HOME	Where the World's Views of America Come into Focus

By Mohammad Badrul Ahsan

June 3, 2005

Original Article (English)

Eighteen hundred years ago the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antonius said that all things since the dawn of time were of like form and come around full circle. What he actually meant to say is three common sense words: History repeats itself. Right now that repetition is going on inside the U.S. military prisons. In Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, the Russian gulags are back in business under new management.

I am not saying it. Amnesty International is saying it. It has released a report calling the U.S. prison system, stretching from Iraq to Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, "the gulag of our time." It labeled the United States "a leading purveyor and practitioner" of torture and mistreatment of prisoners. The heartland of democracy is now possessed by demons, and freedom rings hollow in the madness of its endless vengeance.

In the wake of the now-retracted Newsweek story about the desecration of the Koran in Guantanamo, the American Civil Liberties Union has obtained summaries of the FBI interviews with the prisoners. It shows that the inmates had told FBI interrogators as early as April 2002 that the mistreatment of the Holy Book was widespread at the prison, and that it was being kicked, thrown to the floor, or withheld from the prisoners as a punishment. One prisoner had complained as early as August 2002 that guards had flushed a Koran down the toilet.

The Pentagon reaction to the allegation has been crass and constrained. It claimed that the same prisoner was interviewed on May 14 of this year, and he "did not corroborate" his earlier claim. "We still have found no credible allegations that a Koran was flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said in a statement last week.

Knowing what happens inside that prison, it isn't a surprise that the particular inmate might have changed his story two years later. Lawrence of Arabia, who was sodomized in a Turkish jail, wrote in his memoirs that there was nothing he wasn't ready to do to avoid a moment of pain. Better forget than face the dire consequences of speaking up inside a gruesome gulag. Perhaps years of beating, stripping, sexual humiliation, and intimidation left him in no condition to remember.

But the claim that U.S. soldiers desecrated the Koran didn't come from that one prisoner alone. Several detainees made the claim and at least three others told FBI interrogators that they had heard about such incidents from other inmates. The International Committee of the Red Cross and a Muslim chaplain, as well as other detainees and their attorneys made similar allegations.

Whitman of the Pentagon tried to brush off these allegations with absurd arguments. He said that al Qaeda members are trained to lie about their treatment during incarceration. He also said that the officials at Guantanamo knew how to handle the Muslim Holy Book, since the Pentagon issued rules for handling it in 2003.

This is where truth lurks in fiction like sunshine in the clouds. If inmates raised allegations of Koran desecration in 2002, and the rules for handling the Koran with the utmost sensitivity were issued in 2003, it only tells us that something must have transpired in the meantime. We shall come back to this, but let us first talk about the Russian gulags that are being run on by American standards. The inmates are so frustrated that they even contemplate mass suicide and often ask the guards to kill them.

None of these inmates participated in the bombing of the twin towers, but happened to be ideologically and militarily connected with an extremist movement that vowed to fight American hegemony on their soil. Many of them have been held without trial, their lives shattered by bestial treatment in the newly invented American gulags. It doesn't take a Sigmund Freud to explain how depravity begets depravity until an entire society is consumed by deranged minds. Two female interrogators at Guantanamo Bay have been reprimanded for sexually related techniques, including smearing ink on a detainee and telling him that it was menstrual blood.

Inmates are abused in every prison in the world, and military prisons can't be five-star facilities for those who are captured and held for plotting to destroy the most powerful country in the world. So, when naked bodies are piled up for sordid pictures, guards mock dead prisoners, throw prisoner's prayer caps in the trash, sexually molest them, break their bones, cut their skin, kick them, hang them or torture them in every possible manner, these are but manifestations of how the vanquished pay a price to the vanquisher.

Almost four years after September 11, long after the Americans have invaded and ransacked two Muslim countries, and the search for Osama bin Laden has faded into the background, people are being persecuted in the U.S. military prisons. There is a Freudian anxiety about this madness, one that sends a man into the frenzy of vengeance when he keeps hitting long after the enemy is dead. The suicide bombers of the Twin Towers went down with their planes. Many al Qaeda leaders have been captured and others are dead. Saddam Hussein and his men are in prison, his sons dead, his country occupied by American forces.

But people are still held in captivity, their bodies bearing the brunt of American vengeance, defiled and deformed to the demented delight of sadistic killers who tie up their victims in the cellar and then tear them apart limb from limb. These prisoners never attacked the United States. They never committed any crime on American soil. If anything, their only crime was to espouse a passion to resist American supremacy on their own soil.

In the final analysis, the inmates of the American gulag were warriors who fought for their countries and for their convictions. They oppressed women, sent children to religious schools, chopped off hands, beheaded people, and took religion to its logical end. They wanted everybody to see the world through their eyes. It was a mistake. But the same mistake is being repeated in the American gulags, where the prisoners are being persecuted because they didn't see eye to eye with the United States.

While releasing its report in a press conference, Amnesty International called on foreign governments to investigate Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield and other U.S. leaders for the torture of prisoners on their watch. Last Wednesday, Donald Rumsfield held his own press conference in the Pentagon, issuing warnings to any country that might give shelter or medical assistance to terrorists. His warning basically fell short of saying one thing. He didn't say what would be done to the mothers who conceived terrorists in their wombs.

Here is a lesson of biology for Donnie Rumsfield. Terrorists are also born of mothers like he once was, before they take up arms or blow themselves up in the blast of a suicide attack. If we come back to the news of Koran desecration, 16 people have already died in protest over the news, which is now being called a false rumor. But many times more than that number of people have now taken a hatred for the United States into their blood. That is the ultimate shelter for terrorism. How will Rumsfield go after these terrorists hiding in their mother's milk and father's blood?

I guess Rumsfield will have to hold another press conference to tell us how he plans to deal with it. Meanwhile, I would like to warn every Muslim on his behalf. He might come after you if he finds out that your children are also harboring your hatred for the United States.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker