Liberal critics of the White House have also recently attempted to present the abuses in Iraqi prisons as an aberration of the Bush administration by lying through their teeth about the past. In an article in the May 24 New Yorker magazine, for example, Seymour Hersh said unnamed senior military legal officers had told him that “with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions [by Washington] had come to an end.”

The historical record, however, quickly cuts through such falsifications.

Humiliation and abuse of prisoners—along with other atrocities against the civilian population of occupied nations—has been inherent in the conduct of imperialist armies in every war carried out by Washington and other imperialist powers. During most of these wars in the past century, moreover, the Democrats were running the White House and liberals were in charge of the Department of Defense and the Pentagon. That was the case with Harry Truman, for example, who was president during most of the 1950-53 Korean War and with John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who occupied the Oval Office from 1960 to 1968—during most of the U.S. war against Vietnam.  
 
Tiger Force, ‘tiger cages’
In April, Toledo Blade journalists won the Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting for a series they did exposing the horror committed by an elite U.S. Army unit 35 years ago in Vietnam. The 45-member volunteer unit, known as the “Tiger Force,” was part of the 101st Airborne Division. The reporters scoured military documents and interviewed 43 surviving members of the unit. They traveled to Vietnam to interview survivors of the attack and their family members. The series documented the atrocities committed by the unit, which included torture of prisoners, rape of civilian women, mutilations of bodies, and the murder of at least nine and possibly well over 100 civilians.

A four-and-a-half-year investigation by the army concluded that 18 soldiers from the unit had committed crimes ranging from murder and assault to derelictions of duty. The cases never reached a military court, however, and no one was ever charged. Six soldiers were allowed to resign from the army during its investigation specifically to avoid prosecution.

Equally notorious in Vietnam was the U.S. 172nd Military Intelligence unit. According to formerly classified army documents, reported the Blade, a military investigation disclosed that from March 1968—when Johnson was president—through October 1969, “Vietnamese [civilian] detainees were subjected to maltreatment” by no fewer than 21 separate interrogators of the 172nd Military Intelligence Detachment.

Unit members not only beat prisoners and civilian detainees but also employed a variety of brutal methods, including a particular torture called the “Bell Telephone Hour.” This involved using a hand-cranked military field telephone to generate electrical shocks through wires attached to hands, feet, nipples, and genitals. Another method involved forcing water down a person’s throat until he or she passes out or drowns. U.S. troops who fought in the occupation of the Philippines in the early 20th century also used this method, which they dubbed the “water cure.”

The U.S. military and the CIA also helped set up and maintain the infamous “tiger cages” at the Con Son island prison in the South China Sea. On that island, the South Vietnamese U.S.-puppet regime had its largest jail for non-combatants, about 9,600 prisoners, with no legal rights. The cages were built by RMK-BRJ, a Texas military contractor.

Tiger cages were dank concrete pits—four feet wide, nine feet long, and six feet deep. Each held three to five prisoners. Steel grates covered the top of each pit. Prisoners were shackled to the concrete floor. Their guards often beat them without mercy. Above each tiger cage was a bucket of lime. Wardens would throw down clouds of it onto the chained prisoners as a form of “sanitary torture.” After months of internment, prisoners would lose the use of their legs or develop tuberculosis, gangrenous feet, and life-threatening dysentery.

Throughout most of the war, U.S. officials claimed the cages did not exist. Frank Walton, director of the U.S. Public Safety Program in Vietnam, said about the Con Son prison, “This place is more like a Boy Scout recreational camp.”

The cages came to light in 1970—during Richard Nixon’s presidency—after Vietnamese students who had been brutally tortured after being tried and convicted by a U.S.-run military court, put themselves on display in a room in the Saigon College of Agriculture, prompting an investigation into the conditions of prisoners in Vietnam and subsequent reports in the U.S. and other media.

Military intelligence in Vietnam also used as a common method of interrogation taking prisoners on a helicopter, tying their hands with wire attached to the craft, and pushing them out the open door if they refused to talk.  
 
My Lai massacre
On the morning of March 16, 1968—again during Johnson’s presidency—Charlie Company, a unit of the Americal Division’s 11th Infantry Brigade, killed more than 500 Vietnamese civilians in cold blood in the village of My Lai. Villagers were ordered out of their homes, which were dynamited if made of stone and burned if made of wood. This was standard operating procedure for “search and destroy” missions by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War.

According to the media and historical accounts of the attack, troops began to gun down groups of villagers without provocation. When one soldier refused to shoot a group of 60 villagers, the unit’s commanding officer, Lt. William Calley, carried out the killing himself with a burst of gunfire from close range. Women in the village were gang raped. Other men and women were beaten, clubbed with rifle buts, and stabbed with bayonets. Some were mutilated with the signature “C Company” carved into their chests. Only 132 of the 799 men, women, and children in the village survived. Many did so by lying underneath the dead bodies of their relatives and neighbors until their murderers left.

The unit’s orders were to search for and engage the 48th battalion of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. They never found the battalion, and the U.S. soldiers were never fired upon.

The story of the massacre would not come to light for another year. One of the reasons was that indiscriminate killing of non-combatants was not uncommon in Vietnam, especially by U.S. air strikes. In fact, officers and troops involved in the massacre tried to cover it up by reporting that only 20 to 28 villagers had been killed by gunship and artillery fire.

As in the case of Abu Ghraib, the killings at My Lai were revealed by a soldier. In the case of My Lai it was Ronald Ridenhour, who also had the ambition of becoming a journalist. Ridenhour first became aware of the massacre after listening to a member of Charlie Company bragging about the killings after a few beers. For his remaining eight months in Vietnam, Ridenhour spent his spare moments gathering and sifting through accounts of the killing. When he returned to the United States in early 1969, he sent a substantial dossier and summary of the event to the White House, secretary of defense, and a number of senators. He received one visit from an army investigator.

In September of that year, the army announced, as quietly as possible, through the command at Fort Benning, Georgia, that an officer had been charged with the murder and deaths of an unspecified number of civilians in Vietnam in 1968. Seymour Hersh resurrected Ridenhour’s dossier and summary. He found three GIs who witnessed the killings at My Lai and arranged for one of them to appear on television. The story could no longer be ignored.

The army established two commissions that questioned more than 400 witnesses, resulting in 20,000 pages of testimony. One of the official reports concluded that at least two high-ranking officers knew of the massacre and did nothing about it. The commission recommended charges be brought against 28 officers. Army prosecutors decided to bring charges against just 14 of them. Only one was ever brought to trial, and he was acquitted.

Another 30 soldiers were charged for their role in the massacre. Among them, charges were dropped against 17 who had already left the army. Charges against the remaining 13 were either dismissed or they were found “not guilty.”

Lieutenant Calley was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor. Three days after sentencing he was released, pending appeal, on the orders of President Nixon. Calley spent three years under house arrest at Fort Benning. In 1974 he was freed on bail and his sentence was reduced to 10 years. Later that year he was paroled after completing one-third of his sentence.  
 
‘Oriental cattle’ in Korean War
During the 1950-53 Korean War—fought under the presidency of Truman and under the banner of the United Nations—thousands of U.S. troops occupied Sinchon County, now located in what is today north Korea, for 52 days. A museum in the city now contains dozens of photographs and artifacts documenting the roundups and executions of Korean patriots and indiscriminate killings of men, women, and children.

One historical site marks mass graves where the slaughtered were buried. Ri Song Jin, a witness to the massacre in the city, told reporters for the Militant visiting the country in 2002 that the imperialist forces tortured many Korean patriots in the basement of the Sinchon church.

In August 1952 Maj. Dawney Bancroft, a young British officer who commanded a unit sent to the island of Koje-do to run a prison camp where 3,200 North Korean officers were held, wrote a scathing report about the treatment of north Korean prisoners held by U.S. troops. His report accused U.S. troops of “ill-discipline, abuse and breaking the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners.” He wrote that early in his command he had to intervene to stop the mistreatment of a sick prisoner by a U.S. soldier who had been assigned to take the prisoner to a hospital.

He also described the killing of 100 prisoners in clashes by U.S. troops attempting to clear a camp. “It became evident,” he wrote, “that the U.S. officers and soldiers responsible thought the Chinese and Korean POW (prisoners of war) were Oriental cattle who were to be given quite different treatment to a European.”  
 
French record in Algeria
These are only a few of the examples of U.S. imperialism’s unbroken record of brutality and abuse of prisoners at times of war. All other imperialist powers, however, including those that have recently criticized Washington about the war in Iraq, have similar if not worse records. One of the outstanding examples is the record of French colonialism in Algeria.

The BBC reported that a French court convicted a former French general who served during the war against Algerian independence with trying to justify the use of torture. The Algerian war for independence from France lasted from 1954 to 1962 and resulted in an estimated 1 million deaths.

In May 2001, 83-year-old Paul Aussaresses published memoirs in which he calmly described the torture and murder of two dozen Algerian prisoners of war. Aussaresses, reportedly, could not be tried for torture because of the terms of the treaty ending the war. Following his conviction the general was unrepentant saying that torture does serve a purpose and that he would do it all over again—especially if he had Osama Bin Laden in his hands today.

Aussaresses wrote that his actions were known to top government officials including François Mitterrand who was then justice minister. Mitterrand, a leader of the French Socialist Party, would go on to become president of France.

Of those brought to Tourelles (a torture center run by the French army’s intelligence service), Aussaresses wrote, “there was no way we were going to release them alive. On busy days, when all the regiments were overwhelmed with prisoners, they would send me everybody they had no time to interrogate. At Tourelles, as at regimental headquarters, torture was always used if a prisoner refused to talk…. When the suspects had talked and seemed to have nothing more to say…my men would take a batch of them out in the bush, 20 kilometers or so from Algiers, shoot them down with a machine-gun burst, then bury them.”

Regimental headquarters also sent the general prisoners they had already interrogated and were deemed to have no further useful information. “Nobody ever asked me what I planned to do with these people,” Aussaresses wrote. “Long story short: when the army wanted to get rid of somebody, he would end up at Tourelles.”  
 
 
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