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Ghosts of Abu Ghraib       
We do not torture. - George W. Bush

“This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.” - Rush Limbaugh

Even though our President cannot pronounce it, future historians will translate it into English as his Waterloo. It was the moment we concretely stepped off the moral high ground and danced with the devil. While conservatives will look to blame the news media, the Arab population surrounding the prison knew what was happening the whole time. Those already freed had returned to their homes and villages with stories of our Marquis de Sade-like behavior. We have seen the photos. The man standing on a box in a Christ-like position with wires attached to his fingers and a hood over his head. Private Lynndie England, with a cigarette in her mouth, pointing at the private parts of a row of naked, hooded men and giving the thumbs up sign. The dog pile of naked men. An army specialist in rubber gloves punching prone, tied and bound, helpless prisoners. A naked man shown covered in excrement. The worst photos have still been withheld from our eyes. Women forced to show their breasts and male prisoners forced to engage in sex with each other. Boys, children really, sodomized with foreign objects. Urinating on detainees. Venomous snakes biting detainees. Jumping on and pounding wounded captives' legs. The pouring of phosphoric acid on Arab men. A 16-year-old girl sexually abused by two guards. Americans riding naked Arab men like they were donkeys. If Rush Limbaugh is right, and all we are witnessing is just a Skull and Bones initiation-like fun, our President (a former Skull and Boner) was a freak in college and needs to be registered on the sexual offenders’ list.

After the photos came to light, President Bush decried such practices. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham reminded people that, “The American public needs to understand we're talking about rape and murder here." Former future President Al Gore gave a blistering speech where he called the Bush administration's conduct in the war "incompetent," claimed that our Christian leader was the most dishonest president since Richard Nixon, and called for mass resignations of those in charge. He bellowed, “In Iraq, what happened at that prison, it is now clear, is not the result of random acts of a few bad apples. It was the natural consequence of the Bush Administration policy.” Not just another day at the frat house, I guess. But others, like former Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, were more outraged that there was any outrage at all.” They are not there for traffic violations. If they're in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners — they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals." Problem is, like Rush, and the hate radio crowd, Senator Inhofe does not know squat and is throwing raw meat to the base. He was just feeding into the blood lust that many Americans have felt since September 11th. Like Guantanamo Bay, anywhere from 30 to 70 percent of the inmates were probably innocent.  Sadly, our military has been used by many in the Arab world to settle a lot of private grudges. (One of the prisoners in the photos is now an Iraqi policeman.) Some were like a 16-year-old boy whose only crime was his father was an Iraqi general. To get his dad to crack, we stripped the boy naked, threw him in the showers, covered him in mud, and then threw the kid on the back of an open truck to enjoy some nice cold night air. Still, more importantly, we lost much of what little world support we had.

When the dust settled, even though there was a clear paper trail from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Vice-President Dick Cheney's offices, the only people punished were the West Virginia hillbilly's stupid enough to get photographed and the female general who had nominal, if any, control over the prison. The CIA interrogators and private contractors, many who logged in and out of the prison using factious names, got off. Donald Rumsfeld spent three more years of screwing up our war effort. Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the man who commanded coalition ground forces in Iraq and authorized interrogators to "go to the outer limits" enjoyed a nice retirement last year. Major General Geoffrey Miller, who was in charge of both detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and then Abu Ghraib, the man sent to Iraq to get more information out of the prisoners, the man who called them "dogs" and encouraged the use of dogs, the man who urged interrogators to breach our official policies, was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and praised as an "innovator" by the President when he retired a few years later. (Although these three, along with eleven other U.S. military and civilian officials, including George Tenet, might not want to vacation in Germany any time in the near future where their names have been mentioned in connection with possible trials for crimes against humanity.) One needs to be always careful when using rhetoric like "evil-doers." When you paint things in extreme black-and-white terms, your own morality can sometimes slip. You can justify the engagement in activities that are repugnant and dehumanizing. We forget that what happens in those dark back rooms gets out and that the only way we can win this "war on terror" is not through the butt of a rifle or the barrel of a gun, but to show that there is a better way, the American way. It is not one of the few hundreds, or thousands, of terrorists that we have to win, but the hearts and minds of the millions that are sitting on the fence, watching, and trying to make up their minds.


Verdict: A must see for those who care