For Adbusters, March 2005

An Australian, Mamdouh Habib, was beaten, he says, with a club, assaulted with a dildo, electrified, told a dog would rape him, burned with cigarettes, told his wife and children had been killed, kept in a tiny cell for months, made to run in flesh-tearing shackles, and menstruated on by a whore as part of a series of interrogations that failed. After three years he was released, uncharged, from Guantanamo on January 22nd and sent home. The Australian government tried to prevent him from 'profiting from his crimes' until told he hadn't been charged and so was guilty, legally, of no crime whatever. So they cancelled his passport and called him a 'person of interest' worth watching, a defamation worth millions, probably, to him and his family and his lawyers. Habib told a Sixty Minutes interviewer, Tara Brown, that an Australian had observed his interrogation. The government then said no Australians had done this, and when one of them confessed he had, said it wasn't an interrogation, it was an 'interview', where no 'duress' had been suffered.

What is torture? Donald Rumsfeld says it is harm likely to occasion death, and anything less than that is 'abuse'. So it is only 'abuse' to tell Mamdouh Habib that his wife and children have been killed and to stop him from phoning Sydney to check if this is true. It is only 'abuse' to be menstruated on by a whore when your religion tells you this is humiliating, debasing, shaming, unholy and against the will of God. It is only 'abuse' to be kept alone and wet and naked and sleepless in a cell not knowing when you will get out for months on end. Or it is 'preparation for interview' perhaps. It is only 'abuse', I suppose, to be made at gunpoint to bash to death your little brother with a lead pipe. You suffered no physical pain; it can't be torture, can it?

The Habib case strikes most Australians as bizarre. Since we're not known for this sort of thing, it probably never happened, Australians reckon, or Habib was really up to something in Afghanistan and deserved it. And so, as happens in America, the subject is changed. It becomes the Habib Mystery not the Habib Scandal and whether (as he confessed, under torture, and later denied) he trained the 9/11 hijackers in the martial arts or not. Or whether a man who wore a Bin Laden T-shirt and shouted a lot in public meetings and was widely held to be weird and flaky would have been tapped for delicate terrorist work in the first place, by al-Qaeda, a cautious organisation, or anyone else. And the true and lasting matter at issue, whether anyone, even Albert Speer, can or should be held without charge for three years and sent to Egypt to be tortured and made to confess to anything his torturers made up on the spot, and whether this is a legal way of running a war without borders and without end, fades in the ambient noise from the public mind.

And yet Australia is not wholly in lock-step with America even now. Its own torture of 'illegal' immigrants in desert concentration camps has gone down badly all in all, and our government's frantic denial of any knowledge of Abu Ghraib and similar hell-holes signifies a difference in our national character from America's. We did not respond to the Bali Bombing by bunker-busting Jakarta. We treated it more like an earthquake, or an avalanche, or a shipwreck, with innocent victims to be mourned and culprits to be found but not a nation to be punished for evil and mass murder with bombs and occupation.

The slaughter of one hundred thousand Iraqis is not approved here as it is in America. It is not even mentioned here. The numbers of civilian dead are hidden from our view at all times. The prevailing excuse we mouth when we're asked why we're in Iraq is, 'It's the price we have to pay to a great and powerful friend for their help in the past, and also in case of a future emergency, when we may need their armies and helicopter-gunships and nukes to scare off some future invader' --- whoever that may be. We don't like Americans, we tell all our foreign friends, but we go along with them. Our Prime Minister John Howard's addition of four hundred fresh troops to Iraq in January was met with national fury. It is unlikely that number will increase.

For however skilful the spinmen who massage the frontline despatches and 'embedded' broadcasts, the killing of 20,000 children and the unending remorseless torture of innocent -- or legally innocent -- Australians by a loudmouthed, hectoring, chest-beating, Christ-invoking nation that got the WMDs wrong, and the Iraqi people wrong, and the Arab world wrong, and thereby made a billion pious flammable enemies, and still talks as if God is a Cabinet consultant, have not thus far much impressed Australians as admirable acts of public policy.

Nobody demonstrates for the war here, and nobody I suspect ever will. The newspaper articles that support it are nearly all by avaricious Murdoch mercenaries or prattling right-wing think-tankers lately unshackled by the Howard-friendly Fairfax Press to cheerlead for America. The Wolfowitz-Cheney crusade has no avid supporters here and those that go along with it mostly -- if secretly -- hold its crazed neocon martinets and their God-bothering propagandists in contempt.

And it's a hard war to like. No cheering Iraqi crowds that are genuine cheering crowds have boosted its image yet, and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have stained its name pretty much forever in the public mind -- in the exact same way as needless death and humiliating torture stained forever the names of Pinochet and Suharto and Marcos and Franco and Stalin, and the timid blood-spattered apparatchiks who served them. Humiliating torture and needless death have no friends anywhere much as a rule, and we in Australia, we have come to realise with dismay, are on the side of humiliating torture and needless death. And because of that -- and we know it, oh how clearly and sadly we know it -- we, and the Americans, and the British, are the finally, truly, and for the next hundred years, the bad guys now.