THE whole world can now contrast, at its leisure, the treatment of Iraqi prisoners held by the US at Abu Ghraib with that of the 15 British naval prisoners of the Iranian revolutionary guards, as advised by one of the prisoners, Leading Seaman Turney.
In fact, the comparison can be made even more exact if it is extended to atrocities much closer to home. The treatment of the British prisoners at the hands of the Revolutionary Guards should be contrasted to the treatment of Baha Mousa, the Basra hotel worker who died in British custody from 94 wounds on his body after being treated as a human football for 24 hours.
As the judge remarked at the court martial of a number of British troops, where nobody was found guilty of that crime, there had been a conspiracy of silence after the British army closed ranks to prevent justice being done.
The members of the alleged ‘axis of evil’ have been seen to be civilised and humane, while the alleged democratic liberators of the Iraqi and now the Iranian peoples have exposed themselves as brutal profiteers who will stop at nothing to get their hands on the Gulf’s oil and gas resources, including covering up soldiers they have brutalised.
It is the supreme arrogance of the ruling class and its servants in the state and the bourgeois media that prevents it from understanding that British soldiers are not just stupid cannon fodder, and that they see and understand what is taking place in the Gulf and in Iraq.
They do not have to be forced by Iranians to write the truth about this situation, they recognise imperialist murder and repression when they see it.
Many thousands of UK troops have witnessed the mass murder, starvation, squalor and murderous sectarianism that the ‘democratic liberators’ Bush and Blair have brought to Iraq.
On Wednesday, the imperialist trained police force, under the control of the ‘democratic’ leaders and their puppet government killed seventy Sunni people in Tal Afar in cold blood, just after President Bush had hailed it as a model town.
Even the puppet Iraqi government has had to confirm that its new police force trained by the imperialists is at the forefront of torture and sectarian killings.
At the same time, the militias of the governing parties, parties installed in power by the ‘democratic leaders’ Bush and Blair, have their own torture chamber under the government buildings that they control where they beat, cut, and drill into the bodies of their victims.
British and US troops know the living hell that the US and the UK regimes have created in Iraq.
They are shocked and shaken by it to the extent that many return with life-long mental problems.
The democratic slaughter has now reached the point where even a US stooge, such as King Abdullah, of Saudi Arabia, referred to the occupation of Iraq by his British and US allies as an ‘illegal occupation’ which must be put an end to, at the Riyadh summit.
It is an insult to British soldiers to state that they are incapable of seeing and writing about the truth for themselves and have to have it dictated to them by Iranians.
British soldiers and sailors know that they are expendable cannon fodder as far as the British ruling class is concerned.
Even the fellow members of the UN Security Council were not prepared to vote for a British resolution saying that the arrested sailors were in a craft in Iraqi territory, and refused to call for the immediate release of the 15 sailors.
British and US imperialism are not trusted anywhere.
Leading Seaman Turney is right. it is high time that British and US troops were withdrawn from Iraq, and for British and US imperialism to cease its repressive behaviour.
In fact, the whole of the British working class must support her stand and fight for a withdrawal of all troops from Iraq and the Gulf now.