Al Mayadeen – April 26, 2024
Day 202 of Israeli aggression: 34,356 killed, 77,368 injured in Gaza
The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza stated that the Israeli occupation committed in the past 24 hours five massacres against families in the Strip, killing 51 people and injuring 75.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza announced on Friday that the number of Palestinians killed in the ongoing Israeli genocide in the Strip since October 7 has now reached 34,356, with 77,368 injured as the war reaches its 203rd day.
Additionally, the ministry stated that the Israeli occupation committed in the past 24 hours five massacres against families in the Strip, which resulted in the martyrdom of 51 people and the injury of 75.
It noted that thousands of victims of the aggression remain trapped under rubble and on roads inaccessible to ambulance and civil defense crews, as the occupation continues to prevent rescue teams from reaching them.
Earlier on Monday, Gaza's Civil Defense announced that 332 bodies of martyrs were recovered from the Israeli-made mass graves in Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis since the withdrawal of the Israeli occupation forces from the area.
According to authorities in the Gaza Strip, some of the individuals discovered at the Nasser Medical Complex were killed during the siege imposed on the hospital, which included direct attacks and air raids on its facilities. Others were executed en mass during the Israeli raid on the medical facility.
The EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, compared on Wednesday between Gaza now and Germany during World War II, saying that "Israel" has exposed areas in the Gaza Strip to greater destruction than that dealt to cities in Germany back in the 1940s.
“I can say that more than 60% of the physical infrastructure has been damaged, and 35% fully destroyed,” Borrell said during his speech at a plenary session of the European Parliament.
He also highlighted the “killing of 249 humanitarian workers and around 100 journalists in Israeli attacks on Gaza.”
It has been confirmed by the Palestinian Journalists' Syndicate (PJS) that at least 141 journalists in Gaza have been killed since October 7.
“Israel must respect international law, implement the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures, ensure the protection of all civilians, and allow humanitarian workers to do their lifesaving job without being targeted," the top EU official concluded.
https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/day-202--34-356-killed--77-368-injured-in-gaza
Former Israeli Major General: Hamas working on Israeli ambush in Rafah
Former Israeli occupation forces Major General, Israel Ziv, said that Hamas is working on a strategic ambush for the IOF, which would constitute a "disaster for Israel."
Former Israeli occupation forces Major General, Israel Ziv, addressed the possible ground invasion in Rafah in a press statement.
He claimed that Hamas was working on a strategic ambush for the IOF, which would constitute a "disaster for Israel," adding that the Rafah invasion poses a high risk, one higher than everything the IOF did in Gaza, given the fact that Rafah is a very crowded place and difficult to fight in, as well as the US and Egypt's sensitivity toward it.
Palestinian Resistance factions affirmed in a joint statement on April 25 that the Resistance is all geared up for any possible scenario in the ongoing Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip, including a ground invasion of Rafah, the southernmost city in the besieged territory.
In its statement, the factions emphasized that they "will not sit idly by," as "all options [for escalation] are on the table," warning against the catastrophic and humanitarian consequences of any ground aggression on Rafah, which hosts more than 1.4 million displaced Palestinians.
The Palestinian factions held US President Joe Biden's administration and Western governments fully responsible for any Israeli invasion of Rafah, as Western backing to "Israel" is ongoing despite the occupation's violation of multiple international conventions and laws.
In the same context, the factions called on the Palestinian masses in the cities of the West Bank to "rise vehemently" in protest against Israeli threats of invading Rafah.
"We call on our people to turn the West Bank into a fireball in the face of Israeli settlers and soldiers," the statement urged.
Furthermore, the Palestinian factions affirmed that the Israeli genocidal war would not restore the defeated military of the occupation.
Socialist West Site – April 16, 2024
Israel escalates war with Lebanon, plans Rafah invasion, as Nasser hospital atrocity details emerge
Thomas Scripps
Israel’s conflict with Lebanon is entering a “different phase” of “higher-intensity conflict”, in the assessment of Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Marjayoun in southern Lebanon.
She writes that, on Wednesday, “Israel carried out the largest number of strikes in a single day,” hitting 40 separate targets with fighter jets and artillery. The assault continued into the early hours of Thursday morning, targeting not just southern Lebanon but also the east of the country.
Students shout slogans and carry the coffin of a 10-year-old girl was killed Tuesday by an Israeli strike on a house in the town of Hanin, during her funeral procession at the backyard of Hezbollah-run Al-Mahdi school, in Tiri village, south Lebanon, April 25, 2024. [AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari]
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told reporters, “Half of the Hezbollah commanders in south Lebanon have been eliminated… and the other half hide and abandon south Lebanon to [Israel Defense Forces] IDF operations.”
An official IDF statement explained that the strikes were not carried out in response to any specific attack but as “part of the effort to destroy the organization’s infrastructure in the border area.”
Roughly 250 Hezbollah fighters have been killed since the latest round of fighting began after October 7, and more than 70 Lebanese civilians. Over 90,000 have been displaced, forced to leave around 100 southern towns and villages under threat of bombardment, and hundreds of acres of farmland damaged.
Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, warned Thursday after visiting the country and writing of “communities suffering throughout,” that tensions in Lebanon “are on the brink of exploding. It simply cannot continue like this.”
He went on, “People fleeing southern villages in search of a safe place end up in overcrowded shelters. Their livelihoods have been destroyed, but we have insufficient funding to help them. There is a feeling of desperation…
“People must be able to go back to their homes and jobs, farmers to their lands, and children to their schools. Families and children are being caught at the centre of a regional crisis here.”
These are the consequences of initial skirmishes heralding a major and far more destructive war. Haaretz’s Ravit Hecht wrote Thursday that the Israeli government is “signalling that after the Rafah operation, whose duration nobody knows, the army will deploy for a more substantial campaign up north to push Hezbollah away from the border”.
She cited one government minister as saying, “First Rafah, then Hezbollah, then Iran.”
The Jerusalem Post’s Avi Abelow wrote enthusiastically Wednesday, “Israel is already at war in the North, escalation with Lebanon is inevitable.” He agitated, “Israel must put an end to the Iranian regime’s threat to Israeli lives on Israel’s borders, and that can only be done by Israel finally destroying the Iranian capabilities in Lebanon.
“Just as the war in Gaza is a just war, so too is the inevitable war in Lebanon. It is actually the same war, just on different fronts.”
A lengthy piece by Maha Yahya, published Wednesday in Foreign Affairs, asked with apparent concern, “Israel’s Next Front? Iran, Hezbollah and the Coming War in Lebanon.”
She noted, “Israel has now deployed 100,000 troops to its north to confront the Shiite militant group Hezbollah.” Moreover, “on April 21, Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s emergency war cabinet, declared that Israel’s border with Lebanon now constitutes its ‘operative front’ and its ‘greatest and most urgent challenge.’”
Earlier this month, “the Israeli military released a statement titled ‘Readiness for the Transition From Defense to Offense,’ outlining its preparations for a conflict with Lebanon. Since then, its targeted attacks in Lebanon have intensified. It may no longer be a matter of whether Israel attacks Lebanon, but when.”
Yahya cautioned that such a war would light the fuse on the region’s conflicts:
“A fuller regional escalation would also almost certainly prompt more attacks by Iran’s allies against U.S. forces stationed in Iraq, Jordan, and Syria. Such attacks, in turn, would likely solicit more lethal responses by the United States… the symbolism of rockets falling into Israel from a variety of countries in the region could galvanize the United States and other Western powers to get more involved militarily, not only by defending Israeli airspace but by directly attacking Israel’s enemies.”
War in Lebanon and beyond is bound up with intensified war, repression and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank.
According to Haaretz, “The Israeli army has informed the government that its forces have completed their preparations for an upcoming operation in Rafah, and that the date for such an operation is to be decided by the cabinet.” Israel’s war and security cabinets both met in Tel Aviv Thursday to discuss the plans.
The Times of Israel reports that Israel’s Nahal Infantry Brigade has been withdrawn from Gaza to train for the offensive, allowing with the rest of the 162nd Division. Nine new military bases have been established near Gaza as staging posts.
Airstrikes continue to be carried out against the city of more than 1.5 million refugees in preparation. Al Jazeera journalist Hani Mahmoud, reporting from the city, described a “surge in attack drones” flying over the city. Among casualties were a Belgian aid worker, Abdallah Nabhan, and his seven-year-old son Jamal; they and five others were killed in an Israeli strike on a building housing 25 people, including displaced refugees.
Two more children were among the day’s victims, adding to the two percent of Gaza’s children killed or maimed in the Israeli genocide to this point.
Another child, 16-year-old Khaled Raed Arouq, originally from Jenin, was shot in the chest and killed by Israeli security forces in Ramallah, in the West Bank. According to eyewitnesses, Israeli forces used stun grenades and live fire against several young people who they claimed were “terrorists” who had “thrown stones”.
Arouq’s cousin, Majed Arqawi, told Agence France-Presse, “He was hit by a bullet in his back, which exited through his chest … they assassinated him in cold blood.”
In the town of Beit Furik, east of Nablus, another Palestinian boy was shot and hospitalised in an Israeli house raid.
More details have meanwhile emerged of the atrocities carried out by the Israeli occupiers at Khan Younis’s Nasser hospital, where close to 400 Palestinian dead have been discovered in three mass graves. Corpses have been uncovered for six consecutive days.
According to the Palestinian Civil Defence organisation, only a minority have been identified because the others are too badly decomposed or mutilated. Head of the department Yamen Abu Sulaiman said Thursday that there was evidence of torture and field executions, including the killing of patients. Ten bodies had their hands tied, and others still had medical tubes attached. Children are among the dead.
Palestinian Civil Defence member Mohammed Mughier commented, “We need forensic examination for approximately 20 bodies for people who we think were buried alive.”
An official statement from the Israeli Foreign Ministry declared “any attempt to blame Israel for burying civilians in mass graves… categorically false and a mere disinformation campaign aimed at delegitimizing Israel… The grave was dug—by Gazans—a few months ago.”
A Civil Defense statement released Thursday appealed “to the secretary-general of the United Nations and international institutions to form an independent international investigation committee to investigate crimes of genocide.” The UN has backed this call, as has a European Union embarrassed by the revelations and safe in the knowledge that Israel is opposed, backed unabashedly by the United States.
Instead, the US has led the publication of a revoltingly cynical open letter, signed by eighteen of the imperialist powers and their allies, placing all responsibility for the war at Hamas’s feet by calling for its release of Israeli hostages. A senior US official commented, “if they would do that, this crisis will wind down.”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/25/xhqf-a25.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Palestine is the future
Mikhael Marzuqa
The understanding of the rights and catastrophe of the Palestinian people at all levels in countries and international organizations has awakened as never before.
The global reaction from political and social movements, as well as the general population, has not been delayed in response to the horror of Israeli Zionist evil against the defenseless Palestinian people. Demonstrations have been expressed at various levels, such as unions and syndicates, parliamentarians, political parties, and international officials, among many others. The massive popular demonstrations have pressured many governments to adopt behaviors condemning Israeli aggression. In other cases, courageous presidents, prime ministers, and chancellors have bravely dared to defy the political-economic power of Zionism. After all, the enemy and its accomplices are the most powerful financial, economic, political, communicational, and military forces in the world.
The understanding of the rights and catastrophe of the Palestinian people at all levels in countries and international organizations has awakened like never before. The commitment and support of political movements and militias from Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria have been fundamental in striking the Israeli army. Iran has been key in its support for Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, and Hamas itself. This has cost them many martyrs, including Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a member of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guard Corps killed by "Israel" on April 1.
The courageous reactions of officials from UNRWA, UNICEF, and the whole range of UN agencies have been damning for "Israel", and just to name the most recent one, Francesca Albanese's brave report has put new pressure on the inaction of UN member countries, mainly those most influential on the international stage.
Presentations to the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice will undoubtedly generate historical effects, as we are already seeing, compelling "Israel" to comply with its resolutions, as it should be with the case of the last resolution of the United Nations Security Council.
Although it is a debatable solution and very difficult to implement, different states around the world are urging the establishment of the Palestinian State in search of peace in the region. Palestine from the river to the sea is for some a cry of romanticism, while for other activists, including increasingly prominent anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals, it is an undeniable requirement for the restoration of the rights of the Palestinian people and is gaining strength in the Left and the progressive world. This, of course, has clear differences with the "two-state solution", coveted by the Palestinian oligarchy through the Palestinian Authority, in collusion with the Arab monarchic disgraceful regimes and with Western powers seeking to undermine legitimate Palestinian demands, aiming to install only symbolically and with very limited autonomy an unviable Palestinian state.
Nevertheless, that is outside the objectives of the illegitimate Israeli "state", which continues to seek to expel as many Palestinians as possible and occupy their land fully, in addition to South Lebanon, including the water resources of the Litani River and the aquifers of the Golan Heights.
The one-state solution and the dismantling of the apartheid system undoubtedly require much more time and objective conditions, as well as the development of a consciousness of peaceful coexistence with justice that will take years to instill. However, it is the unique definitive solution. A single secular, democratic state for Muslims, Christians, and Jews to coexist peacefully. It will also be essential for the reorganization and reunification of the Palestinian leadership, with a change in the balance of political forces, allowing the people to vote again to choose their authorities from the entire political spectrum but, such will must be respected by the power-holders, unlike what happened in January 2006, when the Palestinian Authority thwarted that historic opportunity for the Palestinian people, instead responding to hegemonic interests and the demeaning ambitions of enrichment inherent to the oligarchy and its economic networks. This, unfortunately, has been a reality in all liberation struggles around the world.
In the immediate term, the isolation and criminal stigma of violation of all international norms by Israeli terrorism and its government, savage settlers, and Israeli settler society itself, are being sealed with its own fire. The pain in the souls over women and children killed by the Zionist indescribable inhumanity will never heal.
Despite that, the leadership of Hamas has proven to be of exceptional intelligence in both military and politics, further highlighting the baseness of the Palestinian Authority, the treacherous monarchies, and the Egyptian dictator. But along with this, Hamas has put on the table a strategic political proposal for the Middle East, which must be carefully read by all those involved in the region.
At the international level, the trend has been to delegitimize "Israel", strengthen the need to restore the rights of Palestinians, and establish condemnation and sanctions against "Israel", demanding measures that will be defined in favor of Palestine over the course of the months.
Meanwhile, the catastrophe or Nakba continues its course, but the moral and spiritual strength of the Palestinian people has already shown humanity that they rise above all cultures on the planet and invites them to follow in their footsteps. Every grain of sand in support of the Palestinian people adds to the purpose of freedom for Palestine from the river to the sea, just as it does for all the oppressed people across the world wherever they may be. Palestine is the future.
https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/opinion/palestine-is-the-future
Carceral Imperialism:
Torture, Abu Ghraib, and the Legacy of the U.S. War on Iraq
Maha Hilal
(ﾠTomdispatch.comﾠ) – “To this day I feel humiliation for what was done to me… The time I spent in Abu Ghraib — it ended my life. I’m only half a human now.” That’s what Abu Ghraib survivor Talib al-Majli had to say about the 16 months he spent at that notorious prison in Iraq after being captured and detained by American troops on October 31, 2003. In the wake of his release, al-Majli has continued to sufferﾠa myriad of difficulties, including an inability to hold a job thanks to physical and mental-health deficits and a family life that remains in shambles.
He was never even charged with a crime — not exactly surprising, given the Red Crossﾒs estimate that 70% to 90% of those arrested and detained in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion of that country were guilty of nothing. But like other survivors, his time at Abu Ghraib continues to haunt him, even though, nearly 20 years later in America, the lack of justice and accountability for war crimes at that prison has been relegated to the distant past and is considered a long-closed chapter in this country’s War on Terror.
The Abu Ghraib “Scandal”
On April 28th, 2004, CBS News’s 60 Minutes aired a segment about Abu Ghraib prison, revealing for the first time photos of the kinds of torture that had happened there. Some of those now-infamous pictures included a black-hooded prisoner being made to stand on a box, his arms outstretched and electrical wires attached to his hands; naked prisoners piled on top of each other in a pyramid-like structure; and a prisoner in a jumpsuit on his knees being threatened with a dog. In addition to those disturbing images, several photos included American military personnel grinning or posing with thumbs-up signs, indications that they seemed to be taking pleasure in the humiliation and torture of those Iraqi prisoners and that the photos were meant to be seen.
Once those pictures were exposed, there was widespread outrage across the globe in what became known as the Abu Ghraib scandal. However, that word “scandal” still puts the focus on those photos rather than on the violence the victims suffered or the fact that, two decades later, there has been zero accountability when it comes to the government officials who sanctioned an atmosphere ripe for torture.
Thanks to the existence of the Federal Tort Claims Act, all claims against the federal government, when it came to Abu Ghraib, were dismissed. Nor did the government provide any compensation or redress to the Abu Ghraib survivors, even after, in 2022, the Pentagonﾠreleased a plan to minimize harm to civilians in U.S. military operations. However, there is a civil suit filed in 2008 — Al Shimari v. CACI — brought on behalf of three plaintiffs against military contractor CACI’s role in torture at Abu Ghraib. Though CACI tried 20 times to have the case dismissed, the trial — the first to address the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees — finally began in mid-April in the Eastern District Court of Virginia. If the plaintiffs succeed with a ruling in their favor, it will be a welcome step toward some semblance of justice. However, for other survivors of Abu Ghraib, any prospect of justice remains unlikely at best.
The Road to Abu Ghraib
”My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture… And therefore, I’m not going to address the ‘torture’ word.” So said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press conference in 2004. He failed, of course, to even mention that he and other members of President George W. Bush’s administration had gone to great lengths not only to sanction brutal torture techniques in their “Global War on Terror,” but to dramatically raise the threshold for what might even be considered torture.
As Vian Bakir argued in her book Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror: Agenda-Building Struggles, his comments were part of a three-pronged Bush administration strategy to reframe the abuses depicted in those photos, including providing “evidence” of the supposed legality of the basic interrogation techniques, framing such abuses as isolated rather than systemic events, and doing their best to destroy visual evidence of torture altogether.
Although top Bush officials claimed to know nothing about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the war on terror they launched was built to thoroughly dehumanize and deny any rights to those detained. As a 2004 Human Rights Watch report, “The Road to Abu Ghraib,” noted, a pattern of abuse globally resulted not from the actions of individual soldiers, but from administration policies that circumvented the law, deployed distinctly torture-like methods of interrogation to “soften up” detainees, and took a “see no evil, hear no evil,” approach to any allegations of prisoner abuse.
In fact, the Bush administration actively sought out legal opinions about how to exclude war-on-terror prisoners from any legal framework whatsoever. A memorandum from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to President Bush argued that the Geneva Conventions simply didn’t apply to members of the terror group al-Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban. Regarding what would constitute torture, an infamous memo, drafted by Office of Legal Counsel attorney John Yoo, argued that “physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Even after the Abu Ghraib photos became public, Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials never relented when it came to their supposed inapplicability. As Rumsfeld put it in a television interview, they “did not apply precisely” in Iraq.
In January 2004, Major General Anthony Taguba was appointed to conduct an Army investigation into the military unit, the 800th Military Police Brigade, which ran Abu Ghraib, where abuses had been reported from October through December 2003. His report was unequivocal about the systematic nature of torture there: “Between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison.”
Sadly, the Taguba report was neither the first nor the last to document abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, prior to its release, the International Committee of the Red Cross had issued multiple warnings that such abuse was occurring at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
Simulating Atonement
Once the pictures were revealed, President Bush and other members of his administration were quick to condemn the violence at the prison. Within a week, Bush had assured King Abdullah of Jordan, who was visiting the White House, that he was sorry about what those Iraqi prisoners had endured and “equally sorry that people who’ve been seeing those pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America.”
As scholar Ryan Shepard pointed out, Bush’s behavior was a classic case of “simulated atonement,” aimed at offering an “appearance of genuine confession” while avoiding any real responsibility for what happened. He analyzed four instances in which the president offered an “apologia” for what happened — two interviews with Alhurra and Al Arabiya television on May 5, 2004, and two appearances with the King of Jordan the next day.
In each case, the president also responsible for the setting up of an offshore prison of injustice on occupied Cuban land in Guantánamo Bay in 2002 managed to shift the blame in classic fashion, suggesting that the torture had not been systematic and that the fault for it lay with a few low-level people. He also denied that he knew anything about torture at Abu Ghraib prior to the release of the photos and tried to restore the image of America by drawing a comparison to what the regime of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had done prior to the American invasion.
In his interview with Alhurra, for example, he claimed that the U.S. response to Abu Ghraib — investigations and justice — would be unlike anything Saddam Hussein had done. Sadly enough, however, the American takeover of that prison and the torture that occurred there was anything but a break from Hussein’s reign. In the context of such a faux apology, however, Bush apparently assumed that Iraqis could be easily swayed on that point, regardless of the violence they had endured at American hands; that they would, in fact, as Ryan Shepard put it, “accept the truth-seeking, freedom-loving American occupation as vastly superior to the previous regime.”
True accountability for Abu Ghraib? Not a chance. But revisiting Bush’s apologia so many years later is a vivid reminder that he and his top officials never had the slightest intention of truly addressing those acts of torture as systemic to America’s war on terror, especially because he was directly implicated in them.
Weapons of American Imperialism
On March 19th, 2003, President Bush gave an address from the Oval Office to his “fellow citizens.” He opened by saying that “American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” The liberated people of Iraq, he said, would “witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military.”
There was, of course, nothing about his invasion of Iraq that was honorable or decent. It was an illegally waged war for which Bush and his administration had spent months building support. In his State of the Union address in 2002, in fact, the president had referred to Iraq as part of an “axis of evil” and a country that “continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.” Later that year, he began to claim that Saddam’s regime also had weapons of mass destruction. (It didn’t and he knew it.) If that wasn’t enough to establish the threat Iraq supposedly posed, in January 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that it “aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.”
Days after Cheney made those claims, Secretary of State Colin Powell falsely asserted to members of the U.N. Security Council that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, had used them before, and would not hesitate to use them again. He mentioned the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” 17 times in his speech, leaving no room to mistake the urgency of his message. Similarly, President Bush insisted the U.S. had “no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.”
The false pretenses under which the U.S. waged war on Iraq are a reminder that the war on terror was never truly about curbing a threat, but about expanding American imperial power globally.
When the United States took over that prison, they replaced Saddam Hussein’s portrait with a sign that said, “America is the friend of all Iraqis.” To befriend the U.S. in the context of Abu Ghraib, would, of course, have involved a sort of coerced amnesia.
In his essay “Abu Ghraib and its Shadow Archives,” Macquarie University professor Joseph Pugliese makes this connection, writing that “the Abu Ghraib photographs compel the viewer to bear testimony to the deployment and enactment of absolute U.S. imperial power on the bodies of the Arab prisoners through the organizing principles of white supremacist aesthetics that intertwine violence and sexuality with Orientalist spectacle.”
As a project of American post-9/11 empire building, Abu Ghraib and the torture of prisoners there should be viewed through the lens of what I call carceral imperialism — an extension of the American carceral state beyond its borders in the service of domination and hegemony. (The Alliance for Global Justice refers to a phenomenon related to the one I’m discussing as “prison imperialism.”) The distinction I draw is based on my focus on the war on terror and how the prison became a tool through which that war was being fought. In the case of Abu Ghraib, the capture, detention, and torture through which Iraqis were contained and subdued was a primary strategy of the U.S. colonization of Iraq and was used as a way to transform detained Iraqis into a visible threat that would legitimize the U.S. presence there. (Bagram prison in Afghanistan was another example of carceral imperialism.)
Beyond Spectacle and Towards Justice
What made the torture at Abu Ghraib possible to begin with? While there were, of course, several factors, it’s important to consider one above all: the way the American war not on, but of terror rendered Iraqi bodies so utterly disposable.
One way of viewing this dehumanization is through philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, which defines a relationship between power and two forms of life: zoe and bios. Zoe refers to an individual who is recognized as fully human with a political and social life, while bios refers to physical life alone. Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were reduced to bios, or bare life, while being stripped of all rights and protections, which left them vulnerable to uninhibited and unaccountable violence and horrifying torture.
Twenty years later, those unforgettable images of torture at Abu Ghraib serve as a continuous reminder of the nature of American brutality in that Global War on Terror that has not ended. They continue to haunt me — and other Muslims and Arabs — 20 years later. They will undoubtedly be seared in my memory for life.
Whether or not justice prevails in some way for Abu Ghraib’s survivors, as witnesses – even distant ones — to what transpired at that prison, our job should still be to search for the stories behind the hoods, the bars, and the indescribable acts of torture that took place there. It’s crucial, even so many years later, to ensure that those who endured such horrific violence at American hands are not forgotten. Otherwise, our gaze will become one more weapon of torture — extending the life of the horrific acts in those images and ensuring that the humiliation of those War on Terror prisoners will continue to be a passing spectacle for our consumption.
Two decades after those photos were released, what’s crucial about the unbearable violence and horror they capture is the choice they still force viewers to make — whether to become just another bystander to the violence and horror this country delivered under the label of the War on Terror or to take in the torture and demand justice for the survivors.
Lab and author of Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11. Her writings have appeared in Vox, Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, the Daily Beast, Newsweek, Business Insider, and Truthout, among other places.
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