Karpinski was relieved of her duties until investigations into the abuse are completed, said Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman.

A day later, the Washington Post and other big-business media reported that the top commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, is being recalled from his post this summer. He is likely to be replaced by Army vice chief of staff Gen. George Casey. It is not clear what will happen to Sanchez who was earlier being considered for a promotion to head the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, which directs military operations in Latin America. According to the Post, Lt. Gen. Bantz Craddock, the senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is now the leading contender for the Southern Command post.

These moves are aimed at cleaning up Washington’s image in Iraq in face of widespread outrage in the Middle East and worldwide over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

An angry Karpinski, reported the Post, said, “I suspect that they want to make the statement that all the officers who have been involved in Abu Ghraib have been suspended.” She said she intends to fight the suspension.

Sanchez has been tarnished by accusations that he had knowledge of the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and was present during some of the “interrogations.” The attorney for Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, one of six military police officers facing court-martial for abuse of prisoners, said at an April hearing that the company commander of the military police unit assigned to the prison would corroborate the accusations against Sanchez in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

Washington is acting to ensure that the uproar from the abuse of prisoners does not get in the way of accomplishing its objectives in Iraq: stabilizing its domination of the country and dealing further blows to its imperialist competitors in the process—especially Paris and Berlin. The Pentagon is taking these steps as the U.S. rulers are pressing for NATO to take a greater role in the occupation of Iraq, leading up to the NATO summit in Istanbul in June. The German government has already expressed publicly its strong reservations about allowing the Atlantic imperialist military alliance to play such a role in Iraq. “We will make no secret of these doubts in Istanbul,” German chancellor Gerhard Schröder recently told the press in Berlin.

In a May 24 national broadcast U.S. president George Bush said the Abu Ghraib prison “became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.” He added that his government would fund the construction of a “modern maximum security prison” to which prisoners at Abu Ghraib will be relocated. “Then with the approval of the Iraqi government, we will demolish the Abu Ghraib Prison as a fitting symbol of Iraq’s new beginning,” Bush said.

Throughout the speech Bush described the recent offensives by U.S. occupying forces against cities in central Iraq— including Fallujah, Najaf, and Karbala— as “measured actions.” The U.S. forces, he said, “could have used overwhelming force,” but decided that “massive strikes against the enemy would alienate the local population and increase support for the insurgency.”

In addition to the suspension of Karpinski and the impending replacement of Sanchez, U.S. Army specialist Jeremy Sivits, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company, was sentenced to one year in prison May 19 for his role in the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The verdict came out of the first of a number of court-martials by the U.S. military aimed at assuaging anger at the systematic mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, by trying to convince people that those responsible will be punished.

Top officials of the Bush administration have taken advantage of recent trips to Germany and the Middle East to underscore this point. In an interview with German public broadcaster ARD, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said, “We do no good” to equate what happened at Abu Ghraib to how this “would have been handled in a dictatorship. I simply don’t accept that America has lost moral authority.”

At a May 16 press conference with Jordan’s foreign minister, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell offered further apologies for the abuse at Abu Ghraib and promised that those responsible will be held accountable and punished. “The president offered an apology on behalf of the nation,” he said. “I will reinforce that apology.”

U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld made an unannounced visit to Abu Ghraib. Rumsfeld denied that the trip was intended to diffuse the outcry over mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners. “If anybody thinks that I am [in Iraq] to throw water on a fire they’re wrong,” he said. “More bad things will come out,” Rumsfeld said, adding that “time will settle over this, and we’ll be able to make an assessment.”

The one-year sentence handed to Sivits was the maximum that could be imposed under a special deal in which he agreed to testify against six other soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company.

Three of them were arraigned on a variety of charges but declined to enter a plea, according the Washington Post. The three, Spec. Charles Graner Jr., Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick and Sgt. Javal Davis, face a pre-trial hearing set for June 21. Three others, Lynndie England, and Specs. Sabrina Harman and Megan Ambuhl have been charged with participating in the abuse of the prisoners but have not been referred to a court-martial.

So far no officers have been charged for what took place at the prison. Seven commissioned and noncommissioned officers have received reprimands. All of the military cops charged and numerous soldiers who were stationed at the prison have said that they were encouraged by their superiors and military intelligence officers to abuse prisoners in order to “soften them up” for interrogation.

Sivits’s testimony showed that guards felt at ease inviting anyone in the prison to get a piece of the action. Sivits, a mechanic attached to the military police unit, said that on the night of Nov. 8, 2003, he was relaxing in a common area when Frederick casually asked if he would like to take one of the prisoners to another section of the prison.

He recounted that when he arrived with his prisoner he saw England and Davis stomping on the hands and feet of bound prisoners. Frederick struck one prisoner so hard in the chest, he said, that an inhaler was needed to help the prisoner breathe. And Graner complained that his wrist hurt after punching a prisoner in the head and knocking him unconscious, according to Sivits’s testimony. Sivits claimed that he had “had enough” and left the area when the prisoners were forced to masturbate. Sivits said that as he left Frederick yelled to him, “You didn’t see anything.” Sivits told his story only as part of the plea bargain.

As more details of the abuse are becoming public, liberal critics of the White House are using the revelations as a political football to score points against the Bush administration as part of their efforts to capture the White House in November. Towards this end, Democratic Party politicians are falsifying the historic record on Washington’s conduct toward prisoners of war and inmates at home.

One recent example illustrating this point is a report by New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh, posted in the May 15 online edition of the weekly magazine. Hersh alleged that Rumsfeld was among the top U.S. government and military officials who ordered that interrogation guidelines be put in place that resulted in the abuse at Abu Ghraib.

The only sources for this allegation that Hersh cited, however, were “several past and present American intelligence officials,” all referred to anonymously. Hersh also favorably quoted a statement by an unnamed military legal officer who supposedly said that the Bush administration’s practices meant that “a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.” But this period covers the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and other imperialist assaults during which torture and abuse of prisoners far worse than that so far uncovered in Iraq took place and is well documented. These wars were waged largely by Democratic Party administrations.

Another indication of the bipartisan support for Washington’s war of plunder in Iraq was the reaction of Democratic congressmen after viewing photos of the abuse at Abu Ghraib that have not yet been made available to the public.

On May 14, the U.S. Congress held a closed-door screening for members of the Senate and House of Representatives of some 1,800 images and video clips depicting the widespread abuse at Abu Ghraib. Most politicians, Democrats and Republicans, told the press afterwards that the White House and Pentagon were correct in deciding not to release many of these materials to the public. The Associated Press reported that several said they saw “images of corpses, military dogs snarling at cowering prisoners, women commanded to expose their breasts, and sex acts, including forced homosexual sex.”

Hewing to the White House line, Joseph Lieberman, a Democratic senator, said that the viewing “just deepens the conclusion that this was a cellblock that had gone wild.”

“People have seen enough—they have a good sense of what happened there,” said Sen. Frank Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, to underscore his support for keeping the images secret.

John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president, has been conspicuously quiet on the abuse at Abu Ghraib, noted a May 13 NBC report. It said that while “pictures documenting the abuse of prisoners in Iraq dominated television airwaves,” Kerry spent three days highlighting his “education initiatives.” Kerry voted for the resolution authorizing the war against Iraq and has criticized the Bush administration for not sending thousands more troops to “stabilize” the occupation of that country. He insists he will do a better job than Bush fighting Washington’s “war on terror.”
 
 
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War party on the prod in Iraq
Iraqi Kurds push for more autonomy
Demand is used by occupying authorities to push for federated Iraq  
 
 
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