BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Monday, May 03, 2004
THE HORROR. Thirty-four
years ago Seymour Hersh won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing atrocities
committed by American soldiers in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.
Today he's front-and-center on another horror story involving US
forces - this one involving the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu
Ghraib, Saddam Hussein's former torture center.
The details of the story were first
reported
last week by CBS's 60 Minutes II. Hersh has additional
information in the current
New Yorker on the conclusions of an investigation conducted by
General Antonio Taguba. This is sickening, disgusting stuff - Iraqi
prisoners forced to strip naked and simulate sex with each other,
raped with broom sticks, ordered to masturbate in front of female
American soldiers.
Was it an isolated event? Not
likely. Hersh writes:
As the international furor
grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that
the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military
as a whole. Taguba's report, however, amounts to an unsparing
study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership
at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one
in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were
routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management
of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units
and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and
getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was
the priority.
The New Yorker's website
also includes 10
photos of the torture
taking place. Sadly, the Americans depicted in these photos are
obviously enjoying themselves.
So how many future terrorists have
we created? Hersh again:
Such dehumanization is
unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab
world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is
humiliating for men to be naked in front of other men, Bernard
Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at New York
University, explained. "Being put on top of each other and forced
to masturbate, being naked in front of each other - it's all a
form of torture," Haykel said.
A New York Times
editorial
today also takes note of reports that British soldiers, too, have
tortured Iraqi prisoners. The editorial concludes:
Terrorists like Osama bin
Laden have always intended to use their violence to prod the
United States and its allies into demonstrating that their worst
anti-American propaganda was true. Abu Ghraib was an enormous
victory for them, and it is unlikely that any response by the Bush
administration will wipe its stain from the minds of Arabs. The
invasion of Iraq, which has already begun to seem like a bad dream
in so many ways, cannot get much more nightmarish than
this.
Liberal supporters of the war in Iraq
such as Times columnist Thomas Friedman have argued
that the war was justified because we needed to puncture the bubble
of Arab-American terrorism by building a decent, stable society in
the heart of the Middle East. It's a seductive
proposition.
But as the horrors of Abu Ghraib
show, Tom Friedman was not in charge of the war; and in any event,
war against and occupation of a country that was no threat to us is
no way to achieve some idealistic vision of American-imposed
democracy.
The world can be a pretty ugly
place. The White House utopian dreams have made it quite a bit
uglier.
posted at 9:22 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
