You know what's supposedly popular these days? Holding someone against their will and attaching electrical wires to their genitals! According to some conservative pundits, like Oliver North for example, the acts at Abu Ghraib are "the kind of thing that you might find on any college campus nowadays."
Good ole Ollie's right! Why, now that we at Ball State have learned the dangers of underage drinking, penile electro-shock is the new cool thing.
We'd all love to undo the atrocities of Abu Ghraib. Some people's strategy in doing so is to suggest that what happened was "no big deal."
Many war promoters have tried to neutralize Abu Ghraib by focusing attention on the less severe acts of prison abuse while ignoring the genuine atrocities. "So they had panties on their head! So what?"
Meanwhile I sigh, "Um, women and little boys were getting raped. Detainees were sodomized with broomsticks. One Iraqi was beaten to death during his interrogation."
The other technique is to pull out Nick Berg as a kind of heavier weight that tilts the evil scale toward Al-Qaeda. The sentiment seems to be that those against the war feign outrage at Abu Ghraib in order to undermine the president.
Meanwhile they ignore the far greater atrocity of Berg's videotaped beheading because it serves as proof of the inhumanity of our enemies and therefore justification for everything the president wants to do.
We've known for some time that Al-Qaeda likes to kill Americans. That's standard operating procedure for them. But it's not a standard to which we hold ourselves. We claim to be better than that.
We need to be most focused on the aspects of our lives that we can control. Al-Qaeda's snuff film does not represent America. Yet that picture of a detainee standing on a box with wires dangling from his body does. That's our tax dollars at work making fodder for jihad recruitment posters.
And the policies of our leaders led to this.
Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in the New Yorker, "The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focused on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq... The Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq."
The Pentagon has denied and attacked the article. Hersh, who broke the story of the My Lai massacre, anticipated the response
Maybe this is more important than one brutal murder. Al Qaeda will have plenty of new executioners if we maintain such policies as forcing Iraqi detainees to masturbate in front of their captors.
What next? Will people try to justify using the above techniques in the war on terror? Will they advocate "using evil to defeat evil?" That's the next step in the downplaying of these acts.
Some extremists have already taken it. And it's one that we cannot afford to take if we want to regain the moral high ground in this war.
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