Monday, March 20, 2006

The American Black Room

You have all heard of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Bagram, extraordinary rendition, etc. There has been an additional one called The Black Room. It's in Iraq, just at the Baghdad airport, where American Gestapo tortured Iraqi prisoners in the most merciless ways. Read this extract from a report by the Sydney Morning Herald:

“… an elite US special operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret prison. There, US soldiers turned a former government torture chamber into their own interrogation cell, calling it the Black Room.”

“In the windowless room, soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, spat in their faces and used them for target practice in games of jailhouse paintball. Their aim was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, US Defence Department personnel said.”

“Pentagon personnel who worked at Camp Nama said prisoners often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "There were no rules there," one Pentagon official said.”

The so-called elite US special operations forces unit is called Taskforce 6-26. Tell me, does a group of cowardly torturers wrecking untold brutalities on handcuffed or tied prisoners, like the Nazi Gestapo or the Japanese Kempetai, deserve the description of ‘elite’?

But then I suppose that’s American values if we remember one of their former President Ronald Reagan fantasized about sending Rambo [yes, the fictitious movie character] to sort out the US marines’ problem in Lebanon some years ago. He had to - fantasized that was - because he knew there wasn’t any American military that tough enough.

The American officials have always fantasized that their soldiers are ‘elite’ this or ‘elite’ that, but the reality has been the fact that after WWII, their soldiers couldn’t fight without enormous air or naval offensive support.

See how they are floundering in Iraq; see how the NATO allies have to generally take over from them to sort out things in Afghanistan; notice how they turned tail and scooted out from Vietnam; and the worst of all, we witnessed how they ran away from Somalia, when they couldn’t cope against a local warlord.

Even their allies, the Brits and Australians, privately sneered at their soldiers.

But mind you, they’re good at torturing restrained prisoners. They’re certainly the ’elite’ on such dungeon rat activities.

Related:
(1)
Why the World Hates America
(2)
Why the World Hates America (2)
(3)
American Gestapo
(4)
American Gestapo (2)!
(5)
US Kills For Democracy & Liberty

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