Thousands of innocent women & children attacked by dogs and sexually molested in US / UK concentration camps
By Robert C. Koehler
A picture may turn out to be worth, oh, $87 billion.
Pick your favorite. A naked Iraqi in a dog collar, a hooded guy on a
box wired to electrodes, naked men in a heap, and then they get worse. The
latest round features a prisoner, naked, of course, threatened by attack
dogs; in the next shot, he’s on the ground, bleeding, with a GI pressing a
knee into his back. And let’s not forget the corpses. Or the women.
Remember when Jessica Lynch was America’s heroine, rescued by Navy
SEALs from the sexual predators who had captured her? Here’s what Newsweek
wrote on April 14, 2003: “The possibility of mistreatment had been very much
on the mind of President Bush, who, according to a senior administration
official, had frequently raised concerns about American women’s falling into
Iraqi hands.”
That was then. A happy time, a unified nation. This is now. The lie
has exploded. Jessica Lynch has morphed into Lynndie England, cigarette in
mouth (you’ve come a long way, baby), giving a smirking thumbs-up to the
world as a prisoner is forced to masturbate in her presence.
We’ve entered the looking glass. Everything is precisely the opposite
of what it’s supposed to be. The Iraqis aren’t the ones with WMDs, we are.
And instead of Iraqi men molesting American women, American women are
molesting Iraqi men.
Apologies dribble out of the White House, laced with damage control.
Rumsfeld and Bush are sorry about the bad apples who violated the Geneva
Convention at Abu Ghraib and compromised America’s mission. I’ll bet they
are.
Especially the ones with the digital cameras.
So now the orchestrators of the horror show that is Iraq are tortured,
you might say, with their own dilemma: How do they fake remorse (these
people who refuse to keep a tally of the Iraqi civilian war dead) with
enough sincerity, and throw in enough scapegoats of sufficiently high rank,
to make it all go away and get America back on the right side of the looking
glass?
Well, I don’t think they can. These photos from hell have done
something even worse for the Bush war effort than depict crazed GIs acting
like Saddam’s little helpers. The pictures have bared the humanity of the
Iraqi “enemy”: They bleed, they feel shame, they have souls. They’re pretty
much just like us. We may lose our enthusiasm for killing them.
Calling for Rumsfeld’s resignation is a wholly inadequate reaction to
this scandal. Later, maybe. But if he’s dumped now (and replaced by Paul
Wolfowitz?), are we free to return to business as usual?
The public is suddenly receptive to the truth about the brutality of
the occupation of Iraq. American remorse ought to begin, I’d say, with a
dismantling of the prison system we’ve built there.
Even without the torture, it’s an abomination, with a population by
some estimates as high as 18,000. It includes women and children. The
detainees are mostly civilians, rounded up in sweeps and late-night raids;
these are ordinary people yanked out of their lives and disappeared into
overcrowded pens like Abu Ghraib, Camp Cropper, Camp Bucca and other places,
not to mention Guantanamo Bay.
They’re held in legal limbo, nameless, incommunicado. Loved ones are
told nothing. In response to their desperate pleas, sentries at Abu Ghraib
routinely pointed to a cardboard sign affixed to the barbed wire: “No visits
are allowed, no information will be given and you must leave.”
Here are the voices we’ve failed to hear until now: “The Americans
said they were taking my sons off for an hour of questioning. We have not
seen them since.” So Amal Salim Madi, age 65, told Agence France-Presse
about her three boys, missing since October.
“I have been here for five months!” This was the cry of a middle-aged
woman to U.S. reporters as they toured Abu Ghraib last week, reaching out to
them through steel bars (as reported by the Chicago Tribune). “I have
children.”
We must let these people go, as step one in ending our reign of
terror, a.k.a., our “mission,” in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s resignation can come
later. So can Bush’s impeachment.
Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an
editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can
respond to this column at bob@commonwonders.com
More torture pictures:
http://www.fromallangles.com/iraq-war/files/torture-images.htm
http://www.thenausea.com/usa-iraq.html
http://www.rotten.com/library/crime/prison/abu-ghraib/