| The Allied Governments are fortunate that Lord Russell of Liverpool is not alive to document their atrocities in Iraq. Edward Russell, later Baron Russell of Liverpool, was a soldier, a military lawyer and later, combining these skills, he compiled a damning indictment of the brutality of the Axis Powers – Germany and Japan - during the Second World War. His book on the Nazi crimes against humanity was published in 1954 under the title The Scourge of the Swastika, followed a few years later by a companion volume on the Japanese atrocities in the East titled The Knights of the Bushido. Had Lord Russell been alive, he would found it difficult to resist completing a hat-trick with a third volume, this time on the unspeakable, indefensible behaviour of the Allied troops against their Iraqi captives. |
| The pictorial disclosures during the past few days in The New Yorker magazine and in Britain’s The Daily Mirror newspaper have been an assault on the senses of every decent-minded human being, whichever side of the Iraqi divide they happen to be on. The cumulative effect of each horrific image, piled one on top of the other, like the naked Iraqi prisoners forced to create a human pyramid for their captors to surmount, has been to release a reservoir of revulsion against a war that had no cause, and brutality shown to defenceless prisoners that has no precedent, except during the days of the Nazis and their infamous concentration camps. [EXTRACT] |
| Published in DAWN 11 May 2004, and reprinted in WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE & OTHER WRITINGS (2006). |
|
