Mediations is a semi-regular column on the Middle East as portrayed in the US media.

Jailhouse Rot

Al Miskin

May 2004

"The Arab Summit" (Emad Hajjaj)

As right-wing pundits echoed Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) in expressing “outrage at the outrage” over activities at Abu Ghraib prison some characterized as “prankish,” and liberals tired of wringing their hands decided to wash them instead, members of Congress got a preview of hundreds more snapshots and videotapes showing the kinds of violence and human suffering Americans were spared from watching by blanket censorship of negative images during the first year of the Iraq campaign. The White House, the Defense Department and a compliant commercial media, after creating an atmosphere of impunity for brutal dehumanization of enemy prisoners, now promise to demonstrate a model of justice for Americans that has been denied to Iraqis. The photographs themselves and the public debate both reflect the presumption of absolute domination of an occupied population.

Until material evidence captured with amateur candor by participant-observers at Abu Ghraib was published, one of the great successes of the Iraq war launched in 2003 was the near total ban on images of flag-draped coffins, civilian casualties and close-up violence. Until samples from the jailhouse portfolio of Spc. Jeremy Sivits and his cohort popped up online, the US government had succeeded in controlling photographic depictions of the war, keeping cameras at a distance and depersonalized. Leaked to the press from within the military itself, where censorship was evidently incomplete, the Abu Ghraib images were shocking to Americans because of the deeply personal nature of the abuse. Meanwhile, the focus by the administration, the army and the press on the visual documentation of a few cases perpetuates what can only be described as a thoroughly colonial mentality.

Most Americans reacted to the Abu Ghraib with disgust and demands for the persons responsible to be brought to justice. There was little disgust, however, when Sivits received a paltry one-year sentence, and calls for his superiors to stand trial are fading with news that Gens. Ricardo Sanchez and Janis Karpinski will lose their commands. When the US brings Arabs “to justice,” moreover, it does so en masse. Shortly before CBS broke the Abu Ghraib story, on which it had obligingly sat for two weeks at the request of the Pentagon, a mob mutilated the corpses of four American mercenaries who had taken a wrong turn in Falluja. Somebody dragged two of the charred bodies from the back of a car and then hung them from a bridge. In “overwhelming” response, US troops and tanks laid siege to the town, allowing some women and children to become short-term refugees to escape the gunfire. Punishment, as Iraqi Governing Council member Adnan Pachachi declared to al-Arabiyya TV, was collective.

Throughout Iraq as well as in Abu Ghraib, the International Committee of the Red Cross suspects that 70-90 percent of the Iraqis detained in mass roundups and then held in a legal netherworld governed by neither criminal law nor international protections for prisoners of war were detained by “mistake.” In 1991 and 2003, Iraqi families endured intense aerial bombardment (try it sometime, if you think the noise alone isn’t terrifying), bookending twelve years of economic sanctions as punishment for the announced sins of one bad guy. Disclaimers galore notwithstanding, many Americans blamed Muslims or Arabs generally for blowing up the World Trade Center. The invasion of Afghanistan was rationalized on the premise that those who housed the evil-doers must be held accountable. Vague “links” to al-Qaeda may be grounds for a presumption of guilt by association. Charges have yet to be brought against hundreds of Arabs and other Muslims captured around the world and interned in cages at Guantánamo Bay (not to mention untold numbers of undisclosed locations) since 2002. When it comes to crimes against Americans, American justice casts an expansive net indeed around the actual perpetrators.

In the face of this contradiction, the US assumes the moral high ground. A week after the prison photos went public, Bush went on Arabic-language television to lecture Iraqis about what they “must understand” about “what Americans stands for,” which is honor, liberty, freedom, democracy and other good things. Iraqis should be grateful that Americans have closed the torture chambers and rape rooms. The “wrong-doers” will be presumed innocent but tried and, if convicted, punished, individually, by the American way of justice -- not as the Iraqis have experienced it, in massive sweeps of arbitrary detentions, but one grinning prison guard at a time. They will be given legal defense, their personal stories heard and broadcast on American talk shows, appropriate rule-bound sanctions imposed, in a transparent process. Iraqis will see on American TV the rule of law in action. Bush’s preachy ramblings on al-Arabiyya and al-Hurra were worthy of any Arab dictator: a few sinners will get their just desserts, but they cannot besmirch the glorious national honor and the righteousness of our good people and our noble cause.

The juxtaposition of sermons from Rumsfeld, Bush and various democracy experts about liberty and justice with photographs of grim sadism against nameless Iraqis strains credulity. All the seminars about Western values, especially surrounding gender issues, are for naught. Remember how, preceding the US campaign in Afghanistan, female soldiers were supposed to set a good example for their benighted, burqa-swaddled sisters? Remember the gallant junkets of Sirs Paul Bremer and Wolfowitz to US-built centers in Karbala and Hilla for Iraqi damsels presumably relieved of their distress? The images of Pvt. Lynndie England and her fellow women jailers have made a grotesque and unfunny joke of the messages of gender equality and women’s liberation the US purports to bring Arab and Muslim women. In Afghanistan, the misogyny of the mujahideen and the Taliban thrived on lurid tales of sexual promiscuity in the Soviet Union. In 2004, the sole remaining superpower has offered images of men and women frolicking sadistically in postures of extreme physical domination, mocking mock homosexuality and siccing dogs on naked prisoners.

Contrite on the face of it, much commentary about Abu Ghraib quickly degenerated into a self-righteous polemic about the continued superiority of American honor to the perversion of the “enemy.” Immediately after the revolting footage of Nick Berg’s decapitation hit the airwaves, CNN found a retired military man to intone with steel in his eyes that, unlike Americans reacting to the prison torture, “they” feel no shame while violating norms of human behavior. The reassertion of these reassuring platitudes about “us” and “them,” familiar since the September 11 attacks, acquired a distinctive twist when too many commentators resorted to gross cultural stereotypes to portray the cruel degradation in Abu Ghraib as an indication of Arab (sure not American!) sexual pathologies.

As the scandal continues to widen, is still not uncommon to hear that the Abu Ghraib torture offends Muslims because they are homophobic, patriarchal, hypersensitive misogynists who never pledged for a college fraternity or hung out in a locker room. Charles Krauthammer wrote in response to Abu Ghraib that “this war is about sex,” a conflict of the sexually liberated against the forces of sexual repression, a kind of neo-Freudian explanation for “why they hate us.” The naked human pyramids were victims first of a shame culture, it has been knowingly explained, that gives them a deep-rooted, distinctly Arab or Muslim prudishness about forced voyeuristic group sex. These photos offended the Arab obsession with feminine submission, goes one subconsciously self-congratulatory line of analysis featured on MSNBC’s well-named “Hardball,” as if the US is liberating Iraqi women by displaying their men as impotent. Who was really that surprised when Seymour Hersh, himself a prime purveyor of the “it’s torture because they’re Arabs” line, revealed that Raphael Patai’s “The Arab Mind” -- a laughable example of the discredited “national character” genre of sociology -- has been bedtime reading for the architects of the Iraq war and occupation? The extreme Orientalist line informed by Patai and embellished by the good Dr. Krauthammer pits a few bad apples against a whole culture of perverted chauvinists who haven’t seen any real porn. Taken far enough, this cultural bifurcation contrast depicts the US military as a bastion of feminism, egalitarianism and open gay outness. As is, the cultural-sexual narrative is a distraction from the larger pattern of violence, intimidation, control and ruthlessness that characterize this or any military occupation.

If Abu Ghraib detainees’ humiliation is cultural and/or religious, then by extension the whole Muslim world has now been buggered. The notion of culturally specific torture is itself dehumanizing. Is Muslim misery really so different from ordinary human suffering? Would Donald Rumsfeld not feel agony if stripped naked, chained and bent into contortions while Iraqi women smirked and chortled at his penis? One might as easily argue that, given Arab-Muslim antipathy toward dogs, a canine bite is all the more painful, or that all Arabs bleed when one is mauled.

Of course, reactions to media images are filtered through the media, and contrasted with prior and rival images. Just as Americans were unaccustomed to ugly visuals from the present Iraq war, so Arab public reaction to sadistic homo-erotica on television and in newspapers was almost certainly heightened by the novelty of depictions of genitalia or overt sexuality, much less outright sexual perversion. On the other hand, Arabs, Europeans and others were already conditioned to expect viciousness from the occupation by daily video of jack-booted US soldiers kicking in doors, manhandling women, traumatizing children and hauling off men. So they were far less likely than Americans to accept the improbable explanation that a few instances of mercilessness have marked an otherwise humane and high-minded military occupation. Iraqis themselves, victims of countless indignities and acts of violence, are least likely to accept the hubristic, exceptionalist rhetoric of the occupier.

Nearly a month into the Abu Ghraib scandal, dodging another salvo of quasi-comical pleas from Establishment editorial pages for a mid-course correction, Commodore Bush has once again appeared on television to order the ship of occupation to sail on. Bush deviated from his shopworn, sunny narrative of “making progress” only to promise Iraqis “the construction of a modern, maximum security prison” to replace a certain facility whose name his Arabic pronunciation mangled nearly beyond recognition. “Under the dictator,” he helpfully reminded viewers, “prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture.” Now, the US-supervised deaths and torture within its walls notwithstanding, the prison is “a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.” Mass detention of Iraqis, in itself, is no cause for worry. Once a new warehouse for the country’s strangely plentiful supply of “dead-enders” has been built, “we will demolish the Abu Ghraib prison, as a fitting symbol of Iraq’s new beginning.” Perhaps Americans will not see too much of this symbol, even if Iraqis will. Two days before Bush spoke, Rumsfeld decreed that soldiers in Iraq cannot own the camera-fitted cell phones which the Pentagon suspects captured the scenes of forced public masturbation and forced eating from toilets that have aroused so much indignation. The images of the torture, Rumsfeld knows, are more important than the torture itself.