Ashoke Dasgupta is a Winnipeg based freelance journalist who recently won first prize from the Canadian Ethnic Journalists and Writers Club in Features/News category.

"Our military is performing brilliantly. See, the transition from torture chambers and rape rooms and mass graves and fear of authority is a tough transition. And they're doing the good work of keeping this country stabilized as a political process unfolds."-Bush, remarks on "Tax Relief and the Economy," Iowa, April 15 2004.

I admired America till the 1971 Bangladesh War, which brought the moral bankruptcy of US governments representing an embittered, defeated white middle-class home to me. Consequently the recent pictures of Anglo-American atrocities, triggered by the failure of a prevaricating leadership, did not surprise me as much as they may otherwise have.

Pictures and estimates of the US-backed genocide of 200,000 to a million East Pakistanis by West Pakistanis may be viewed at www.virtualbangladesh.com; Archer Blood, then US consul general in Dacca, telegraphed Washington on April 6 1971, denouncing the US government's complicity in the genocide: " . . . WE HAVE CHOSEN NOT TO INTERVENE, EVEN MORALLY, ON THE GROUNDS THAT THE . . . CONFLICT, IN WHICH THE . . . TERM GENOCIDE IS APPLICABLE, IS PURELY AN INTERNAL MATTER OF A SOVEREIGN STATE

When I immigrated to Canada six years ago, I was not impressed to hear that some Americans think they ought to invade this country for its water and other resources. Canadians may be willing to humour their neighbours, but the images of British and American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners will justify Iraqi resistance further and swell its ranks, as well as those of its sympathizers. They are the underdogs in what has proved a grossly illegal, unjustified and unfair fight from the start.

As yet there is no mention of a reward or promotion for the whistle-blower, to whom the cause of truth owes much.

US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld says he was already aware of more shocking photos than those made public till now, and his President has no intention of dismissing him. Since the photos in Rumsfeld's private collection include those of rape and murder, it may be inferred that the torture of prisoners will be an ongoing aspect of US policy in Iraq, Guantanamo, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

It is not a one-off, as the Pentagon is saying about the Abu Ghraib Prison abuses, though Rumsfeld may only be concerned about the cases for which photographic evidence exists, and which may yet come to light.

Rumsfeld, Bush, Blair & Co. probably ordered these abuses, yet are in the unfortunate position of presenting themselves as the forces of decency, heroically pitted against those of evil. This position was never tenable, and is even less so now, but they may be expected do their best to protect each other as events unfold. Bush claiming ignorance of all Rumsfeld knew is analogous to Pakistan's Musharraf claiming ignorance of all Dr. A Q Khan knew.

Since Rumsfeld did not respond to warnings from Amnesty and the Red Cross, the perennially epic struggle of a good west versus an evil east seems to have blown up in the propagandists' faces, although myths like the Japanese being a cruel race die hard.

The White House would have been unlikely to expose these abuses had "Sixty Minutes" not done so on April 28. The US government smells money to be made in Iraq, but the beheading of an American may indicate the resistance is determined to keep Anglo-American carpetbaggers from cashing in if the videotape showing it is authentic.

Bush has stated that the guards' treatment of prisoners did not "reflect the nature of the American people," inadvertently highlighting the hypocrisy of American society, the essential heroism of which moviegoers are regularly carpet-bombed with via repeated releases of historically inaccurate productions like "The Alamo." The hapless Americans there held out because they were expecting to be relieved and Mexicans, the only ones who lived to tell the tale, say some begged for their lives before being put to the sword.

Be that as it may, the involvement of private security contractors in the management of coalition prisons and interrogations may be expected to increase in the hope that the US army can yet return to its Time magazine "man of the year" image, fooling some of the people. Private contractors are the most bullish segment of the US military-industrial complex so far.

A Red Cross report says the abuses have been widespread and routine, while US President "Jaws" Bush insists his Defence Secretary is doing a superb job. That probably means the main change may be that cameras are no longer be allowed into these torture chambers, except when toted by hand-picked journalists who are not part of the thickening global communist plot.

Efforts to outsource the real fighting at the ground level may also grow more creative. Trig Guardforce, an Indian firm with a large database of retired defence personnel, has been approached by middlemen for a formal tie-up with a US security company active in Iraq. Like all outsourcing, it is also good for the bottom line because it offers Indians lower salaries than Americans, which may not deter relatively less well-off Indians from applying. Batches of recruits go to Kuwait in chartered flights to enter Iraq by bus, escorted by agents of US contractors with special passes to clear the checkposts. The operation is carried out with the full knowledge of the Kuwaiti authorities, and another point of entry is through Jordan. The people of India, Canada or other countries are no holier than citizens of the US and UK, since "the third degree" is a common interrogation technique in police stations around the world. The outsourcing of warfighting, as opposed to warbombing with impunity, has colonial origins. About 8000 Indian troops died at the Battle of Kut in Iraq around 1915, for example. They had to be sacrificed because the British Empire had had the stuffing kicked out of it at Gallipoli, and their War Office badly needed some favourable propaganda. Why am I not surprised that India was not eager to prove what a good boy it was on being asked to help in Iraq 88 years later? It was always part of the imperial mindset that, as long as people of other countries [of non-European descent] are suffering or dying, it doesn't really matter.

The photos taken in the Abu Ghraib Prison reminded me of holocaust pictures. In both cases they were probably taken, and the atrocities performed, because the captors did not expect any of their captives to ever live free again.

When I consider the public abuse of the charred corpses of four American security contractors killed in Fallujah in the light of the images of British-American torture visited on Iraqis, I am not surprised that these characters, often from the lowest social and economic classes, are detested by the public and not only in Iraq.

The Iraqi people have suffered a great deal, a million and a half killed by sanctions sponsored by the US and UK before the latter plucked up the courage to invade. Obviously, they would not have done so if those countries' leaders believed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The US seems to have gained a Pyrrhic victory in Iraq which bodes ill for the world and its economy, partly because of the massive economic deficits incurred in doing so.

Since the UN seems powerless to punish the US&K, its moral authority and effectiveness have been irrevocably lost. Hence Iraq's only hope seems to be the indomitable spirit once shown by Vietnamese peasants against ruthless neo-imperialist leaders.