Sy Hersh blows the cover - all of it - off the real story behind Abu Ghraib. And it's about as bad as you had expected - maybe even a little worse.
I'll let you discover the grisly details for yourself. But the thematic essence - the back story to the back story - is right here:
The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq.
One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996.
The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.”
The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”
We're truly through the looking glass now, and while Sy quotes several intelligence sources who think - and fear - that the scandal will eventually result in a Church Commission-like investigation into the seamy side of the war against terror, I myself doubt it. As nation, as a degenerate republic morphing into empire, I think we're beyond that sort of exercise now.
It will be interesting, though, to see how the system contains and buries the scandal.
David Rose and Gaby Hinsliff, Sunday May 16, 2004, The Observer
Dozens of videotapes of American guards allegedly engaged in brutal attacks on Guantanamo Bay detainees have been stored and catalogued at the camp, an investigation by The Observer has revealed.
The disclosures, made in an interview with Tarek Dergoul, the fifth British prisoner freed last March, who has been too traumatised to speak until now, prompted demands last night by senior politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to make the videos available immediately.
They say that if the contents are as shocking as Dergoul claims, they will provide final proof that brutality against detainees has become an institutionalised feature of America's war on terror.
However, it is Dergoul who now reveals that every time the American guards attacked him, a sixth team member recorded on digital video everything that happened. Senator Patrick Leahy, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has been an outspoken critic of the Abu Ghraib abuse, said he would demand that Rumsfeld must produce the videos this week.
Is anyone else struck by the awesome similarity between the revelation that Nixon taped his White House conversations and the fact that there are video tapes of the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and GitMo?"
Don't serial killers usually keep something from the victim as a trophy? Tapes of their voices and images could work just as well. Granted, Nixon's were political victims, not actual homicides, but it sounds like the same mind set.
