Letters to the Editor
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Grey Dotted Line
What I often ponder, and no one yet has tackled this angle, is how did Graner and Fredericks, both CO's (correctional officers - jailers) in civilian life end up in the heart of an Iraqi prison as Army jailers. Were the "skills" they brought with them honed in their civilian jobs in the prisons of America? The stain you see on the moral fiber of America may be far deeper than we realize.
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pictures lie
i don't know how many folks saw the recent nostalgia pieces in the papers about the famous photo from the boston busing riots days of the black guy about to be speared by the US flag in front of city hall; but they (the ny times maybe?) tracked down the people involved and what really happened; the guy who was "holding the victim" was in fact trying to yank him away to safety, and the guy with the flag wasn't trying to stab the victim, he was swinging it sideways at him but that doesn't show in a photo, especially with the sideways perspective (yeah, small improvement, but still.....)
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With about 1 out of 10 Americans with close contact with the law enforcement system in this country
I tend to worry more about what we do to prisoners here. It's all well and good to tack up Iraq as a metaphor for all that's bad about the US but wouldn't it be better to focus on what really is?
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The Whole Picture
Growing up as a military brat I heard the stories from my pop about the Turk POWs traded back by the NKs in a prisoner exchange during the Korean war. One refused to go home, he wanted to go back into combat. He wept as he told my pop of being given a kerosine can to use as a urinal in his cell. One day he was strapped to a chair, a black hood was dipped into that full can of urine and placed over his head. He was repeatedly punched in the solar plexis, until gasping for air, he aspirated his own urine and passed out. When he came to, it started again. And again and again. Eventually he broke and told the NK's anything they wanted. Now he felt he had to atone by staying in Korea and fighting on.
My pop and his fellow marines all called this barbaric torture, done by less than human, evil people.
Now look again at the photos from Abu Ghraib. There seems to be spilled urine on the floors. Explains those hoods, doesn't it, and why those poor souls would climb naked onto a pyramid or masturbate on command.
If this was vile and evil torture of our allies 55 years ago, it is vile and evil torture by us today.
Maybe it is time to just admit it.
Then we can twist the stripes on our flag into the crooked cross of the swastika.
Thank God my pop passed on before he saw this sorry state.
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Very disturbing review!
I read a lot. I think a lot. I am retired and I have the luxury of time and the "wisdom" of age. But I also have many decades of experience at high levels in the Federal government; and particularly at the Department of Defense.
He saw blood on his shirt and wondered. . .well, I don't care what he wondered.
We are all fully responsibile for the horrors that took place at Abu Ghraib and I gather that the film you are reviewing doesn't make that clear, or even shadowy.
Human beings, acting in groups, can be induced rather easily to revert to the earlier evolutionary stage of savagery which barely precedes us. Though antropologists will be quick to point out that our "founding fathers" ate what they killed and didn't know from torture.
If we knew, if we watched, if we held the guys hands up while others did it, if we failed to write a letter to the editor, or our Congress or our President, didn't speak to our spouses or children about the uacceptable and uncivilized behavior of which we as humans are capable we are guilty. If we neglected to point out to everyone with whom we had a speaking relationship that "compassionate conservative" was a hoax we are guilty. Have we got it now? Are we all thinking burned up Jews and a millions of Germans who didn't have any idea what was going on? Are we thinking about the Germans who lived within a few hundred yards of the furnaces from which they could smell the stench of burning flesh but claim they didn't know what was going on; and if they were suspicious its better to keep your head down.
We are perpertrators and enablers and in the right circustances we would use machetes to chop off heads in front of the family. Until we understand that we learn nothing and I gather the movie doesn't help deliver that central message.
But we must also figure out where "the buck stops". We now have incontrovertible evidence that Gonzalez, Rice, Rumsfeld and Yoo made decisions about the extent of permissible torture in our White House. They got into detail. There were others. Forgive me for not mentioning them all. If we have to stop the buck (and it should be obvious I don't think we should stop the buck) it stops at the man who ensured "plausible deniablity" by not attending the meetings but by being briefed and nodding his head affirmatively. Bush and the others need to be tried for war crimes. That's a movie I will watch with interest. As for our own savagery, we don't have a wide angle lens (not even a fish-eye) that's wide enough to capture us all.
Intellectuals, and virtually all agree, that had there been a draft there would have been no war and maybe much less torture. But, if true, (and I think it probably is) that means that we all are paralyzed in the face of unspeakable degradation unless our sons and daughters have electrical clamps on their nipples and penises.
Think about the implications of that sad realization and what a great box office flop it would be.