Who did the torture serve?

In the chapter on South Africa, 'Democracy Born in Chains', in Naomi Klein's book, 'The Shock Doctrine' one of the jurors on South Africa's "Truth and Reconciliation Commission", the later Head of "South Africa's Foundation for Human Rights", Yasmin Sooka, concludes that "when you focus on torture and you don't look at what it was serving, that's when you start to do a revision of the real history." In a sense it was an expression of her frustration at big business not being held to account for the crimes of apartheid.

The latest revelations from 'Wikileaks' on the Iraq war are to be welcomed as they provide us with further documented evidence of war crimes. However, that should not stop us from looking at what that torture was serving. This was an illegal war that was part of a pre-existing strategy to secure US control of the world's oil supplies and hand over control of the economy to the disaster capitalists . When this strategy has been pursued anywhere torture and the illegal slaughter of innocents are, if not incidental, almost inevitable.

Therefore, although torture, the slaughter of innocents, the looting of the Iraqi economy and the destruction of Iraqi society are all very real crimes, we are still left looking at what or who those crimes served. It is when we do that we can turn our attention to the real criminals, to big business, to big oil, and to the 'Chicago Boys' and the greedy, seedy, politicians who serve them. If we can do this and if we can get just one or two of them in front of the ICC in the Hague, there might be hope. Nevertheless, we would be more than a trifle naive if we expected to that to happen. No, there will be no such questions and most certainly no confession on what this war really served. After all, that really would threaten to put an end to their "little game".