The International League of Peoples' Struggle (ILPS) condemns in the strongest possible terms the physical and psychological torture, sexual abuse, and humiliating and degrading treatment committed by US occupational forces against Iraqi detainees and prisoners of war.
The video footages and photos from Abu Ghraib prison which are coming out successively in the mass media and the internet this past week are graphic proof of the war crimes daily being committed by the US occupational forces against Iraqi detainees and prisoners of war. Based on reports from their own military investigators, US military police and military intelligence personnel routinely tortured, sexually abused, and humiliated Iraqi detainees to extract information from them. Several prisoners have also been killed under their custody.
Most of the detainees have not been charged in court and have been kept in isolation, their immediate families not having any clue as to their whereabouts or their condition.
But the horrors which we have witnessed in Abu Ghraib prison is not the only, nor the worst, of the war crimes being committed daily by the US occupational forces and its allies against the people of Iraq.
At least 10,000 Iraqi civilians — unarmed men, women and children — have been killed by US and British military air strikes, air raids, artillery bombardments, and indiscriminate gunfire, while tens of thousands more have been injured. For the month of April alone, over 700 civilian Iraqis have been killed in a major escalation of US-led attacks against the civilian population. Hospitals, houses and residential apartments, and government buildings have been destroyed, and religious centers have been desecrated or destroyed.
Every day we receive reports and see video footages of houses being raided, unarmed civilians rounded up in the streets at gunpoint, and people being maltreated and humiliated by the US-led occupying troops. The several hundred detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, located near Baghdad, are mostly civilians rounded up from house to house searches made by the coalition troops. And they are just a few of the estimated 18,000 civilians illegally being detained in various prison camps all over the country. Most of them have been in detention for months already, and they are all denied their right to see their families, friends and lawyers.
The horrors of Abu Ghraib prison are in no way an aberration nor an isolated incident. Rather, it is but a small part of the ever-growing number of horrors being perpetrated by the imperialist occupiers in Iraq.
Experiences in Vietnam, Philippines, Korea, Afghanistan and countries in Latin America and Africa have shown that such horrific actions of the US military are inherent in its training of soldiers to be killing machines with utter disregard for basic human rights.
The US and British imperialists have shown to the world that they have no degree of respect for the national and economic sovereignty of the Iraqi people when they launched their imperialist war on Iraq. They continue to violate the basic human rights of the Iraqi people as they continue their armed occupation of Iraq. The US and British imperialists are totally exposed as aggressors, mass murderers, and violators of international law on the question of national sovereignty, war and peace.
It is only right that the people of Iraq intensify their resistance against the imperialist aggressors.
The ILPS continues to extend its solidarity to the people of Iraq. We join all the popular forces and peace- and freedom-loving people in condemning the invasion and continued occupation of Iraq. We condemn all acts of aggression and intervention by US imperialism in Iraq and all in other countries it wants to control.
ILPS GENERAL SECRETARIAT
15 May 2004