Iraq : Think nothing can shock you anymore? – Try this

November 1995 – New York Times Iraq Sanctions Kill Children, U.N. Reports UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 30—

As many as 576,000 Iraqi children may have died since the end of the Persian Gulf war because of economic sanctions imposed by the Security Council, according to two scientists who surveyed the country for the Food and Agriculture Organization.

The study also found steeply rising malnutrition among the young, suggesting that more children will be at risk in the coming years. The results of the survey will appear on Friday in The Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Association.

That was over 20 years ago. Today, including sanctions and the Bush/Blair attack of Iraq landmark research proves that the US-led ‘war on terror’ has killed much higher numbers than previously reported. Counting in Afghanistan and the sanctions prior to the so-called War-on-Terror the horrifying number of fatalities is concluded at somewhere over six million.

In this environment, drone attacks and state sponsored murder such as is extrajudicial executions carried out by the USA and more recently the UK have followed on from truly appalling evidence of coalition abuse of torture and abuse of prisoners, much of it so bad the public were excluded from viewing an orgy of depravity via heavily redacted documents. Read The Torture Report or the first pages of the Senate Intelligence Committee REPORT for some truly shocking facts or indeed “US Stalling Release Of Thousands Of Torture Photos Worse Than Abu Ghraib” by MintPress.

Around the world, in secret detention centres, the United States assisted by Britain, was, and still is, brutalising Muslim detainees in the name of the war on terror. These reports graphically demonstrate nothing but another bloody stain on what was supposed to be a model to the world of justice. You would think all citizens of America and Britain would have insisted that individuals involved in such acts of wanton barbarity would have been brought to a court of justice in shackles.

Far from it. Soon your kids will be able to play the video game. Yes, that’s right, a game to do exactly what these reports have gone to such lengths to condemn.

A team of video-game designers have been working for the last two years on perfecting a more visceral way of experiencing horrifying modern day torture techniques as adopted in US prisons such as Abu Ghraib. The idea is to bring players “uncomfortably close to the abuses that took place in one particularly infamous prison camp.”

The Atlantic reports that “In the game, which is still in development, players assume the role of an American service member stationed at Camp Bucca, a detention center that was located near the port city of Umm Qasr in southeast Iraq, at an undetermined time during the Iraq War. Throughout the game, players interact with Iraqi prisoners, who are clothed in the camp’s trademark yellow jumpsuits and occasionally have black hoods pulled over their heads. The player must interrogate the prisoners, choosing between methods like waterboarding or electrocution to extract information. If an interrogation goes too far, the questioner can kill the prisoner.”

The developers relied upon actual allegations of the abuse suffered by prisoners in archived news articles and a leaked Red Cross report to assist in the design of the game.

Accordingly, the developers say they chose to have the player grapple with life-like assignments to experience the role of American prison camps in Iraq that ends with the radicalisation of the next generation of fighters and terrorists in the form of ISIS from where so much death and destruction has emanated.

The Atlantic interviewed the game designers and finally reported that the team were “Worried for their safety if their names were associated with what’s likely to be a controversial video game, the designers, a group of five graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University and New York University, asked to remain anonymous in this story.”

The fact that the US and UK discarded the United Nations Convention against Torture to prove its case for going to war in the first place should not allow for the sanitising of such horrific and brutal abuses via a video game to be somehow enjoyed, especially as torture victims continue in their struggle against a justice system that denies them exactly that – justice.

The Atlantic seem to have trivialised the story by turning torture into an interesting read with contributors and experts enthusiastic about realism and ensuring a good game player experience with their advice. The reality is that torture is no better than rape, paedophilia, murder or any other heinous crime that only the sick minded, psychotic and insane would somehow find gratifying.

Instead of simply profiting from the inflicted life-long pain of others, these students need help.

truepublica.org.uk

 

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