Muhammad Salahuddin, Arab News

In one of his first press conferences in Baghdad following his appointment as civil administrator, Paul Bremer apologized for the heavy Iraqi casualties and the increasing destruction.

“American soldiers are trained in combat and not in peacekeeping,” he said. Whether Bremer forgot or wasn’t aware at the time, American officers and soldiers are in fact trained in many things besides fighting — methods of humiliating, deadly torture which violate human dignity and degrades humanity!

In any case, Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t honest when he said that the torture inflicted on the Abu Ghraib prisoners in Baghdad was an isolated incident. He lied when he declared that his department didn’t know of the incident until the beginning of the year. The military reports to the secretary of defense cites incidents of torture as going back to October last year; the reports confirm through eyewitness testimonies, evidence and other documents that the torture and criminal acts of degradation were systematic and organized and that those who carried them out were constantly encouraged and praised by their superiors.

Perhaps readers remember the film leaked more than a year ago to the European Union that was later shown to the European Parliament. It revealed the tragedy of more than 3000 Afghan prisoners who suffocated to death as a result of being transported to their prisons inside closed tanks. Perhaps readers will also recall the massacre in one of Kabul’s prisons in which thousands of prisoners were killed.

In short the full extent of the American occupier’s crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq will not be revealed for years to come. They may even remain hidden forever.

We must not happily accept assertions from President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rumsfeld that the group that tortured Iraqis, violated their dignity and trampled on their humanity does not represent the American people or the American armed forces nor America’s high principles and morals — the contention that it was the doings of a few. We would like to be able to accept it happily — but on one condition: that the American administration look upon the Saudi people and the Islamic Ummah with that same logic and review its insane policies and actions toward us on that basis.

Eleven young Saudi men were involved in the criminal attacks on New York but no one in the American administration seems to have realized that that number does not represent 15 million Saudis and their morals and principles. Neither does it affect the solid friendship of those 15 million Saudis with America. Yet that was the basis on which the Islamic Ummah was treated because a few of its sons deviated and adopted the methods of terrorism. Moreover Bush’s malicious aides who in fact control him, considered the Ummah as a whole — religion, principles, educational curriculum and social system — responsible for what happened. It was as though the Ummah is one giant factory churning out terrorism and terrorists.

Even relief organizations, charities and donation boxes for orphans, widows, the sick, the retarded, charities teaching the Qur’an and schools to combat illiteracy were treated as if they were entities eagerly funding terrorism and creating killers. Or so the world was told by a merciless and fanatical Zionist campaign that trampled on all international laws, ignored all the rules of justice, human rights and requirements of law.

Well, Mr. Bush, can you now, from the depths of the Iraqi swamp, comprehend that the participants in the New York attacks don’t represent the Saudi people and that others of their ilk who have turned to terrorism don’t represent Arabs and Muslims? Can you curb the unruly extremist Zionist clique that rules in your name and stop the mad plans and policies that have only earned you and your country the hatred of the whole world, even of your closest allies, and made the world more dangerous than it ever was before? Have you, Mr. President, retained for yourself and your people any principles beyond the total and blind support for the war criminal Sharon, who has been condemned and denounced even by his own people — judges, politicians and military men?