy.

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