DEAD PARROT BULLETIN, 5/9/04

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THE FUTURE OF A DELUSION

I wasn't going to write about the abuse of the Iraqi prisoners, which seemed on the one hand to be beyond the reach of language and on the other to speak for itself. However, the message may not be so clear if we are to judge by some fanciful interpretations now taking root in the richly manured field of American politics. These demand to be answered.

1. The photos are fakes.

Even Donald Rumsfeld, whose weakness for wishful fabrication ("we know exactly where the WMD's are") is well established, has chosen not to go this route. There are just too many witnesses. Nevertheless, the spirit of flat-out denial dies hard among Bush enthusiasts in the "heartland." Boston Globe reporter Anne Kornblut interviewed two of them in Dubuque, where they were waiting for Bush's "Yes, America Can" bus to roll into town (5/9). Frank Kennedy told Kornblut, "They looked fake to me." Franciska Redmond eagerly grasped the straw: "You know, I saw it on Fox and I said the same thing to my husband. How do you get a camera into a prison, anyway?" The addled but rather poignant premise of Redmond's question is that the photos must have been concocted by Iraqis eager to smear Americans. The truth--that they were taken by Americans eager to commemorate their domination of Iraqis--has not even occurred to her.

2. The mistreatment was no more serious than your average fraternity prank.

This is the position taken by Rush Limbaugh, who told his 20 million listeners on Tuesday that the scenes in the photos were "no different than what happens at the Skull & Bones initiation" (Globe, 5/9). Working his way in deeper, Limbaugh said, "I'm talking about people having a good time...You ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?" Exactly how much Limbaugh knows about Skull & Bones remains unclear, and reports that young George Bush blew off some steam by branding pledges with heated coat hangers do spring to mind. That the army and its civilian hirelings behaved like drunken frat boys would not seem to be the strongest line of defense, and one hopes that most initiations do not end with the initiates being sodomized or murdered, as several of the prisoners were. In any case, there is a name for emotional release achieved by inflicting physical pain or humiliation on others. It is called sadism.

3. Abusing prisoners is not the "American way."

Quite to the contrary, abusing prisoners is a staple of "discipline" in the American penal archipelago. According to the NY Times (5/8), in the past 25 years no fewer than 40 state prison systems "have been under some form of court order, for brutality, overcrowding, poor food or lack of medical care." (Over that same period, the number of inmates has quadrupled, and it now stands at 2.1 million.) Governor George W. Bush's Texas was among the worst states in this respect; a federal judge had to intervene in 1999 after learning that guards colluded with inmates in a brisk sex-slave trade.

A direct thread of personnel connects the doings at Abu Ghraib to this American tradition. The American who revamped and reopened Saddam's hell-hole was Lane McCotter of Management & Training Corporation, a private corrections firm with 13 prisons in its stable. Before he went into business, McCotter had, in 1997, been forced out as director of the Utah Corrections Department when a schizophrenic inmate died after being shackled naked to a restraining chair for 16 hours. With such a resume, McCotter evidently seemed a natural when John Ashcroft was putting together a team of law enforcement types to tutor backward Iraqis on the concept. Announcing his appointments, Ashcroft said, "Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that freedom permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable criminal justice system based on the rule of law and standards of basic human rights."

McCotter stayed in Iraq just long enough to get the renovated Abu Ghraib up and running and denies any connection with what happened afterward. He is not, however, the only link between American and Iraqi prisons. As reported by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker (5/10), two of the seven enlisted men and women who have so far been charged with abuse, Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick and Specialist Charles Graner, "were put in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things were supposed to be run."

4. The soldiers who carried out the abuse did not receive sufficient training.

It is hard to imagine what training would have been sufficient. Would it have been sufficient, for example, to say, "You must not strip the prisoners naked, hood them, force them to form a human pyramid, and then stand there leering and gesturing gleefully; and if you do, you certainly should not take any pictures"? Common sense suggests that only training so rigorous as to verge on complete desensitization could induce ordinary people to carry out such carefully calibrated and elaborately staged rituals of humiliation. We can be sure that the Abu Ghraib Seven will now be savagely scapegoated by their superiors; we can be equally sure that they committed their crimes at the behest of superiors who wanted the prisoners softened up for subsequent interrogation and had given careful thought to the most effective physical and psychological methods of doing so.

5. George W. Bush is not responsible.

Tame pundits like the Times's Thomas Friedman solemnly intone that Bush must restore our honor by sacking Rumsfeld--as if Bush and Rumsfeld were not merely two facets of the same dark stone. Bush is responsible for the prison abuse not only because it occurred on his watch but also because he has set both the tone and the concrete conditions for it. By repeatedly dividing the world into saints and evil-doers, he has legitimized violence against anyone unlucky enough to be swept up in the American net. By stubbornly mongering an unnecessary war, he has unleashed the brutality that every war brings. The damage he has caused us in the eyes of the world is incalculable. What remains to be seen is whether he can still ride the myth of American innocence--our smart bombs! our love of freedom!--to victory in November. The revelations of Abu Ghraib should make it just a little bit harder.

MACHINE GUN DICK

We quote without comment the following story, which appeared recently on the right-wing web site NewsMax.com:

Dick Cheney is a proud gun owner and hunter.

In April the Vice President addressed the NRA to wild cheers and acknowledged his own interest in guns.

But a source close to the White House tells NewsMax that Dick Cheney is a true gun aficionado.

Cheney's collection, our sources say, is in the hundreds of guns, including pistols, shotguns and machine guns -- from antique Thompsons to the most modern European automatic machine guns.

To let off some steam (God knows he has some to let off these days), the Vice President has been known to go out to the federal training center in Maryland where the Secret Service does its own gun practice.

A typical Cheney visit, told to us by a person who attended one, included the Vice President bringing some 30 guns from his own collection.

On the ranger [sic], Cheney would blow away his targets -- with Thompson machine guns, the latest German and Austrian machine guns, Lugars [sic], MP5s, shot guns, you name it.

One after another an aide would hand the Vice President his latest armament, and Cheney would fire away, no doubt imagining al-Qaeda terrorists in his gun sights.

We're told Cheney is a good shot to boot.

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