Bu-lat-lat (boo-lat-lat) verb: to search, probe, investigate, inquire; to unearth facts Volume IV, Number 14 May 9 - 15, 2004 Quezon City, Philippines |
Torture,
Incorporated By
VIRGINIA TILLEY
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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-i.e., 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, NY. She can be reached at: tilley@hws.edu
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