Posted on 05/08/2004 12:49:37 PM PDT by Lando Lincoln
At the center of the Iraqi prisoner controversy, stand six individuals accused of abusing approximately 20 detainees at Saddam’s infamous Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.
These six have already been reprimanded by the US military, another six are currently under investigation for having possibly participated in the incidents, all of which seem to have occurred in November and December of 2003.
Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, was the head of the 800th Military Police Brigade and in charge of the entire Iraqi prison system which includes the Abu Ghraib jail. She was also in command of the 3,400 National Guard troops assigned to the city of Mosul.
Karpinski [whose husband continues to serve in Oman] denies any knowledge of the events, claiming to have been “shocked" when the information became public.
Regardless, she has been reprimanded and relieved of command, a career destroyed.
So what exactly is the grave activity that those involved in this behavior are accused of?
Humiliation basically, that and placing subjects in circumstances where they believed that peril could ensue.
No actual physical torture is being alleged.
No skin broken, no bones shattered, no cattle prods, no meat hooks.
What we find of particular interest is the contrast between the worst that has occurred in Abu Ghraib under the coalition and the worst that occurred under Saddam and to a lesser extent which continues to occur in nearly every Muslim penal institution in the Middle East - every day of the week.
Under Saddam, such horrific acts of cruelty were inflicted upon, at minimum, tens of thousands - as official state policy - that it’s really beyond comprehension.
It is also without modern historical precedent. Whereas the Third Reich murdered millions, even Hitler refrained from the pure demonic brutality that Saddam’s inner circle bathed in.
So again we must ask ourselves, what exactly is the coalition guilty of, if the worst comes to pass?
Basically you could characterize it as rough hazing at Sigma Abu Ghraib, the type of thing that maybe fifty-thousand American kids undergo every year, mostly in activities set in and around of higher learning – frat houses and intramural sports teams primarily.
There is no reason here to go into to oft-times perverted and sadistic sexual nature of the most extreme of these college rituals, ample evidence exists and has been extensively catalogued.
Are there differences between what we may disapprove of in theory but tolerate in practice on American campuses and what apparently has taken place in Iraq?
Absolutely.
Students are not captives of an almost omnipotent foreign power, they are not in confinement and dependent upon their keepers for the necessities of life and only the most severe of cases seem to rival what we have seen in the media’s feeding frenzy so far, but the fact remains that the parallels are there.
But that is not really the point.
What is being lost here is perspective. If I may be so bold, let me suggest that there is precious little perspective and balance in evidence at all.
First let us remember that in his salt-the-earth depravity, Saddam opened the prisons, in anticipation of the coalition attack. Those released were often common criminals – rapists, murderers and thieves. It is from this socially deviant demographic that a substantial number of Abu Ghraib’s past and current prison population are drawn. Along with them are a significant contingent of dead-enders, unreconstructed Baathists, assorted crazies and those newly conscripted into the hate America club.
These are the people who inhabit the Iraqi prison system, most minor offenders are released in short order, and there simply isn’t room to hold every party who commits a lesser offense.
And it is among these specimens of social pathology that our troops live and work. In a very real sense the jailers in this type of arrangement become the jailed themselves.
This is not being offered as an excuse, not even as an extenuating circumstance, but as merely explanatory.
Keep in mind also something that though repeated often needs to be hammered home at every opportunity.
We are engaged in a war, whose outcome is still unclear, against a philosophy as dangerous as any that we, as a people, have faced in our near 400 plus years of common shared experience.
Watch the evening news, the extremist elements reveling in successful sapping operations in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or India or the former peaceful land of the House of Saud.
Look at the hate on the faces of indoctrinated monster-children created in fundamentalist Islamic Madrassas and Mosques, as they hoist their AKs high while dragging their victims through the streets.
Picture that coming to your neighborhood…because if intent alone were driving the train, they would be outside your door as you read this, some of the forward-placed expeditionary troops reside among us already.
It is this clarity of vision which has been absent from the so far, one sided, prisoner debate.
It has been removed from this controversy, like color is drained from the sky as night approaches.
If we allow such diversions to fixate us, all will eventually unravel and it will be an exceedingly hard night that is upon us indeed.
What amazes me the most is that photos were allowed. Even a more innocent connotation could be misconstrued by malevalent use of pictures. What was the policy on cameras? I cannot believe they were allowed. Did someone sneak them in? Surely those in command must have know the propaganda value of these pictures.
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