Bloody Trophies
by Linh Dinh / December 18th,
2010
We have an unprecedented capacity to absorb
scandals. Wikileaks
or no, Americans wake up each day to a new set of outrages, yet nothing
changes. With hundreds of channel at our fingertip and a billion songs
sloshing in our skulls, no crime against country, man or earth can
linger long enough in any brain cell to matter. All synapses are
currently busy with bullshit, yet again, thank you.
There have always been enough incriminating evidences to fill several
Pentagons and CIA headquarters. It takes no dick or hacker to know that
the U.S. government is duplicitous and sadistic. It lies and kills
compulsively. Though hardly alone, America’s unique in her reach and
influence. As an empire, our sick tendencies become everybody else’s
problems. Without our “leadership,” would Poles and Ukrainians kill and
be killed in Iraq? Would Germans patrol Afghanistan? Would Georgia pick a
fight with Russia, only to have its ass kicked? We don’t just commit
evils, we train many others to do it. We graduated thousands of
torturers from The School of the Americas. After some bad press, it was
niftily re-christened as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation. (Similarly, Blackwater is now Xe.) Our tactics haven’t
changed, and waterboarding, openly admitted to by our cynically sinister
capos, is the very least of it. No criminal confesses to everything.
“Ah, I only do some shoplifting on the side, Your Honor. No beating or
rape or nothing.”
Our elected leaders, our bald, shiny faces to the rest of the world,
are shameless hypocrites. During the Georgia-Russia conflict, George
Bush was indignant that Russia had “invaded a sovereign neighboring
state,” while John McCain declared, “In the 21st century nations don’t
invade other nations.”
Was March 20th, 2003 in the 21st century? I’m not talking about March
Madness, of course, but the start of our invasion of Iraq. Sated with
college hoops, Americans could switch channel for some cool, live snuff
action. Soon after, George W. Bush announced at the Boeing F-18
Production Facility in St. Louis, “Two weeks ago, the Iraqi regime
operated a gulag for dissidents, and incredibly enough, a prison for
young children. Now the gates to that prison have been thrown wide open,
and we are putting the dictators, political prisons, and torture
chambers out of business.” (Applause.) A mere year later, the Abu
Ghraib scandal broke, revealing America to be in charge of Saddam’s
torture chambers.
Not so incredibly, we also imprisoned children in Abu Ghraib. Its
commander, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, spoke of visiting the
youngest inmates, including a boy who “looked like he was 8-years-old.”
Maybe this kid was just undersized from all those years of economic
sanctions? Maybe he was actually 11 or 12? By 2008, the Pentagon would
admit to jailing 600 Iraqi juveniles. From a supposedly feel-good story
in Stars and Stripes: “The U.S. military in Iraq is holding some 600
juvenile detainees—ranging in age from 11 to 17—and is building
educational programs to address their special needs.”
In any case, no evidence could be more damning than what happened at
Abu Ghraib, yet there were no consequences, really. We went on with our
occupation, which has continued to this day, and only one officer was
ever court-martialed. The conviction of Lieutenant Colonel Steven L.
Jordan was even overturned, resulting in merely an “administrative
reprimand” on his record. Torture, American style, is an administrative
procedure.
The photos themselves often show our troops casually moving about in
the background. It was business as usual to punch, slap and kick
prisoners; to jump on their naked feet; to videotape and photograph
naked male and female prisoners; to forcibly arrange prisoners in
various sexually explicit positions for photographing; to force
prisoners to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several
days at a time; to force naked male prisoners to wear women’s underwear;
to force groups of male prisoners to masturbate themselves while being
photographed and videotaped; to arrange naked male prisoners in a pile
and then jumping on them; to position a naked prisoner on a box, with a
sandbag on his head, and attach wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to
simulate electric torture.
On and on the various means for inflicting pain and humiliation on
helpless human beings. Oh, the casual or gleeful sadism, often sexual,
of our conquering heroes! These all-American men and women will go home,
marry, raise children and become realtors, policemen, accountants and
teachers. We freak out when a sexual predator moves into the
neighborhood, but how many honorably discharged and decorated torturers
and mass murderers are chummying up among us?
“Dad, what did you do in the Iraq?”
“Oh, nothing much, I broke chemical lights and poured the phosphoric
liquid on prisoners; beat prisoners with a broom handle and a chair;
threatened male prisoners with rape; sodomized a prisoner with a
chemical light and perhaps a broom stick. Now, what would you like for
Christmas, Son?”
General Antonio M. Taguba’s list of Abu Ghraib abuses, summarized
above, was leaked to the press by an unknown source. Though not a
whistleblower per se, Taguba did not flinch from accusing his own
comrades, and he didn’t scapegoat but pointed his finger at the very
top. In 2008, Taguba wrote: “After years of disclosures by government
investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights
organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the [Bush]
administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains
to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be
held to account.”
For showing courage and integrity, Taguba was forced into retirement,
but Bradley Manning, a mere private, is already paying a much heavier
price for exposing yet more crimes by the U.S. Army. Kept in solitary
confinement for seven months now, Manning faces up to 52 years in
prison, with many, including Congressman Mike Rogers, calling for his
execution.
Manning’s physical and psychological conditions are deteriorating
rapidly. He turned 23 just yesterday. Friends who have visited Manning
in prison are being intimidated by our government from speaking out,
according to the Guardian. People are being stalked, computers seized
without warrants. A staple of Fascism, extra-judicial harassment should
never be tolerated in any genuinely free society.
So after decades of appalling disclosures by human rights
organizations, the media and even the government itself, nothing has
changed. We have enough evidence to convict just about everybody and
everything inside that Beltway, save a potted plant or two, perhaps, so
what’s missing is not more information, but an ability to deduce and to
synthesize, that is, to think, and, even more importantly, some
semblance of moral clarity.
The same scene that outrages one person will titillate another. To a
Nazi, photos of Dachau and Bruchenwald are a turn on. Atrocity and
torture images also confirm the status quo, since they illustrate most
vividly who has the power, who can do what to whom, who can be stripped
naked, bloodied and blown to bits.
Susan Sontag rightly compared the Abu Ghraib images to trophies.
Proud of our bloody trophies, and not just photos but ears, fingers and
whatnot, many Americans still subscribe to our full spectrum domination,
ass-kicking aspirations, so protests or no, Wikileaks or no, the
American Empire will not be shamed or persuaded into changing its ways.
It will not reform itself. Cornered, it’s likely to become even more
vicious. Evil will bare its fangs most nakedly.
Obey orders and torture and the worst that can happen to you is an
administrative reprimand, whatever that means, but if you follow your
conscience, be prepared to be locked up, tortured or even killed. It’s
already in the book.
Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories
and five of poems, and a just released novel, Love Like Hate. He's tracking our
deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of
the Union. Read other articles by Linh.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/12/bloody-trophies/#more-26754
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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