When I first saw the images and read Seymour Hersh’s now-legendary article describing in horrible and terrifying detail the barbarous practices that some members of the US military were carrying out on Iraqi prisoners– acts which were carried out, as we now know and many of us even then suspected, under the direct supervision of military intelligence and with the tacit, if not explicit, authorization of some of the highest-level commanders in the military chain—I felt quite literally ill.
My most immediate reaction, as I recall, was the thought that this was IT; the end of the war as well as the Bush administration and everything that it stood for. I felt absolutely certain that a nation like the US, which had experienced the agonies and the brutalities of Vietnam only a generation or so previously and which withdrew troops from Somalia because it supposedly “could not tolerate civilian casualties”, would have had more than its fill of crude violence and wanton killing in the name of “nation building”. Boy, was I wrong!!
My next sensation was one of deep shame and depression to the point of nihilism. I kept looking at those photographs and every time I looked my flesh creeped and my skin burned with humiliation at the callousness and sadism of Lyndie England and her fellow troopers.
Now I have never been a naive person. I consider myself fairly well-read in history and I am well-aware of the profound savagery that human nature is capable of, as illustrated precisly in that history. But was this really happening now, in Iraq, during an alleged mission of liberation and democracy-building? As an expatriate, how could I continue to hold my head up and look in the faces of the Italians around me who had been seeing the same images and hearing the same shocking stories repeatedly in the media. It was hard to miss the disgust and disdain in their eyes as I passed by the local newstand to pick up a newspaper or an icecream. I wanted to disappear down a hole and come back when this thing had passed over.
It has now been a year since those photographs were published and the news of those shocking events was revealed to the eyes of the world. During that time, Bush was reelected President of the United States and the war has continued to rage with no end in sight.
I’ve often wondered if those Americans who supported the war have not at last moderated their enthusiasm for the blood-letting and outrageous violation of human rights that have been indissolubly associated with it.
Then, this morning I wake up and read this:
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[M]ake no mistake about it, they are celebrating this. I just want to warn you, by the time you get to the afternoon shows on cable, and the nighttime shows on cable, Abu Ghraib will be portrayed as if it happened yesterday. We will be getting retrospectives. They will show us the pictures again, and they will go through all of the people they think personally ordered it from Alberto Gonzalez to George W. Bush. I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to revive the National Guard story within some context with this. But, it’s just so illustrative. In fact, Mary Mapes was the producer of the Abu Ghraib story. It was Mary Mapes who got the Abu Ghraib pictures. Somebody in the Defense Department leaked them to her. It was the same show, 60 Minutes Wednesday that ran the first pictures, and the New York Times caught up with it and bammo! They were out on the blocks with it. And so, you’re going to see media celebration today with the sad one year anniversary of Abu Ghraib.
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CALLER: Just to keep you with the season, I want to wish you a Happy Abu Ghraib. And I apologize that I didn’t get my Abu Ghraib present in the mail. I was wondering what I could get you for Abu Ghraib this year and how are you going to decorate your Abu Ghraib tree sir?
RUSH: You want to know what to get me for Abu Ghraib? You know what? That is a good question. I don’t really want anything for Abu Ghraib. The Democrats, that is who we need to get presents for. One thing, have you thought about handcuffs? Those have multiple uses for Democrats. A whip. You know, to go along with the handcuffs. Dawn says a good present would be to give a Democrat a digital camera so that he or she can document their own atrocities. All you have to take it to a Madonna concert. You got the whips, and the handcuffs and chains right there on stage and people are paying for this.
CALLER: They may have military intelligence, Rush. Who knows?
RUSH: That is a great question. What kind of gift to give Democrats here on the anniversary of Abu Ghraib. I’m glad you called, Christopher.
We’ll think of more as they, as they come up. You know, you might give them a little pyramid game, something that is in the shape of a pyramid. Wire tap kit. Could borrow that. Ted, actually could borrow one from Raymond Reggie, a wire tap kit. What else? Autographed picture of Mary Mapes. Boy, if you could score, come up with an autograph of Mary Mapes, she’s the mother of the Abu Ghraib scandal. Jumper cables. A pair of jumper cables–superb idea, Mr. Maimone. And these are things we all have lying around the house, folks. Just get rid of it. It is junk. Give them a German shepherd. Oh, yeah, a German shepherd dog, little German shepherd puppy. You can train yourself.
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It is Abu Ghraib Day. Senator Kennedy issued a statement, Democrats celebrating the one year anniversary of the Abu Ghraib scandal. I don’t know how I forgot this. Obviously, at the top of the gift list has to be women’s underwear. Remember, women’s underwear was put on the heads of Islamic prisoners to humiliate them. Democrats found this totally objectionable, can’t believe it. Another thing, remember all of the pictures of Abu Ghraib prisoners with bags on their heads, with eye holes cut out. Give them some of those. Those are cheap. Go to the grocery store, get groceries, then give them the empty bags with the eye holes cut out favorite liberal Democrat, that as well as handcuffs. The bag for the head has a series of uses for liberal Democrats as well. Then, of course, there is a leash. A leash can be found at any pet store and it goes along with the German Shepherd that you are going to give away to a democrat here as they celebrate the one year anniversary of Abu Ghraib Day. Kevin in Eugene, Oregon. Hello and welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: How you doing Rush?
RUSH: Pretty good, Kevin.
CALLER: Love to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I just want you to know that we are going to have our Abu Ghraib barbecue party tonight and we are going to be playing nude Twister.
RUSH: (Laughing.) How many people you got coming?
CALLER: Well, I figure we only need 8 or 10 to make it a rip roaring time. I thought that would be kind of fitting.
RUSH: Yeah. Nude Twister? Big Abu Ghraib barbecue. (Laughter.) Okay. And that’s from Oregon. Progress here.
And possibly my favorite “joke” of all:
You know, the Democrats today celebrating the one year anniversary of Abu Ghraib. Now you have to be very careful about how far they take this. I mean, it is one thing to start giving them gifts. We forgot, a water board would be a great gift. For some libs, if you could find a naked Iraqi inflatable insurgent doll that would be a thrill.
I just don’t know what to make of this sort of thing anymore.
when I’ve seen so much naked cynicism and base political pandering in my life.
Sen. Kennedy acknowledges the horrible stain on US history that Abu Ghraib was and is, and it’s dismissed as a ploy to get votes.
Oh no! Someone dared to suggest that the way that Americans treat prisoners is inhumane in a class with the world’s worst criminal dictators. They are just as barbaric and indefensible, though their crimes may be numerically less severe. So far.
Rush will dismiss it as a political ploy? A CELEBRATION? Fuck him. Someone should be running on the promise that Americans will no longer perpetrate abuses like that.
By saying Democrats are out of step Rush implicitly implies that all Americans are torture apologists.
Rush is celebrating Abu Ghraib and torture by saying that no one should condemn these abuses. I’ll say it again: FUCK HIM!
hit it right on the head. Not that understading Clownbaugh requires deep logical anaylis, for god’s sake.
He’s saying that the majority of Americans agree with him that this is, as he called it last year, “a friendly fraternity gag” or soemthing like that.
Now he takes it a step further and makes fun of all the people who take the issue seriosly as well as the event itself…
I know it’s charactertic of him, but that doens’t make it any the less repulsive!!!
I move Rush volunteers to be waterboarded, have electric shocks applied to his testicles, and then be sodomized with a broomstick and forced to sit in his own excrement…to show Americans that it’s “no big deal”.
I think conservatives have less-developed premotor cortexes.
that so many Americans (probably not the majority I realize but still a lot) can continue to share such a callous and cavalier view of the torture of other human beings?
I think that it takes a long-term gradual process of desensitization. Once the psychlogical process of tuning out or deriding some violent behavior begins, a vicious cycle sets in where even the most heinous acts become tolerable over time.
GWB had us all out getting back to “normal” go on vacation, spend money, now watch this drive three days after 9/11. The answer to the question is THEY DONT CARE! If it doesn’t concern or involve them directly, let me repeat…THEY DON”T CARE! No empathy, sympathy, .If they are like Rush the pill popper they are numb from all the pain killers don’t you think. GWB, after being confronted about no WMDs JOKED about it on television. do you all remember him looking under his desk in the Oval Office saying”Hmph..Nope, no WMDs here..tehetehe”. Asswipe!
But who is it that doesn’t care? Is it just a small group of extremist “ditto-heads” on the right or is Rush right, as I suspect he is, that the American people in general just don’t give a f** about this? How is it even possible that such horrendous crimes aginst humanity not only go unpunished but are rewarded with a second-term electoral victory for the administration which put them in place?
Isn’t the problem much deeper? The increasingly violence and insensitivity of American culture itself?
Sadly this statement: “THEY DON”T CARE!” applies to too many of the American people. They Don’t care, they don’t know ? What’s the difference ?? In regards to they don’t know, and to the main stream media, they need to be dealt with. Turn them off, cancel subscriptions, and work on their sheeple. Some sheeple are brain-washed(or brain-removed), but there are some that are still reachable. Do realize that there is a snowball effect. Since many sheeple are merely followers. With each sheep converted, others may follow. This is one FIGHT worth fighting.
you’ve touched on an important aspect of any widespread socio-psychological phenomenon of this type: the herd-instinct. I’m firmly convinced that all mass groups of human beings are vulnerable to it by genetic predisposition.
It’s extremely difficult to overcome and reverse its effects though. This is especialy true when you don’t have substantial control over the means of communication and “training” that sets the process in motion. Limbagh and his like have had that control for some time now.
It’s time for the left to figure out a way to get it back.
link
Buy the book or rent the movie (1975, starring Donald Sutherland).
BTW- “Homer Simpson” is one of the main characters in the book.
You mean it’s not public-dominion. I’ll have to try a copy in translation. That sounds like a REALLY good one just from the short excerpt you provided.
It’s too bad I’ve never had the opportunity of encountering Nathanael West’s writing before now, expext perhaps in some anthologies back in high-school days. But I didn’t seriously READ back then.
Nowadays the problem is the opposite. I read so damned much and in such diverse material that I end up unavoidably omitting important auhthors. Now I’m buried in Italian literature,hostory and politics, so when someone mentions an American author I haven’t read…well,, its a bit frustrating..
Thanks for the reference tough.
“Homer Simpson and the Madness of American Crowds…”
His whole corpus consists of four books, all of which are short and rather easy reads. He is a still life artist rather than a classical master. Which is a polite way of saying that if you pick up some used copies of his work and put them in your bathroom, you will be done with reading them in a matter of days or weeks.
Have faith Gilgamesh – there is humanity here in the states.
Rush is making an error – just like Frist did earlier this week. A lot of people wanted to forget about Abu Ghraib – just not the whackos.
The rethugs have lost the moderate christians and they have lost the grandmothers. The true caring people thought this was over…and will be angry with the repubs when reminded. Rush and Frist et al are doing the best defense is a good offense theory. Won’t work. Too many conservative polls are showing a rapid slide into hell for these guys.
…be patient my friend across the ocean…we’re pedalling real hard over here but it is uphill.
Let’s hope your right. But as someone pointed in the first comment (forgot his handle), the Democrats are not ,or at least not to my knowledge, discussing torture very much, let alone running on the issue (pace Rush) even though they should..
the most credible defense. If you will forgive me for quoting myself:
America’s secret sweetheart, America’s secret mirror. There’s one thing I bet you do know. A lot of those fancy talking folks in their fancy suits, with their twenty dollar words are not a whole lot different from you, in their hearts, so deep most of them don’t even know it. They’ve just read more books, learned to be politically correct, learned that it’s something to be ashamed of.
Which is in a way, terribly unfair to you. You are the kernel on the same cob they cling to like glossy silk. They will not claim you, they will denounce you and decry you and see you tarred and feathered and locked up, for being the result of their decades, their generations, of failure to act, complicity.
America made you what you are, taught you what you know, sent you to manifest its innermost values and desires, and now they act all shocked when somebody holds up a picture, holds up Lynndie the mirror, Lynndie the harvest of 2 centuries and change of amber waves of grain.
Neither you nor I know how many other hands were with yours on that leash, but we know it’s in the millions. The big millions. But all those millions are a speck on the wall compared to the billions of us who were supposed to be on the other end of that leash, the billions of us who were that one time, saved from our intended American planned fate. And I bet we would give you a fairer deal than those millions of hands, all slippery from their new unfamiliar coats of shame.
We would not expect so much from you, we know it must be hard for you to turn on your babydaddy like that, since both of you were just having some fun, not doing anything either of you thought was wrong. Expectations would, under the circumstances, be highly out of place.
I don’t expect you to get up on that witness stand and throw millions of people in with your babydaddy, and tell them America taught me this was the right thing to do, a perfectly acceptable way to have fun, joke around.
Open Letter to Lynndie England
And lest we forget, the official position of the US is that the policies are comparable to a popular comedy movie:
I was never interested at all with Lyndie England and her
associates in this whole disaster. In my diary, I even deliberately mispelled her name in order to illustrate how much I support the ridicolous hyphothesis that these seven indivuals were somehow totally anomolous creations, existing independently of the increasingly paranoid, racist and hyper-violent society in which they developed and flourished.
All Americans saw these hideous war-crimes on their televsion sets or in their newspapers every single day for about a month. The rest of the world saw them and was shocked and appaled. Americans reelected the commader-in chief and his honchos who they knew to be fundmantally responsible for these crimes.
Rush is right, though!! I don’t know why I didn’t emphazise this point in my diary. The Democrats in general aren’t taking this on as a winning campaign issue. Why not? Perhaps because, if they did, they might find themslves to be out of touch with the majority of the American people?
The insitution of an interantional system of gulags in which people can be permantely incarcrated without due process of law and treated to the pleasurable sensations of group sodomy with inanimate objects, waterboarding and god knows what else is just a trivial matter, you see? It always happens in war. No, I really don’t think it does!! Not on this scale and with this intensity of humiliation and secretiveness.
Even if it does, that’s just one more reason to avoid going to war when it’s unneccesary and unjustifed to do so.
Lynndie, like the people laughing at the mention of Abu Ghraib are products of their culture.
No mainstream politician would be doing himself any favors by defying that culture.
It would just not be pragmatic.
our minds tend to move on the same wavelength with regard to the cynical nature and desparete sitaution of politics these days at least (perhaps it hath always been so).
I always tell people who ask “why, if I’m so intereted in politics, I don’t go into politics?” that I would get zero or less votes because I would spend most of my time putting the repsonsibility for most problems where it really belongs: the people themselves . And that’s not a winning platform to run on.
Yes, I agree it goes much deeper.
quote from an important article this morning on Alternet concerning the importance of Limbaugh and how to fight back. It’s a good rebuttal to many folks on dkos who once wrote that I shouldn’t take this s+++ seriously:
I’m too tired and depressed to write much myself, so I’ll just quote the relevant passage:
For more than a decade now, conservative talk radio has had the Republicans’ back. Republicans could count on Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, et al to go out on the nation’s air waves and organize support for conservative positions. Whenever Republicans were in a tough spot, they knew they had defenders.
That, in turn, meant Republicans had more margin of error when making their case. An overstatement — or even an outright falsehood — wouldn’t be a political death knell. So, Bush could talk loosely about Democratic senators as “not interested in the security of the American people” or pretend that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had barred U.N. weapons inspectors before the war and expect little fallout.
By contrast, Democrats could expect any clumsy remark to be turned into a huge controversy both by mainstream and conservative news outlets. In Campaign 2004, John Kerry got pummeled for saying that he had supported one version of an Iraq War appropriations bill but opposed another, when it was barely mentioned that Bush had opposed the first version and supported the second.
Four years earlier, Al Gore saw his words twisted beyond recognition to make him out to be a liar or delusional, a crucial factor in Election 2000. During the run-up to war in Iraq, Gore was savaged again for his thoughtful critiques of Bush’s unilateralist foreign policy.
The liberals simply lacked a media that could defend Democrats when they took tough stands or when they made innocent mistakes. They were pretty much on their own, helping to explain their timidity.
Left side
But that dynamic has begun to change as more U.S. cities get “progressive talk radio” stations, which now number more than 50. Though still far fewer than the hundreds of conservative talk radio outlets, this “left side of the dial” is reaching critical mass, altering the political psyche both of rank-and-file Democrats and their leaders.
With humor and without deference, the progressive hosts give voice to the outrage that many American liberals feel over what they regard as years of conservative highhandedness — a stolen election in 2000, a deceptive case for war in Iraq in 2002-03, and the smearing of Kerry’s war record in 2004.
After more than a decade of the Right’s near monopoly of AM talk radio, listeners on the Left are taking pleasure in hearing the conservatives get a taste of their own medicine. Hosts — such as Stephanie Miller, Randi Rhodes, Al Franken and Ed Schultz — dish out a mixture of satire, ridicule and information.
Leading Democratic politicians from the House and Senate are lining up as guests, but now they are addressing an audience that expects tough talk about the Republicans, not mushy rhetoric designed not to offend.
In effect, a political market is emerging that rewards courageous Democrats and punishes wimpy ones. That is why references to Sen. Joe Lieberman bring derisive laughter on progressive talk radio shows because he is viewed as an archetype of the Democrat who seeks acceptance from the Brit Humes and Tim Russerts.
Liberalism also has gained media traction through the emergence of irreverent Internet sites, distribution of progressive documentaries on DVDs, and the satire of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” which pokes fun at both the Bush administration and the national news media.
According to the writer of the article (forgot his name), the media climate (specifcally talk-radio) is undergoing some of shift, with 50 new progressive AM radio stations coming on line in the past year or so. His thesis is that this helps explain the Democrats recent spinal transplant and the victories on some issues. I don’t know. Can you folks living in the States confirm this phenomenon?
What he’s ultimately mocking is not Democrats’ supposed secret joy at the Abu Ghiraib revelations but our agony at those revelations.
On thinking it over more carefully, I suspect that he genuineley belives that the issue is so trivial that noone can take it seriously. The Democrats must therefore necessarily be using it for ulterior political ends. But they’re just too foolish to realize that such cynical use of the issue won’t work on the “intelligent average Joe” who knows better, like Rush himself.