The perception of the victims, their families, their people, their fellow believers, and their nation is that degradation of Iraqi prisoners is the technique authorized and approved by the highest levels of power and executed by the terror experts, from elite psychologists down to the lowest jailers. Nobody can claim, “they didn’t know”. Nobody, in a volunteer army, can claim they were just obeying orders. Citizens in electoral systems who voted for the imperial executioners cannot claim innocence.
The technique of degradation: The larger meaning
The book of virtuous living for the Islamist and even, to a lesser degree, the secularist is the Koran. It is the “divine book”, which provides a moral guide and existential meaning to life. The torturers defecated and urinated on the Koran. They stomped on the Koran with muddy army boots. They flushed pages, held most sacred by the victims, down the toilet. They violated the most sacred single source of moral life.
The torturers systematically denied their victims water to clean themselves before prayer. Instead they defiled them with filth, scantily clad female interrogators smeared fake ‘menstrual’ blood on bound prisoners, forced them to defecate on themselves and ridiculed their victims’ intense religious distress. They violated every taboo, every norm, including the deepest held moral codes. They forced (and photographed) deviant sex, prolonged nudity, raped men and women with cattle prods and other torture devices. They wrapped prisoners in the Israeli flag.
Such humiliating techniques have lifetime psychological consequences preventing the victims from ever marrying and maintaining normal family relations. The torturers specifically told their victims that the films and photos of their degradation would be shown to their families and neighbors to intensify the anguish after their release. The torture techniques specifically focused on Moslems and Arabs, but in general defiling all normal men and women’s sense of modesty. They used gross sexual humiliation designed to break all political bonds between the colonized people and the degraded victims. Women prisoners in Abu Ghraib reportedly sent out messages begging the resistance to kill them in their cells by mortar attacks. Mosques were destroyed or turned into slaughterhouses; wounded men huddled in the sacred halls were executed at point blank range.
The AA political leaders promoted Christian evangelical military chaplains who incited the executioners to “fight Satan” as they encircled and destroyed the city of Fallujah.
Jewish and Christian “terror experts” (often in the behavioral sciences) provided the emotional vitriol in pseudo-scientific jargon by transposing the psychopathic behavior of the executioners to the victims. The political psychologists as war criminals …as creators of the Suicide Bombers…
Political consequences of defiling the sacred
The profound systematic effects of “total war” and its derivative defilement of the sacred has far-reaching effects on Muslims and Arabs, including secularists, in terms of geography, political practice, intensity of reflection and feeling about the practitioners, their government and their “civilization”. The impact of defacing the sacred is strongest on those collectivities, which share the same ethnic, religious and cultural values as those who are violated. The degradation of the sacred texts and religious sanctuaries impinge on the spiritual and physical existence of the groups and individuals whose lives have been guided by the defiled texts. The message relayed to millions by the torturers and their leaders is that ‘nothing is sacred’ – everything and everybody is equally an acceptable instrument for conquest, domination and control. The whole process of degradation from the indiscriminant bombing of civilian communities, to the usurpation of public space, to the pillage of a cultural heritage, to the arbitrary arrest and assassination of passersby, culminates in utter depravity or literally turning the spiritual symbols and texts and moral guides into trash.
The denial of what is sacred to the oppressed is inherent to the process of creating a hierarchical chain – the greater the degradation of the “other” the greater the power and self-esteem of the torturers. The lower the stature of the torturers – (those who, outside the torture chambers, have no access to the real spoils of conquest, the war profiteering, the “reconstruction” racket or the military officers who can “cream” the contracts) – the greater the inducement to achieve “superiority” (symbolic rewards) by debasing the shackled and manacled, the naked and the humiliated, to please their superiors with tidbits of irrelevant “intelligence”. Much of this is documented in General Antonio Taguba’s report.
The chain of command dictates the license to torture; the word of the imperial executive informs the practitioners of degradation. The celebrants of imperial “Judeo-Christian” values flaunt their impunity in the security of their technological and military might. The “special people”, the chosen nations, aggravate the experience of degradation. Imagine Rumsfeld and other officials and senators reviewing General Taguba’s report describing the young son of an Iraqi Army officer stripped, smeared with filth and abused before his captive father (Seymour Hersch describes the shrieks of young boys being raped) — and projecting their own perversities on to the victimized people.
