by Jonathan Hershfield, 5-22-04

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Everytime I watch the news these days I feel like I’m in “A Clockwork Orange” with my eyelids forced open and scenes of depravity flashing repeatedly right into my brain. Looking at the now famous image of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, hooded and naked, perched on top of one another in a disturbing cheerleader-like pyramid, I can’t get over my inability to distinguish ass from elbow in such a literal sense.

But I am soon hit by a revelation far more disturbing. Rumsfeld may be right. When he casually dismisses this as not being torture, I am drawn to the sickly grin of the female soldier and her rubber-gloved counterpart. This isn’t torture. This is a break from the torture. This is taking a breather to shoot some snapshots before they go back to actually torturing the prisoners. What are the rubber gloves for, people?

Now, there’s no doubt that many of these Iraqis are in this prison for some reason. Granted, many of them are probably in there for the crime of defending their country from a foreign invader. But I’m sure many are also in there for simply being “bad guys” (to use terms the president can understand). However, there are rules to war; I imagine somewhere in the Geneva Convention there must be a clause against naked man-pyramiding. Right?

Torture is not entirely a new concept for Americans. Look at all the fun our new ambassador to Iraq, henchman John Negroponte, had when he willfully promoted the Honduran death squads. Hell, look at most of Central and South America. But we’ve grown accustomed to washing our lily white hands of it all because we always terrorized with puppet governments when we could. Now it seems the torture we would most certainly have left to the new Iraqi government is in the hands of some of our own soldiers. And, for once, the media has half an eye open.

But wait, according to our own defense secretary, we’re not bound by the Geneva Convention because, when it suits us, this is not a regular war, but a war on terror, with a whole other set of rules. Funny how they talk about the invasion of Iraq like it’s a war when they want our unconditional support and tax dollars, but quickly downplay its official “war-dumb” when evidence of torture surfaces. Not that anyone seems to care, but there seem to be an awful lot of uncharged men in Guantanamo waiting for a day in court that will never happen, and who the hell knows what kind of naked man-pyramids they’re building there? But that’s not our problem because, when it suits us, Guantanamo suddenly becomes part of Cuba.

The president claimed to be quite upset by the Abu Ghraib torture when he read about it in the newspaper. I’m quite upset that my president so often finds out about these things from the paper… something he once proudly said he doesn’t read anyway. Confused, anyone?

Deflecting calls for Rumsfeld’s resignation, Bush once again employed his presidential mastery of the English language by describing the defense secretary as being “really good”. But one has to wonder why Rummy never bothered to read a detailed report of systematic torture in Iraq that was submitted months ago. If our own defense secretary isn’t interested in human rights and the law and the political legitimacy our country earns from it, then why should we be surprised when members on the bottom rung of the ladder start sticking things up people’s butts in Iraq?

But, then again, we live in a time when Condoleeza Rice can claim with a straight face -- a smile even -- that no one was informed of anything by the memorandum entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack within the United States”. And we live in a time when the Vice President only leaves his cave to tell us the head of the counterterrorism department for the last thirty years was “out of the loop”. And we live in a time when the attorney general takes it upon himself to point the finger at other attorney generals for the tragedy of 9/11. And we live in a time when George W. Bush has a job… any job.

The naked man-pyramid phenomenon in the media is an important lesson. If this is what we’ve seen on television, then the reality must be much worse. Television is always the low-carb version. Anybody remember the pretty green bombs gently landing on Baghdad over a year ago? Well, you certainly don’t remember what the inside of an Iraqi hospital looked like at the time. You didn’t see it.

So where’s the outrage? Are Americans blind or are we just not looking? What, does this president have to have consensual oral sex with an intern -- or is stealing an election, lying to congress, executing an illegal invasion and hiring incompetent fools like Rumsfeld to manage it not enough?