[A-List] Torture, Incorporated

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Let the Wall of Silence Fall

by Virginia Tilley

Counterpunch (May 03 2004)

The hooded figure stands Christ-like, arms out, frozen in place by the
snaking wires that he was told would kill him if his bare feet left the
small box on which he is poised.  Chosen for publicity because his
nakedness is actually covered with some filthy rag, he is emblazoned on
every newspaper in the world.  Other photos are worse: a mound of naked
men, obscenely intertwined for laughing torturers; leering American
soldiers pointing imaginary weapons at prisoners' genitals. And those
not published are even worse: men forced to simulate sex acts with each
other, or to masturbate before their guards.  Staring at these images,
an entire aghast international community recalls dehumanizations pursued
by the worst regimes in history.  Arab-Muslim sensitivities to nakedness
give these scenes - flanked by the leering female US soldier - an
additional dimension of shame and horror.  But what exactly does this
faceless man symbolize-besides the moral rot filtering through the
foundations of the US occupation?

The whole package of abuse in Abu Ghuraib Prison is being soothingly
denounced by US generals and the Bush administration as an "aberration".
Hence we have just one mealy line from Bush: that he is "deeply offended"
but certain that "this is not who we are" - as though we have been
attacked by outsiders.  For admitting that the US occupation truly
commanded these things would instantly discredit our claim to bring
enlightenment to the benighted Arab world.  Worse, admitting that what
we do is part of who we are would undermine Bush's divinely charged
vision in our inherent cultural superiority, which - in his colonial
mind - legitimizes our grant mission to enlighten the world.  But in
posturing this indignant denial, the Bush administration is lying, again.
They knew, months ago, that trouble was up.  And they knew that it went
deeper than the few soldiers in these photos, now being scape-goated.

The US crimes in Abu Ghuraib Prison were not at all aberrant.  For one
thing, torture and abuse of prisoners has been happening at US detention
centers all over Iraq, and were happening while General Kimmitt - who
knew about them months ago - angrily affirmed to journalists and the US
public the fine upstanding character of the US military.  More
importantly, as Seymour Hersh has recently exposed, the actions of these
grinning soldiers reflected their obedience to orders by the
intelligence services, and implemented partly by private contractors, to
use shame and terror on random prisoners in the hope of extracting
information.  The rot did not stem from a few young soldiers left to
their own devices; it was embedded in an occupation ill-designed, poorly
run, and poorly supervised, which allowed a hidden intelligence process
to spin wildly away from the laws of war and violate all moral standards
shared by the international community.

Nor is that program itself aberrant, a peculiar twist of criminal
behavior arising from a hidden intelligence apparatus.  Sloppy
supervising, insufficient staffing and inexperienced soldiers have been
generating a whole host of country-wide abuses, documented and denounced
by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which are heavily
responsible for that rising Iraqi anger and hatred which the Bush
administration tries to blame on "foreign agitators" and al-Qaida.
Thousands of suspects are being held without trial, suspects are
routinely beaten, soldiers shoot civilians - accidentally, or
accidentally-on-purpose - with impunity at checkpoints, in searches, and
in firefights.  The lack of rules - or enforcement of rules, or
knowledge or respect of the rules of war - is endemic.  The whole Iraq
theater is collapsing in a lethal interplay of US arrogance and
incompetence, ad-hoc decision-making steered by hard-line logics, and a
casual disdain for international standards which leaves the military
rudderless in Fallujah and Najaf.  The plumes of flame rising from
Fallujah indicate a military in charge of itself; thrashing efforts to
disengage - an old Saddam-era general briefly resurrected and as quickly
cast aside - reveal the US government as a headless octopus.  Long lost
is the old adage that war is too important to be left to the generals:
there is no civilian authority - that is, a capable president -
containing them.

The US population has been dangerously insulated from the crimes in Iraq,
and remains insulated by top-level denial that these latest terrible
photos signal anything substantial about the occupation.  In an
especially insidious twist, the Bush administration has been playing on
Vietnam syndrome in holding any critical regard of our soldiers as
unpatriotic: consequently, the media and much of the country has
absorbed a collective decision to lavish only praise, to "support our
fine men and women" who are doing a "fabulous job" and "deserve our
support".  Yet that ethos, generous in spirit, has translated into a
wall of silence which has fostered rampant ignorance about
Iraqi-civilian suffering at US hands and the implications of these
abuses for the US role, and has forestalled any sober collective effort
to correct them.  Hence the relatively muted US response to these
dreadful photos reflects a great national confusion and in-drawing of
breath, as the population is confronted by photos which are, to many
sheltered people, so unexplainable, and whose very discussion has no
moral standing in the current national climate - except to reject as an
aberration.

Instead of absorbing that a moral rot pervades the occupation, the US
population is therefore likely to find baffling, extremist or even
absurd the scandalized reactions of the Arab world and in Europe, for
whom the photos are the US occupation's moral death-knell.  For of
course, as an aberration, these crimes imply nothing about our larger
mission and certainly not our culture, right?  The irony here is that,
if these photos had instead portrayed American soldiers abused in some
Arab prison, screaming right-wing US media would have waved them as
substantiating every racist claim of inherent Arab depravity.  On Fox
News, ranks of flunky intellectuals would have soberly propounded the
social-psychological violence inherent in Muslim theology and the "Arab
mind"; tears of patriotic passion would have celebrated US military
might as the golden force opposing the dark ferocity of the savage Arab
masses.  Feeble liberal protest - that it is wrong to extrapolate from
one prison policy to a whole culture - would have been derided and
silenced.  And high-minded speeches would have emerged from the White
House, mustering US patriotic zeal to combat these forces of evil which
produced such an outrage.  Yet when others launch similar stereotyping
distortions of us, we claim the high ground: those ignorant savage Arabs,
we sneer, with no conception of our culture.  How gullible and backward
they are, to fail to grasp the truth and be so enflamed.  It must be
al-Jazeera's fault.

This scandal itself, however, does present an opportunity stemming from
one genuine difference between the old and new regimes in Iraq.  The
photos are glaringly reminiscent of practices under Saddam Hussein, but
the publicity is not.  It was US soldiers who gamboled around naked
terrified prisoners and snapped pictures of their own broad grins; it
was other soldiers who were able to leak the photos to press outlets
quick to print them and engage a horrified international community.
Seymour Hersh has put the pieces together; the fuller story is coming
out.  Human progress is defined by such shaky remedial measures to limit
barbarism, and, for all their hypocrisy and self-delusions, the Western
democracies can be recognized for their weak and flawed struggles toward
confronting their own repeated failures.

Let this revelation impel one of those nobler collective efforts; let
the wall of silence fall.

Virginia Tilley is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Hobart
and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.

http://www.counterpunch.org/tilley05032004.html

Please also see:

"Torture: Simply the spoils of victory?" by Kevin Toolis, New Statesman
Coverstory (May 10 2004)
http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSTemplate_NS&newTop=Section%3A+Front+Page&newDisplayURN=Section%3A+Front+Page

"Who should we believe?" by Stephen Grey, New Statesman (May 10 2004)
http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newDisplayURN=200405100003

"The Good Guys Who Can Do No Wrong" by Robert Fisk,
CounterPunch (May 1-3 2004)
http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk05022004.html

"An Army Vet on Prisoner Torture in Iraq: Abu Ghraib as My Lai?"
by Diane Rejman, CounterPunch (May 01-03 2004)
http://www.counterpunch.com/rejman05012004.html

"Lawyers Say Post-9/11 US is like Police State" by Jim Nichols,
Cleveland Plain Dealer (May 01 2004)
http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/108341175 0274472.xml