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=> Parhad : brain food- condensed n detailed

Parhad : brain food- condensed n detailed
Posted by Andreas (Guest) - Thursday, May 13 2004, 14:55:14 (CEST)
from 217.255.206.60 - pD9FFCE3C.dip.t-dialin.net Network - Windows 2000 - Internet Explorer
Website: http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1430
Website title: TomDispatch

Parhad: brain food- condensed n detailed - n - oh yes: multi-dimensional n stellar n ...

starts the REAL america to strike back?

so far the best summary i could find.

go to url for download links in the original.

i mean: please go.

best

Andreas
--------------------

http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1430


Postcards from the edge: "We saw the pictures"

"The next day [January 14, 2004], Gen. John Abizaid, commander of all U.S.
forces in the region, was on the phone to Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld. 'General Abizaid informed the leadership within hours of the
incident,' said a senior Pentagon official. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the
military's spokesman in Iraq, also called the Pentagon, though with more
alarming words. 'He said, "We've got a really bad situation," recalled one
official, who like others requested anonymity. 'The evidence is damaging and
horrific,' 'We've got a really bad situation.'

"Abizaid talked daily with Rumsfeld about Iraq, and the prison investigation
likely came up often, officials said. Top Pentagon leaders, such as Rumsfeld
and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, as well
as President Bush were kept aware of the situation, said Gen. Peter Pace,
vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the CBS Early Show
yesterday." (Tom Bowman, the Baltimore Sun, Army tightly guarded pictures of
prison abuse)

The torture system

It's worth starting with the basics, because they are what you're likely to
see the least of in the uproar at hand.

The system of injustice that, since 9/11, we've sent offshore and organized
globally -- from Guantanamo, Cuba to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan --
is by its nature also a system of torture. It was designed from the
beginning to be a Bermuda Triangle of injustice, existing in an
extrajudicial darkness beyond "our" sight or oversight. There, on military
bases and in special military-controlled prisons, the "war on terrorism"
could be carried to its informational climax in whatever ways and by
whatever methods American intelligence officials felt might "break" whatever
prisoners we had.

Whether in Guantanamo or at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, this developing mini-gulag
was never meant to be a system of imprisonment for crimes -- hence the lack
of charges, no less trials of any sort, anywhere in the imperium. It was to
be an eternal holding operation for the purpose of information extraction
(and possibly revenge). The men (and woman) running the Bush
administration's foreign policy in this period didn't have to specify the
actual use of torture, though some of them seem to have done so. We know
from the Sunday Washington Post that, in April 2003, after "debates" on the
subject, Pentagon officials at "the highest levels" approved twenty
"psychologically stressful" methods of interrogation, most or all of which
any sane person would classify as torture, including the questioning of
naked prisoners, and that these methods were later approved at least for
"high-value detainees" in Iraq. In the meantime, there was a good deal of
post-9/11 torture chatter in the media about how much of it we could,
should, and would use in a war to the death against a fanatic enemy.

Both the President and his Pentagon chief claimed to be "shocked" or
"disgusted" by the forms a torture system took -- by its look. Yes, they had
been informed of what had happened at Abu Ghraib prison, but those, after
all, were just words, months of words. The difference was the images on
television and in the press. "We saw the pictures," said the President. "It
is the photographs that gives one the vivid realization of what actually
took place," said his secretary of defense. "Words don't do it. The words
that there were abuses, that it was cruel, that it was inhumane, all of
which is true, that it was blatant, you read that and it's one thing. You
see the photographs and you get a sense of it, and you cannot help but be
outraged."

That is in itself a kind of confession, if you consider it for a moment. You
cannot help but be outraged. All those previous months from mid-January 2004
on, when he and his president assumedly only knew about the "words" (grim
enough certainly in General Taguba's report), when they were, in the pungent
phrase of Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, "apprised
orally," our secretary of defense and our President could evidently "help
but be outraged." And that tells us a great deal.

They could, it seems, practice "deniability" not only on us but on
themselves. Human beings are as capable of this as they are of turning into
animals and torturing other human beings. But whatever deceptions they may
have practiced on themselves, the simple fact is that the penal system they
set up was a torture system. The Bush administration, while speaking loudly
of bringing its version of democracy to the Middle East, was also eager, as
Adam Hochschild wrote for Tomdispatch many months ago, to bring the
developing "age of human rights" to a speedy end in the pursuit of what
former CIA director and enthusiastic neocon James Woolsey liked to call
"World War IV," which was imagined, like the Cold War, as a many decades
long slog to victory in which only the toughest, those willing to wield
brute power and commit the most difficult acts, would survive. After all, it
was, post 9/11, a new-style bomb-shelter world and we were planning on
acting accordingly and -- so our leaders made clear -- to hell with
international institutions and international norms, whether new (the
International Criminal Court) or old (the Geneva Conventions). In this way,
they set the tone for a world of torture on the Single-Power Planet of a
military giant determined to have its own way and in documents like its
National Security Strategy of 2002 said so in no uncertain terms. They
determined the camera angles and set up the cameras, so to speak, but when
the pictures came back they had no stomach for them. Words, that was another
matter entirely.

From the beginning, this administration was never embarrassed by the words,
by the news that did leak out from its black hole of injustice. That such a
system was being developed was obvious to anyone who cared to look, or
bothered to read even our own press closely, or consulted groups like Human
Rights Watch which are concerned about such matters. I've written about it
over these many months at Tomdispatch, for tiny audiences, without a
researcher to help me, no less teams of reporters -- based upon nothing but
a close reading of the press here and abroad and the kind of Google search
ability that any journalist at a major paper could better in a few seconds.
Despite the odd report on the methods that were quickly put in use in the
privacy of military bases and offshore prisons, our cowed and demobilized
press has generally preferred since 9/11 not to shine its spotlights -- or
send its teams of reporters -- "into the shadows" to find out what indeed
was going on; while its editorial pages preferred to blindly "support our
troops in Iraq" and let the small problems like abuse and torture in those
shadows go by the boards.

I mention this because, in the wake of the publication of the photos of the
horrendous abuses at Abu Ghraib, the editorial pages of our two imperial
newspapers are suddenly in full cry. They are shocked, shocked, and ready to
do something about it. And we have to be glad for that. On Wednesday, the
Washington Post published an editorial acknowledging that what we were
facing was, as the headline put it, A System of Abuse:


"Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday described the abuses of
Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison as 'an exceptional, isolated' case.
At best, that is only partly true. Similar mistreatment of prisoners held by
U.S. military or intelligence forces abroad has been reported since the
beginning of the war on terrorism. A pattern of arrogant disregard for the
protections of the Geneva Conventions or any other legal procedure has been
set from the top, by Mr. Rumsfeld and senior U.S. commanders.
Well-documented accounts of human rights violations have been ignored or
covered up, including some more serious than those reported at Abu Ghraib."

The day after the same page called for Rumsfeld's resignation:


"Mr. Rumsfeld's decisions helped create a lawless regime in which
prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, beaten,
tortured and murdered -- and in which, until recently, no one has been held
accountable."

But it also called for the sort of special handling of terrorists that can
only lead to further torture:


"In one important respect, Mr. Rumsfeld was correct: Not only could
captured al Qaeda members be legitimately deprived of Geneva Convention
guarantees (once the required hearing was held) but such treatment was in
many cases necessary to obtain vital intelligence and prevent terrorists
from communicating with confederates abroad. But if the United States was to
resort to that exceptional practice, Mr. Rumsfeld should have established
procedures to ensure that it did so without violating international
conventions against torture and that only suspects who truly needed such
extraordinary handling were treated that way."

It sounds so simple, but the "exceptional practice" - such a conveniently
opaque phrase; it wouldn't work if they wrote what they meant in plain
English, would it? -- quite naturally becomes the ordinary in such settings
as Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. In the meantime, the New York Times, in recent
months regularly a day late and a dollar short compared with the Post,
called for Rumsfeld's departure on Friday and on the same day, offered its
editorial version of our offshore penal system (The Military Archipelago):


"The road to Abu Ghraib began, in some ways, in 2002 at Guantánamo Bay. It
was there that the Bush administration began building up a worldwide
military detention system, deliberately located on bases outside American
soil and sheltered from public visibility and judicial review. The
administration shunned the scrutiny of independent rights monitors like
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. It presumed that suspected
agents of terrorism did not deserve normal legal protections, and it
presumed that American officials could always tell a terrorist from an
innocent bystander."

The editorial, while strong, promptly added: "So far as we know, the
psycho-sexual humiliations that military jailers inflicted on Iraqi
detainees last year at Abu Ghraib have no parallels in American-run prisons
elsewhere."

Accounts by released Guantanamo prisoners and those in Afghanistan, in fact,
indicate that psycho-sexual humiliations were part and parcel of the system
itself. But the more important point is simply to imagine what might have
happened if either of these imperial papers had made up their collective
minds to shine a spotlight into the imperial darkness once they knew --
after all, the Bush administration practically broadcast this to the
skies -- that we considered the Geneva Conventions beside the point in the
"war on terror" and that our leading global principle would simply be the
application of brute force of which we had, it was believed, the global
preponderance? Now the editorial pages of these (and many other papers) are
calling for official accountability and resignations as well as Donald
Rumsfeld's head. Perhaps, however, there should be a little journalistic
accountability as well, not to speak of the odd editorial apology and maybe
even a resignation or two. (Fat chance, of course.) Despite the recent
editorials and the burst of front-page coverage, let me just assure you
that, given the performance of our until-recently cowed and demobilized
press, there aren't going to be a lot of media profiles in courage to hand
around when it comes to the last two years.

To give but a single example, during the period in the spring of 2003 when
our media expressed outrage (as they should have) over the parading of
American POWs before Iraqi propaganda cameras, they were showing the first
shots of hooded Iraqi prisoners in what looked like burlap sacks. If you go
back to our newspapers of that moment, you'll find such photos presented
without comment and they were relatively commonplace on TV. No one discussed
"hooding" as a practice until the photos of the hooded prisoners at Abu
Ghraib suddenly made it look like a horror. And yet the practice, clearly
systematic, had to have been carefully planned out and prepared for. Those
bags didn't just materialize from the palm groves along the roadside. They
must have been shipped in with the troops. I'm not an expert on war crimes,
but I find it hard to believe that the hooding of prisoners is an agreed
upon international practice in time of war.

As far as I can tell, for Iraqis themselves, though the specifics of Abu
Ghraib undoubtedly shocked, none of this was, at heart, exactly news. After
all, they were the ones who best grasped that the essential principle of the
occupation was the use of brute force (in or out of prison); that the
Coalition Provisional Authority and its head "administrator" L. Paul Bremer
were instituting not a system of laws and rights backed by the vote --
democracy -- but a system of lawlessness focused on corporate spoils.
Bremer's "democracy," run out of the isolation of the Green Zone in Baghdad,
was Iraqi-less, but filled with corporate "contractors," including those who
made, and evidently continue to make piles of money, by sending hired
"interrogators" and "linguists" into our detention centers to join American
"human exploitation teams" - a term I heard for the first time last night on
ABC News -- and at least one of which, CACI International, is still
advertising for interrogators willing to work under "moderate supervision"
in the field in "AfghanistanIraqKosovo." ("Must be able to work and live in
a hostile field environment with minimum medical facilities. Must process
excellent communications skills and the ability to work in extreme
environments for extended periods of time. Willing to travel and must posses
the ability to be an effective communicator. Knowledge of Military police
operations and Force Protection procedures. Experience conducting
interrogations and interview using linguist and local interrupters.
Knowledge of the reporting tools used in tactical interrogation
operations.")

The need for "information" in Iraq was so great, reports Julian Borger of
the Guardian, that there was a veritable rush to employment. He interviewed
Torin Nelson, "one of a team of roughly 30 in Abu Ghraib employed by a
Virginia-based firm, CACI International." Of Nelson's testimony he writes in
part:


"Torin Nelson, who served as a military intelligence officer at Guantánamo
Bay before moving to Abu Ghraib as a private contractor last year, blamed
the abuses on a failure of command in US military intelligence and an
over-reliance on private firms. He alleged that those companies were so
anxious to meet the demand for their services that they sent 'cooks and
truck drivers' to work as interrogators."

Enough Iraqis have passed through our prison system there -- 43,000 by some
estimates, including perhaps 8,000 still in detention -- that this sort of
thing was hardly news (as Jo Wilding recently pointed out in great detail at
the Progressive Trail website). Protests by families of the detained have
been going on there for months and months. Nor could it have been news that,
among the "terrorists" slipping into the country, the CPA was sponsoring
hired mercenaries who had formerly worked in death squads or at other
heinous activities for the regimes of Apartheid South Africa, Pinochet's
Chile, and Milosevic's Serbia. The Iraqis, of course, knew firsthand what a
simple Google search could have brought you to here in the U.S. (as it did
me), or what any American guard in one of our detention centers could
certainly have told you. ("'It is a common thing to abuse prisoners,'
military police sergeant Mike Sindar told Reuters of his time in Abu Ghraib.
'I saw beatings all the time.'")

Our Iraqi "prison" system has now been revealed to all as 16-17 detention
centers countrywide, whose activities involve systematic beatings, abuse,
torture, humiliation, and murder; the holding of tens of thousands of often
innocent prisoners without charges, often beyond the reach of their
families, sometimes off the books and from elsewhere ("ghost prisoners," as
the intelligence people evidently call them), and in chaotic conditions
(even Rumsfeld in his testimony could only offer an approximation of the
number of prisoners held in the system). Until recently, however, it has
been possible to learn more about the nature of this system from
"Riverbend," a young woman blogger in Baghdad, largely confined to her house
due to the insecurity of that city, than from our major papers, each with
their teams of reporters, translators, aides, drivers, equipment handlers,
and the like.

Having in the past described something of the nightmare of detention in her
country under the occupation and meetings with the despairing relatives of
the detained, she now writes in part:


"Everyone knew this was happening in Abu Ghraib and other places. seeing
the pictures simply made it all more real and tangible somehow. American and
British politicians have the audacity to come on television with words like,
'True the people in Abu Ghraib are criminals, but.' Everyone here in Iraq
knows that there are thousands of innocent people detained. Some were simply
in the wrong place at the wrong time, while others were detained 'under
suspicion'. In the New Iraq, it's 'guilty until proven innocent by some
miracle of God.'

"People are so angry. There's no way to explain the reactions- even
pro-occupation Iraqis find themselves silenced by this latest horror. I
can't explain how people feel- or even how I personally feel. Somehow,
pictures of dead Iraqis are easier to bear than this grotesque show of
American military technique. People would rather be dead than sexually
abused and degraded by the animals running Abu Ghraib prison.

"I sometimes get emails asking me to propose solutions or make
suggestions. Fine. Today's lesson: don't rape, don't torture, don't kill and
get out while you can- while it still looks like you have a choice... Chaos?
Civil war? Bloodshed? We'll take our chances- just take your Puppets, your
tanks, your smart weapons, your dumb politicians, your lies, your empty
promises, your rapists, your sadistic torturers and go."


Having a good time. Wish you were here!

Returning to, as scientists might say, the proximate cause of the present
uproar -- the latest photos with, we now know, more and worse to come --
here's how a recent Washington Post piece started (New Prison Images
Emerge):


"The collection of photographs begins like a travelogue from Iraq. Here
are U.S. soldiers posing in front of a mosque. Here is a soldier riding a
camel in the desert. And then: a soldier holding a leash tied around a man's
neck in an Iraqi prison. He is naked, grimacing and lying on the floor.

"Mixed in with more than 1,000 digital pictures obtained by The Washington
Post are photographs of naked men, apparently prisoners, sprawled on top of
one another while soldiers stand around them."


And so the young and impoverished here in our country were "enabled" -- to
appropriate a word from the Taguba report -- to see the world via the U.S.
military thanks to the Bush administration. Camels, the desert, a young
woman in uniform holding a leashed Iraqi. one of so many images caught on
digital cameras, packed onto compact discs, and sent home via computers to
the folks; a modern twist on the 19th century colonial postcard or the
thrilling stereopticon scene (which sometimes featured no less chilling
visions of the conquered world).

"Having a good time.. Wish you were here!" And thanks to these images of and
from the boys and girls next door ("It's not in her nature to do something
like that. There's not a malicious bone in her body." ".she sometimes found
it difficult to kill animals when they went hunting."), Americans find
themselves plunged into a different world. Okay, actually a number of those
boys and girls were next door to American prisons where they were guards and
no doubt none too kindly there either, but those who weren't were
undoubtedly trying to escape a burger-flipping or Wal-Mart-clerking fate.
And, as it turned out, the U.S. military under George Bush offered so many
opportunities to be more than they could be or should have been.

From camels to leashed humans, their photos of the "exotic," instantly
recognizable to 19th or 20th century historians, are the stuff of any brutal
colonial occupation. The shots of Chinese severed heads from the good old
days of the Boxer Rebellion, when an international expeditionary force took
Peking, or those grim photo "albums" Japanese soldiers proudly brought back
from their Pacific War "triumphs" in places like Nanking, or similar shots
sent home from Vietnam (and published in the late 1960s in what was then
called the "underground press"). The bloody and exotic always went so well
together as long as you imagined the conquered - and even then, the missions
of conquest had fancy, uplifting names like the French "mission
civilatrice" -- as somehow less human than yourself. These were, of course,
acts you would have hidden if they took place in your own world -- except
under similar circumstances as, for instance, with the celebratory postcards
of lynchings that were made well into this century in our own country.

"These pictures are pictures of colonial behavior," wrote Philip Kennicott
in a powerful piece in the Washington Post, "the demeaning of occupied
people, the insult to local tradition, the humiliation of the vanquished.
They are unexceptional. In different forms, they could be pictures of the
Dutch brutalizing the Indonesians; the French brutalizing the Algerians; the
Belgians brutalizing the people of the Congo."

For us, the present imbroglio has been a long time coming; and unpredictable
as the specifics with their modern twist (the digital photo loosed onto
computer systems) may be, the path to these horrors was a remarkably
straight one. We don't need further investigations to see this -- though I
thought Rumsfeld's announcement Friday that he was setting up an
"independent review board" to look into the previous investigations of Abu
Ghraib had a certain charm. Assumedly it will be followed by an
investigation of the investigation of the various earlier investigations,
given that this "blue ribbon" panel, as the New York Times termed it in a
piece Saturday, is made up so far only of members of the Defense Policy
Board, an advisory body to the Pentagon, headed until recently by this
administration's famed neocon "prince of darkness" Richard Perle. It might
lead you to ask, "Independent of what exactly?"

Of course, why "investigate" when this has been investigated, and then
General Taguba's scathing report was, against military regulations,
classified secret and kept away from the public gaze until those "postcards"
began to exfiltrate Iraq. (According to the Federation of American
Scientists' Project on Secrecy, "The executive order that governs national
security classification states that "In no case shall information be
classified in order to... conceal violations of law.") You also don't need
to investigate because simple logic takes you directly down the Guantanamo
highway to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, which are sure to be simply a way
station along the road to "atrocities" (the word Senator Kerry recently
apologized for in relation to Vietnam) elsewhere, including in the prison
cesspool that Guantanamo is sure to prove to be.

Most of the comments, apologetic or horrified, out of this administration
really have to do with "image," "standing," loss of "reputation" or of
"credibility," with "wrong impressions" and, of course, "damage control."
Only to Americans, inside our imperial bubble-world, can these sound faintly
reasonable or at all like actual apologies of any sort. The other day in his
interview with Al Arabiya Television, for instance, the President said:


"In our country, when there's an allegation of abuse -- more than an
allegation in this case, actual abuse, we saw the pictures -- there will be
a full investigation and justice will be delivered. We have a presumption of
innocent until you're guilty in our system, but the system will be
transparent, it will be open and people will see the results. This is a
serious matter. It's a matter that reflects badly on my country. Our
citizens in America are appalled by what they saw, just like people in the
Middle East are appalled. We share the same deep concerns. And we will find
the truth, we will fully investigate. The world will see the investigation
and justice will be served."

"The presumption of innocent[ce]" is indeed the American Way, as the
President has said, but in this case only for America (and not, of course,
for Jose Padilla or Yaser Esam Hamdi, American citizens who have experienced
their own private Guantanamos in military brigs and jails right here in the
USA). In fact, that was the very point of Bush administration policy
post-9/11. Their too-clever-by-half move that produced the present situation
was to portion off small American-controlled areas of the globe -- generally
military bases, our modern imperial "gunboats" -- as "not America" and so
beyond the legal reach or oversight of anyone from the Supreme Court to the
International Red Cross. Guantanamo was, of course, to be the master stroke
in this policy and so the pride of our new offshore penal system.

It tells you everything you need to know about that system that, two years
later, this administration hasn't managed to conduct a single trial, even of
the stacked sort they thought would put their enemies of choice away
forever. (And remember, they made it quite clear that, should they lose any
of these tribunals of their choosing, they considered it their right to keep
prisoners behind bars anyway as long as the "war on terrorism" was ongoing.)
This, too, is now the American Way. And -- let me say it once more -- what
we're not talking about here is a system that has anything to do with
determining "innocence," which would indeed imply a system of justice; it is
intent only on the breaking of wills and the extraction of information, and
so by its essential nature a torture system.

Note, by the way, that Major General Geoffrey Miller, head of Guantanamo
prison, was recently brought to Iraq to "overhaul" the prison system there.
(Our global mini-gulag is now extensive enough that it seems to have its own
career ladder.) In the last few days, he has been one of a string of high
officials who have "apologized" to Iraqis and now he claims that he's taking
perhaps 10 of the 50-odd techniques for severe interrogation, including
hooding, off the table in that country. Dexter Filkins of the New York Times
reports:


"But he defended practices like depriving prisoners of sleep and forcing
them into 'stress positions' as legitimate means of interrogation, noting
that they are among 50-odd coercive techniques sometimes used against enemy
detainees. [He seems since to have changed his mind on sleep
deprivation.]... He said he saw his main purpose in both places as
extracting as much intelligence as possible to help the American war effort.
'We were enormously proud of what we had done in Guantánamo, to be able to
be able to set that kind of environment where we were focused on gaining the
maximum amount of intelligence,' General Miller said.He also defended the
use of contract interrogators, saying he had employed 30 at Guantánamo."

We now know as well that General Miller originally visited Abu Ghraib back
in the fall of 2003 and seems to have really gotten the ball rolling by
offering a little piece of helpful advice from a penal colony all-star. He
suggested "that military detention centers in Iraq should serve as an
'enabler for interrogation' and that the prison guards should 'set the
conditions for successful exploitation of the internees.'" As Seymour Hersh,
whose New Yorker piece really broke the Abu Ghraib story, commented in an
appearance on Fox TV's The O'Reilly Factor, "One of [the other
investigations of Abu Ghraib] was done by a major general who was involved
in Guantanamo, General Miller. And it's very classified, but I can tell you
that he was recommending exactly doing the kind of things that happened in
that prison, basically. He wanted to cut the lines. He wanted to put the
military intelligence in control of the prison." The general, whether he has
ever lifted a hand against a prisoner or directly ordered one of those
"stress" methods (and it seems he has), is by the very nature of what he has
overseen a torturer and, like those above him, deserves prosecution.

Out there in the world, given the system the Bush administration has spent
over two years carefully setting in place, it's "guilty forever." Out there,
whether at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Force Base, "Camp Justice" on
the Indian Ocean Island of Diego Garcia (an "aircraft carrier" of an
island), or in so many detention areas, holding facilities, literal
aircraft-carrier prisons, and even the foreign jails of "friendly allies,"
where prisoners have been more or less openly sent for torture, there is not
only no presumption of innocence, but no chance of proving one's innocence.

Perhaps the most striking and least commented upon aspect of the recent
interviews with Iraqi detainees, who were abused and tortured in various
ways and are now on the outside (and so could be interviewed) is this: When
asked why they were released, they invariably have no idea. One day, they
were simply notified that they would soon be released, or they were just
unceremoniously dumped out on the street. As far as I can tell, in no cases
were their releases explained to them. This isn't strange. After all, what
explanation could be offered, since the very concept of "innocence" has
disappeared, as it must in a thoroughly extrajudicial world. (This sort of
thing takes Kafka's famed novel The Trial, whose scenes were once a
touchstone for describing totalitarian worlds, several steps beyond anything
he imagined.)

Sooner or later, assumedly, detainees prove to be not innocent, but of no
further use or perhaps they are found never to have been any use at all --
and so they're tossed out of prison with no more explanation than when they
entered it. Robert Moran of Knight Ridder reported on one bizarre recent
prisoner release from Abu Ghraib:


"Scores of prisoners released from the controversial Abu Ghraib prison
Tuesday were forced to take a winding, nearly five-hour journey through
central Iraq on three hot, rickety buses escorted by U.S. military Humvees
before being deposited without explanation in the middle of a gravel quarry
near Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. It was unclear why the detainees,
at least a hundred of them, were dropped off at the remote location 120
miles north of Baghdad. One detainee, who declined to give his name, asked,
'Is this democracy?'"

No, this had nothing to do with "democracy." It was the logical culmination
of, the final small torture in an extrajudicial system meant only to extract
information by whatever means. Now we know why Gillo Pontecorvo's film about
rebellion and torture in French colonial Algeria, The Battle of Algiers, was
shown at the Pentagon back in 2003. It's just too bad that everyone
evidently focused on the tortures, meant to break the back of the Algerian
resistance, and ignored the film's ending.

And here's the irony of it all. Such methods -- from the "softening up"
humiliations to the harder stuff -- were meant to crack first the hard nuts
of al-Qaeda and then the bitter-ender Baathists from Saddam's regime of
torture and murder. But the more information these prisons and their
"exploitation" units pumped out, the more insecure Iraq (and the world
became). The more they applied such horrors to crack our enemies, the closer
this administration came to cracking itself. ("One Pentagon consultant said
that officials with whom he works on Iraq policy continue to put on a happy
face publicly, but privately are grim about the situation in Baghdad. When
it comes to discussions of the administration's Iraq policy, he said, 'It's
"Dead Man Walking."'") Now the post-9/11 torture system, in the form of
those postcards from the edge, seems to be cracking the Bush administration
wide open. Under "torture," it's they who have folded. If there isn't a
lesson here, remind me what the lesson should be.

Who are we anyway?

Novelist and former British intelligence officer John Le Carré wrote a
series of Cold War thrillers, of which the most famous were The Spy Who Came
In from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. All of them cumulatively
offered an essential insight for that era. Although the Russian KGB, British
intelligence, and our own CIA had all plunged "into the shadows" to play the
deadly game of spy vs. spy, it turned out, in that underground realm, where
each side believed itself to be blocking the other's crucial advances,
something strange was happening. Their spies and our spies were coming to
feel they had more in common with each other than with either of the
societies they were ostensibly defending. Underground, their ways of life
began to merge. Le Carré's was an essential insight and he was the first to
bring it back from the intelligence netherworld in novels that are still
striking to read.

But here's the strange thing -- as he makes clear in his latest thriller
Absolute Friends -- when the Soviet Union collapsed, instead of folding its
tent, the last standing global superpower simply absorbed much from the
other side and soon plunged further into the shadows. And in doing so, our
own system -- out there in the imperium (and increasingly at home as
well) -- became more "absolute," more oppressive, more -- in short --
Russian.

We see the grim results of that in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. We see it in
the continuous growth of the Pentagon despite the loss of all major military
enemies. We see it in the grim, helter-skelter way the Bush administration
has been replaying its own primal experiences -- the Cold War and Vietnam.
In particular, though it's hardly been noted, we see it in the way this
administration is acting out the one policy that, in the era of two
superpowers, remained a fantasy.

Given the power of the Russian military, especially once it nuclearized, the
American position in the Cold War was generally considered one of
"containment." But particularly in the early years, another policy was
discussed with fervor. John Foster Dulles, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's
Secretary or State (and brother of then-CIA Director Allen Dulles) called it
"rollback." We were to rollback the borders of the Soviet empire by
subversion and by military power. Never practiced (except in a few heady
Korean-War months), it was much dreamt about.

Now, in the post-Soviet era, our government has taken aspects of the worst
Cold War dreams of both sides. It wants to dominate the world. (Remember
when this is what we swore they wanted to do?) It wants to control an
extrajudicial penal system for its enemies, a kind of global Siberia
shielded from prying eyes of any sort; and it wants rollback of the now
pathetically impoverished remnants of the Soviet Union, Putin's Russia
(still dangerously nuclear armed). So as NATO has, with our enthusiastic
support pushed deep into the western borderlands of the old Soviet Union,
the U.S. military has driven its own bases deep into the former Yugoslavia,
the former Islamic SSRs, those 'stans of Central Asia, into Afghanistan
(where the Soviet Union essentially expired in a brutal lost war that also
gave birth to al Qaeda), and prospectively into the former SSR of Georgia
which sits on a crucial oil pipeline meant to bring Caspian oil to Europe
and beyond.

This then is the world according to Bush, the world from which those photos
emerged. Tom



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