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Thu 6 May, 2004 06:13 pm
A Wretched New Picture Of America
Photos From Iraq Prison Show We Are Our Own Worst Enemy
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 5, 2004; Page C01
Among the corrosive lies a nation at war tells itself is that the glory -- the lofty goals announced beforehand, the victories, the liberation of the oppressed -- belongs to the country as a whole; but the failure -- the accidents, the uncounted civilian dead, the crimes and atrocities -- is always exceptional. Noble goals flow naturally from a noble people; the occasional act of barbarity is always the work of individuals, unaccountable, confusing and indigestible to the national conscience.
This kind of thinking was widely in evidence among military and political leaders after the emergence of pictures documenting American abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. These photographs do not capture the soul of America, they argued. They are aberrant.
This belief, that the photographs are distortions, despite their authenticity, is indistinguishable from propaganda. Tyrants censor; democracies self-censor. Tyrants concoct propaganda in ministries of information; democracies produce it through habits of thought so ingrained that a basic lie of war -- only the good is our doing -- becomes self-propagating.
But now we have photos that have gone to the ends of the Earth, and painted brilliantly and indelibly, an image of America that could remain with us for years, perhaps decades. An Army investigative report reveals that we have stripped young men (whom we purported to liberate) of their clothing and their dignity; we have forced them to make pyramids of flesh, as if they were children; we have made them masturbate in front of their captors and cameras; forced them to simulate sexual acts; threatened prisoners with rape and sodomized at least one; beaten them; and turned dogs upon them.
There are now images of men in the Muslim world looking at these images. On the streets of Cairo, men pore over a newspaper. An icon appears on the front page: a hooded man, in a rug-like poncho, standing with his arms out like Christ, wires attached to the hands. He is faceless. This is now the image of the war. In this country, perhaps it will have some competition from the statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled. Everywhere else, everywhere America is hated (and that's a very large part of this globe), the hooded, wired, faceless man of Abu Ghraib is this war's new mascot.
The American leaders' response is a mixture of public disgust, and a good deal of resentment that they have, through these images, lost control of the ultimate image of the war. All the right people have pronounced themselves, sickened, outraged, speechless. But listen more closely. "And it's really a shame that just a handful can besmirch maybe the reputations of hundreds of thousands of our soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines. . . . " said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Sunday.
Reputation, image, perception. The problem, it seems, isn't so much the abuse of the prisoners, because we will get to the bottom of that and, of course, we're not really like that. The problem is our reputation. Our soldiers' reputations. Our national self-image. These photos, we insist, are not us.
But these photos are us. Yes, they are the acts of individuals (though the scandal widens, as scandals almost inevitably do, and the military's own internal report calls the abuse "systemic"). But armies are made of individuals. Nations are made up of individuals. Great national crimes begin with the acts of misguided individuals; and no matter how many people are held directly accountable for these crimes, we are, collectively, responsible for what these individuals have done. We live in a democracy. Every errant smart bomb, every dead civilian, every sodomized prisoner, is ours.
And more. Perhaps this is just a little cancer that crept into the culture of the people running Abu Ghraib prison. But stand back. Look at the history. Open up to the hard facts of human nature, the lessons of the past, the warning signs of future abuses.
These photos show us what we may become, as occupation continues, anger and resentment grows and costs spiral. There's nothing surprising in this. These pictures are pictures of colonial behavior, the demeaning of occupied people, the insult to local tradition, the humiliation of the vanquished. They are unexceptional. In different forms, they could be pictures of the Dutch brutalizing the Indonesians; the French brutalizing the Algerians; the Belgians brutalizing the people of the Congo.
Look at these images closely and you realize that they can't just be the random accidents of war, or the strange, inexplicable perversity of a few bad seeds. First of all, they exist. Soldiers who allow themselves to be photographed humiliating prisoners clearly don't believe this behavior is unpalatable. Second, the soldiers didn't just reach into a grab bag of things they thought would humiliate young Iraqi men. They chose sexual humiliation, which may recall to outsiders the rape scandal at the Air Force Academy, Tailhook and past killings of gay sailors and soldiers.
Is it an accident that these images feel so very much like the kind of home made porn that is traded every day on the Internet? That they capture exactly the quality and feel of the casual sexual decadence that so much of the world deplores in us?
Is it an accident that the man in the hood, arms held out as if on a cross, looks so uncannily like something out of the Spanish Inquisition? That they have the feel of history in them, a long, buried, ugly history of religious aggression and discrimination?
Perhaps both are accidents, meaningless accidents of photographs that should never have seen the light of day. But they will not be perceived as such elsewhere in the world.
World editorial reaction is vehement. We are under the suspicion of the International Red Cross and Amnesty International. "US military power will be seen for what it is, a behemoth with the response speed of a muscle-bound ox and the limited understanding of a mouse," said Saudi Arabia's English language Arab News.
We reduce Iraqis to hapless victims of a cheap porn flick; they reduce our cherished, respected military to a hybrid beast, big, stupid, senseless.
Last year, Joel Turnipseed published "Baghdad Express," a memoir of the first Gulf War. In it, he remembers an encounter with Iraqi prisoners. A staff sergeant is explaining to the men the rules of the Geneva Convention.
" . . . What that means, in plain English, is 'Don't feed the animals' and 'Don't put your hand in the cage.' "
And then, the author explains, the soldiers proceed to break the rules. The ox thinks like a mouse.
"My vanquished were now vanquishing me," wrote Turnipseed, heartsick.
Not quite 50 years ago, Aime Cesaire, a poet and writer from Martinique, wrote in his "Discourse on Colonialism": "First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism."
Are we decivilized yet? Are we brutes yet? Of course not, say our leaders.
From the Indian Wars to Vietnam to Iraq, it remains the same scenario.
Right Wing research: The 'Bell Curve' -- Levant Version
'Bell Curve' -- Levant Version
Wherein our intrepid correspondent unearths some fascinating right-wing research.
By Tony Hendra
Web Exclusive: 05.06.04
From an unexpected quarter comes some rare good news for embattled U.S. military commanders trying to contain the widening prison-abuse scandals in Iraq. The conservative San Diego-based scientific review No Junk Science published an article today by a team of researchers from the Adolf Coors Center for Studying Arabs at Pepperdine and the Charles Murray Institute of Eugenics at West Texas Christian University. The study presents "overwhelming evidence" that Arabs are not, by any prevailing scientific standard, human.
The idea that there is something uniquely "different" about Arabs has been roiling conservative think-tanks and intellectual circles for some years. An internal paper circulated at the American Enterprise Institute in 1997 posed the question bluntly: Is it prejudice that leads so many people with long experience and intimate knowledge of the Arab world -- Americans, British, French, and Israelis -- to think of Arabs as animals? Or simply that they are perceiving at a non-cognitive level what is biologically the case?
The Coors Center launched several lines of research to explore this question. They ranged from the socio-political, assembling statistics on why Arab populations resist progressive opportunities in favor of self-destructive behaviors (supporting oppressive governments, voluntarily adopting barbaric laws and medieval social structures, embracing "martyrdom," etc.), to the archeological. One provocative Pepperdine monograph demonstrated radical differences in ancient embodiments of divinity as conceived by pre-European BCE populations and BCE precursors of Arab populations. Greco-Roman, Celtic, Indo-Aryan, and Nordic divinities were predominantly anthropomorphic, while the divinities of ancient pre-Arabic peoples of North Africa and the Levant -- with the sole exception of Israel -- were predominantly animal (e.g., the myriad half-animal gods of the Egyptians). If ancient peoples projected an idealized version of themselves into their deities, would not a pantheon of half-human, half-animal deities suggests a population that was at best only half-human?
But it was the Charles Murray Institute that provided the clincher, thanks to huge advances in one particular application of DNA research: population genetics. Population genetics has incontrovertibly established a Homo sapiens family tree of relatively recent origin -- beginning about 60,000 years ago in Ethiopia -- by reading mutations (or polymorphisms) on the Y (or male) chromosome. Both the approximate dates and the destinations of migrations out of northeast Africa into Asia, Australia, the Americas, and Europe can be tracked by these genetic markers. The admirable implication is that racial and ethnic categories are meaningless: We are all descended from the same distinct individuals and -- whether black, white, brown, yellow, Jew, Christian, Hindu, or Muslim -- constitute one human family.
Except, say the DNA experts of the Charles Murray Institute, the Arabs. According to their research results (which have been subjected to peer review by Dinesh D'Souza), Arab male DNA does not carry the common polymorphisms of Homo sapiens. Instead it carries DNA markers from another hominid species altogether, Homo erectus. More commonly known as Neanderthal man, the species was displaced and/or eradicated by Homo sapiens in every region of the world -- with the exception, apparently, of the Middle East. Whether they represent a pure strain of Homo erectus that somehow survived the predations of Homo sapiens or came about through interbreeding between an errant Mediterranean strain of Homo sapiens and indigenous Neanderthals, Arabs are the sole surviving subhumans on the planet.
If true, the findings could have a dramatic impact on the prison-abuse investigation and its legal ramifications, as well as on the treatment and detention of Arab prisoners in general. Kenneth Starr, Dean of Pepperdine Law School, says: "This study annihilates the 'inalienable' and 'human' rights of Arabs, including (but not limited to) property rights, right of assembly, free speech, freedom of religion, privacy, due process, the right to an attorney, and, most importantly in this matter, the rights of combatants. The authors of the Geneva Conventions wrote the rules for humans, not hominids. We are under no obligation to observe the rules of war for a species without rights, nor do we have any criminal liability for our actions toward them in any court from Virginia to The Hague."
Beltway progressives, sensing the evaporation of a major campaign issue, have fired back that even if Arabs are non-human -- a possibility centrists like Senator Lieberman find not unacceptable -- there is still no reason to treat them inhumanely. "Be kind to animals," is the thought. Animal-rights ethicist Peter Singer of Princeton goes further, arguing that the rights of other species -- regardless of whether they are hominids -- are if anything superior to those of humans: "Centuries and millennia of oppression and exploitation of all other species by humans require us to make massive restitution to them. Arabs in this respect are no different than cows, chickens, shrimp, or oysters."
Harder heads, however, point out more draconian consequences of the scientific breakthrough. A source in the office of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who requested anonymity for reasons of national security, says: "Where animal populations prey on humans, controlling populations by culling herds -- or even, in certain cases or locations, extermination -- is a legitimate response. This could finally bring the enormous firepower and human resources of the NRA front and center in the war on terrorism. The idea of open season is long overdue."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld doesn't go quite that far. He puts the situation differently: "For me it's simple. The burden of proof is on these prisoners or on the thugs in Guantanamo or on these whining widows and orphans in Fallujah who want us to pay them off or on any other Arab who tangles with us -- you prove your human, we'll respect your rights. Otherwise -- you're dead meat."
The Charles Murray Institute is under enormous public pressure to release its lab results, but has so far refused to do so, citing the confidentiality of its DNA sources. The exhaustive study analyzed DNA samples from a comprehensive cross-section of Arab nations; the sole exception was the Saudi Royal Family, which exempted itself on religious grounds. The authors of the article have thus been forced to admit the possibility -- though they stress it's highly unlikely -- that the Saudi Royal Family may be human.
Interviewed in Ohio at a fund-raising dinner thrown for him by the Diebold Corporation, President Bush steered clear of the more incendiary aspects of the research, but he did pointedly use the phrase "human dignity" three times in his response to a reporter's question. He also expressed doubts about the major role played in the study by "the evolution thing." Said the President, "The jury's still out on that."
(If you haven't figured it out by now, this is satire).
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Tony Hendra is an author and an actor. His latest book, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul (Random House), will be on sale May 18.
As an observer of human behavior and a professional instigator, I found that the reports of the abuses were a bit more surprising to me than I'd initially believed. The photos were a real surprise, each showing the detainees in humiliating situations and the guards smiling.
I read the official text of the military investigations and was amazed that many involved and charged with abuse said the same thing that the Nazis used as a defense when charged with war crimes,"I was only following orders." Now I realize that there's been 34 years since my discharge from active duty, but I don't believe that the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) has eliminated "Unlawful Orders" yet. Unlawful orders are those that would be illegal under any cicumstances. An easy out is to simply ask for a written order from the person giving the order. They'll usually back track quickly.
Regarding "softening up" the prisoner before interogation, it's illegal. The third degree went out with the Miranda Act. I personally told officers that I wasn't taking orders from them, if they weren't in my unit, so how in the world could these people follow instructions given verbally from MI (Military Intelligence, an oxymoron even in my day) or civilians?
Officers in charge are being officially repromanded, some removed from promotion lists and relieved of command. The findings and recommendations of the investigative team don't go far enough. If this happened in a US prison and was exposed, the guards would be tried, sentenced and possibly put into the same prison to be dealt with by other guards and the prison population. No bets on their safety.
Regarding the bit of satire, unfortunately dehumanizing the enemy is often used by military personnel. It allows them to cope with having to kill another human. Some, like myself couldn't do this and thought of the ramifications on the person's family, community and future generations. It took years of introspection, counseling and prayer to overcome the guilt and memories. The governmant and shrinks refer to it as PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), but I question that term. How can it be a disorder when we react to life threatening situations in a normal manner. Maybe, it's that some of us have residual effects longer than "sane" people that dehumanized the enemy.
Oh, two quick questions, is the Charles Murray Institute funded by grants from any oil companies? Have they done DNA testing on the Bush family? That would explain their hesitantcy in releasing their findings.:-D
Charles Murray
Wiyaka, I was able to find the following information to partially answer your good questions. ---BBB
Charles Murray bio at AEI web site
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:v0RQiOGP-_cJ:www.mediatransparency.org/people/charles_murray.htm+Charles+Murray+Institute&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Charles Murray
Charles Murray, one of the chief ideologues of the right, is a Bradley Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and has close connections to the Manhattan Institute, where he was a Bradley Fellow from 1981 to 1990. He has received more than $1 million from the Bradley foundation over the past decade, enabling him to write two important conservative books, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (1984), in which he argued that social programs designed to help the poor actually hurt them, and The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), in which he argued that Black people are genetically intellectually inferior to white people. Both books were roundly criticized by reviewers and social scientists, but had broad impacts in the popular press and, in the 1980s, in the Reagan and Bush administrations.
One good critique of Murray is The Bell Curve: Roadmap to the "Ideal" Society, a full chapter from The Feeding Trough, and is available on this web site in its entirety.
A full debunking of The Bell Curve by Nicolas Lemann is available at Slate.com, or by clicking here. It reveals mathematical errors, logical errors, and the misuse of statistics (i.e. the purported "IQ" test actually has questions on subjects as involved as Trigonometry, thus measuring educational attainment, not innate intelligence).
Stephen Jay Gould, author of the 1981 bestseller "The Mismeasure of Man," added a chapter in the 1996 reprinting of his book, specifically dedicated to critiquing The Bell Curve. Anyone seriously interested in Murray should read this book. To get a flavor of what Gould has to say, take a look at the outline of his critique:
THE BELL CURVE
Disingenuousness of content
Disingenuousness of argument
Disingenuousness of program
GHOSTS OF BELL CURVES PAST
This critique puts The Bell Curve in its proper perspective as one in a long line of attempts by whites of European descent trying to find a genetic basis for their supposed superiority over other races and peoples.
Grants
It's difficult to see the exact grants to Murray, although some specific ones name him as a recipient.
Click here to see grants to the Manhattan Institute:
http://www.mediatransparency.org/search_results/info_on_any_recipient.php?198
click here to see grants to the American Enterprise Institute:
http://www.mediatransparency.org/search_results/info_on_any_recipient.php?19
and See grants where Murray's name is mentioned in the grant's purpose:
http://www.mediatransparency.org/search_results/comment_string_search_results.php?Message=Charles+Murray
Also see:
http://www.mediatransparency.org/recipients/national_affairs.htm
National Affairs, Inc. Sits on board of magazines.
Personal history
Charles Murray (1943- )
Charles Murray was born in Newton, Iowa, took his bachelors degree in history from Harvard in 1965 and immediately joined the Peace Corps. He served for five years as a volunteer in rural Thailand and stayed for a sixth to do research on economic development. Returning to the United States, he completed his Ph.D. in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974. Since then he has written extensively on crime and poverty and become one of the nation's most influential conservative thinkers. His 1982 monograph, Safety Nets and the Truly Needy, in which he argued that President Johnson's massive welfare spending had helped the poor no more than President Eisenhower's laissez-faire policies, so impressed the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research that it offered Murray an annual stipend of $35,000 to expand it into book form. The result, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (1983), became one of the cornerstones of President Reagan's domestic policy.
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From the web page of Jason Paul Mitchell, a phD student at the University of Mississippi.
I'm sorry.
I was attempting a bit of facetiousness. Didn't mean it to taken seriously. Next time, I'll PM you, if my post might be misconstrued.
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