Longtime Middle East correspondent for the Guardian David Hirst speculates on the unthinkable: the defeat and ejection from the Middle East Gulf region of the United States, as a result of the 'greatest strategic defeat in US history', the invasion of Iraq.


Airstrike kills 22 but misses Al-Qaeda chief: This attack in remote Pakistan by a CIA predator drone symbolises the phony US 'war on terror' as a whole: Hi-tech, bungled, murderous and utterly counterproductive. Even if target Al-Zawahiri was actually there, is the killing of 22 people (not to mention the killing of one or two hundred thousand other people in the region) considered acceptable? How can Pakistan, a sovereign nation, tolerate this lawless violence from a supposed ally? Do these killings diminish terrorism against the US or increase it? Do they secure oil reserves or put them at risk?

Former US interrogator Tony Lagouranis talks about Abu Ghraib and other things:

I talked to some of the Arabic people who were in my company and also some of the translators. And they told me a little bit of the history of the prison, that it's notorious in the Arab world. And so they said every Arab will know what this place is, but Americans don't know. You know, it was Saddam's torture chamber and execution chamber. And it's where thousands of Shi'a died after the uprising. So you know, it's sort of equivalent of Auschwitz for the Arab people.

No doubt it was convenient and practical to just take over Abu Ghraib, but its just laugh-out-loud inappropriate to have done so. This is a mission that was clearly destined to fail....

In an interesting interview, Lagouranis also says:

The other interrogators and the analysts, they tended to be pretty disillusioned and bored. Like they'd been there a whole year and had gone in, you know, experienced the frustration of not being able to get any intel, and having the wrong guys there and having that information to go on. So they tended to be pretty disillusioned with the whole process and just wanted to go home. …

The worst stuff I saw was from the detaining units who would torture people in their homes. They were using things like … burns. They would smash people's feet with the back of an axe-head. They would break bones, ribs, you know. That was serious stuff....

Part of it is, they were trying to get information, but part of it is also just pure sadism. You just kept wanting to push and push and push, and see how far you could go. And it seems like that's just part of human nature. I mean, I'm sure you've read studies conducted in American prisons where you put a group of people in charge of another group of people, and give them control over them, and pretty soon it turns into cruelty and torture, you know? So it's pretty common.

And I saw it, every detention facility I went to. If there wasn't really strong, strong leadership that said, "We're not going to tolerate abuse," … in every facility there would have been abuse. And even among people like the MPs who aren't trying to get intel -- they just do it because it's something people do there, if they're not controlled either inwardly or from above. …

Iraq is in fact a textbook example of what postwar conventions and prohibitions are all about: the ban on warfare; aggressive war as the supreme crime; absolute ban on torture; Geneva convention; International Law etc. And the Bush administration, which dismissed as 'quaint' the Geneva convention, openly tried to authorise and legitimise torture, and advanced a 'Fuhrer principle' of Presidential authority - this Administration has broken all the rules, acted like a pack of Nazis, and are in fact war criminals, who should be in prison.

Longtime Middle East correspondent for the Guardian David Hirst speculates on the unthinkable: the defeat and ejection from the Middle East Gulf region of the United States, as a result of the 'greatest strategic defeat in US history', the invasion of Iraq.


Airstrike kills 22 but misses Al-Qaeda chief: This attack in remote Pakistan by a CIA predator drone symbolises the phony US 'war on terror' as a whole: Hi-tech, bungled, murderous and utterly counterproductive. Even if target Al-Zawahiri was actually there, is the killing of 22 people (not to mention the killing of one or two hundred thousand other people in the region) considered acceptable? How can Pakistan, a sovereign nation, tolerate this lawless violence from a supposed ally? Do these killings diminish terrorism against the US or increase it? Do they secure oil reserves or put them at risk?

Former US interrogator Tony Lagouranis talks about Abu Ghraib and other things:

I talked to some of the Arabic people who were in my company and also some of the translators. And they told me a little bit of the history of the prison, that it's notorious in the Arab world. And so they said every Arab will know what this place is, but Americans don't know. You know, it was Saddam's torture chamber and execution chamber. And it's where thousands of Shi'a died after the uprising. So you know, it's sort of equivalent of Auschwitz for the Arab people.

No doubt it was convenient and practical to just take over Abu Ghraib, but its just laugh-out-loud inappropriate to have done so. This is a mission that was clearly destined to fail....

In an interesting interview, Lagouranis also says:

The other interrogators and the analysts, they tended to be pretty disillusioned and bored. Like they'd been there a whole year and had gone in, you know, experienced the frustration of not being able to get any intel, and having the wrong guys there and having that information to go on. So they tended to be pretty disillusioned with the whole process and just wanted to go home. …

The worst stuff I saw was from the detaining units who would torture people in their homes. They were using things like … burns. They would smash people's feet with the back of an axe-head. They would break bones, ribs, you know. That was serious stuff....

Part of it is, they were trying to get information, but part of it is also just pure sadism. You just kept wanting to push and push and push, and see how far you could go. And it seems like that's just part of human nature. I mean, I'm sure you've read studies conducted in American prisons where you put a group of people in charge of another group of people, and give them control over them, and pretty soon it turns into cruelty and torture, you know? So it's pretty common.

And I saw it, every detention facility I went to. If there wasn't really strong, strong leadership that said, "We're not going to tolerate abuse," … in every facility there would have been abuse. And even among people like the MPs who aren't trying to get intel -- they just do it because it's something people do there, if they're not controlled either inwardly or from above. …

Iraq is in fact a textbook example of what postwar conventions and prohibitions are all about: the ban on warfare; aggressive war as the supreme crime; absolute ban on torture; Geneva convention; International Law etc. And the Bush administration, which dismissed as 'quaint' the Geneva convention, openly tried to authorise and legitimise torture, and advanced a 'Fuhrer principle' of Presidential authority - this Administration has broken all the rules, acted like a pack of Nazis, and are in fact war criminals, who should be in prison.