Well I’ve been wanting to say something about this whole Abu Ghraib “prison abuse” (torture) scandal for a while, but what exactly can you say that is not obvious or that has not already been said by some other asshole? Well, hopefully I’ll come up with a few things.
First off, let’s get this out of the way: NO FUCKING WAY is this just the work of six or seven numbnuts soldiers. Yes, those people are scumbags who clearly enjoyed what they were doing and should go to (regular) jail for following unlawful orders. But I’m sorry, I’m not a fucking retard, I’m not buying this bullshit. No bottom of the totem pole grunt is going to be stacking up naked prisoners, raping people with glowsticks, setting dogs on people, attaching wires to people’s dicks AND posing for hilarious novelty photos next to the victim, if they are worried they might be found out. These people were comfortable. There were apparently intelligence people shown in at least one photo, and there were CIA people at the prison. I wonder which one of these six acting alone bad apples brought along the electrodes, hoods, whips and chains? And how did they know so much about the best ways to humiliate Arabs?
Sure enough we now find out from Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker and somebody else in Newsweek that this was an extension of a secret program of torture and sexual humiliation that was being used against terrorists in Afghanistan, now being offered for the average Iraqi on the go swept up at random and locked up for months without recourse. It’s a program signed off on by everybody going all the way up to the number 2 man, Bush, designed to get information out of high risk terrorists but used on old ladies who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when we invaded the wrong country for the wrong reasons. Welcome to democratic Iraq.
Clearly this is what was expected to go on there and a lot of people had no problem with it. Rumsfeld was very telling in his testimony when he seemed to have no idea that the actual torture, raping of children, etc. was the problem. He thought the problem was that there were photos. That was all he kept going on about. “Yes, I knew this was going on but it’s not my fault, because I hadn’t SEEN the photos.” Of course, there were already reports by the Red Cross and if you’ve been paying attention there was even a story in the AP long ago interviewing former prisoners about the atrocities going on there. So once again we have that wonderful choice: we have to either believe our leaders are completely inept and don’t even read the fucking newspaper let alone follow up on reports, or (more likely) that they just didn’t care. (more…)
