The London Independent has broke a story that is likely to become Britain's equivalent of the Abu Ghraib scandal, with shocking accounts of brutal and perverse prisoner abuse at the hands of male and female British soldiers.
Britain's Abu Ghraib: Did Britain collude with US in abuse of Iraqis?
The fresh allegations raise important questions about collusion between Britain and America over the ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners during the insurgency. In one case, British soldiers are accused of piling bodies of Iraqi prisoners on top of each other and subjecting them to electric shocks, an echo of the abuse at the notorious US detention centre at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison.
One claimants says he as raped by two British soldiers, and others say they were stripped naked, abused and photographed. For the first time, British female soldiers are accused of aiding in the sexual and physical abuse of detainees.
Did signals that civilized norms of behavior wouldn't apply to Iraqis work their way down the British chain of command from the top as happened inside the Bush Administration, or did the impulse to abuse their prisoners come laterally from their American allies?
In insurgencies like Iraq and Afghanistan where foreign troops are fighting to stabilize a government who's legitimacy isn't recognized by large segments of the population, the lines between the indigenous population and combatants blur creating the temptation to treat the whole population as combatants, leading to wholesale human rights abuses like we saw at Abu Ghraib and in these latest revelations in Britain.
On Thursday I heard an extraordinary radio interview with former C.I.A. analyst and author Ray McGovern on the local NPR station, so I went to hear McGovern give a talk that night titled "Why Accountability for Torture is Crucial for Human Rights, Our Security, and Our Souls" at the University Of Washington. I hope you can listen to his radio interview here. During his talk Ray McGovern asked the audience a couple of questions. Did we know why the Bush White House would resort to torture when it produced such unreliable information? Answer: Because the Bush White House wanted unreliable information that linked Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda. Did we know who the first person the Bush Administration used torture on? Answer: John Walker Lindh AKA "the American Taliban".
During McGovern's talk I sat near Rep. Jim McDermott who introduced anti-torture legislation in Congress.
Resorting to torture has opened Pandora's Box for both the U.S. and Britain.