But it must not. Must not ever fade. Cannot. In the fading lies the danger of repetition: the ever-recurring danger. The danger of brutality. More of it. More cruelty. Stupidity. Evil. We never did this or that, some might think, will want to think, unschooled in history. Yet that, that terrible thing, that awful sequence of horrendous things, is precisely what we do do, again and again, and again. What we do while ignorant of history, or unmindful of it. While indifferent to it. Uncaring. As arrogant as ever. The human degradation that occurred in that prison in Iraq: much, much more than a “scandal.” But yes. Without question. Crimes against humanity: a more fitting term. War crimes, sanctioned by various arms of the United States government. Sanctioned because, after all, who cares about those people? Are they not all pigs, all “terrorists,” all anti-American sons of bitches? (Or, if they are women, just bitches?) The wise, sad man with those eyes that had seen too much—much too much—said:
(Yes, to be sure—he warned. Warned as others have warned, continue to warn. But when, and where, does our listening begin?) In the case of that prison in Iraq and what was done to human beings there by United States soldiers and officers (and what was done to human beings in Afghanistan by U.S. soldiers, and what was done, is still being done, by U.S. soldiers to human beings in Guantánamo Bay--), where does indifference begin? Abu Ghraib. And so the photographs of male and female U.S. soldiers torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners were published. This year, 2004. Made public in newspapers, electronically, in magazines, and on TV. All over the world. Violations revealed: Iraqi women and men, civilians held as prisoners for indefinite periods (and what exactly were the charges?). Iraqi people held naked, bound, hooded. In that nakedness degraded by U.S. soldiers. Vulnerable in that nakedness to who knew what sort of further humiliation and torture at the hands of gleeful American soldiers. Iraqi men forced by laughing U.S. soldiers to simulate sex acts with each other. (Yes: a profound violation of Islam.) So much glee on those laughing American faces. Some of the soldiers sporting the “thumbs up” sign as they humiliated the Iraqi prisoners. (Or as they crouched over the dead ones.)
But then remember this above all else, except the torture itself: that not one of us—not the United States public, nor the rest of the world, and certainly not the people of Iraq —were ever supposed to know about any of it. We were not meant to know about the torture, the violations —about all that malevolence visited upon Iraqi bodies by— Yes. By American hands. A secret. To be kept as secret, surely, as U.S./C.I.A. aid to mujahideen in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet Union’s invasion, 1979-1988. The United States having begun supplying aid to the mujahideen six months before the Soviets invaded. As secret as the U.S.’s training of the Iranian secret police under the Shah in the 1970s.
Who then were their “superiors”? More importantly, their ultimate “superiors”? The head of the C.I.A.?
Already we are beginning to forget. The United States did sign the Geneva Conventions. It did sign the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It did sign—yes, without question—the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Global treaties, all. Each treaty expressly enjoining, enjoining the use of torture in any situation, for any reason, ever.
“Torture should be added to the list of evils that the Bush administration is defending, in accordance with a foreign policy based on unilateral American domination of the globe.” But then remember this too: that it all began long ago. Began not with a prison in a country invaded by the United States for nefarious reasons (can any invasion ever occur for a “good” reason?), but on American soil, in Atlantic waters. Centuries ago. Those bodies, raped and humiliated, torn and burned, castrated and flayed and yes, O yes, now remember: so much more. Forced to work the land, forced to breed. Forced to swallow and forced to—. . . . Those bodies that, while chained, could not speak for themselves against the torture, though many did escape, many fled. (Fled, including by way of suicide: death, the most guaranteed route of flight.) Those bodies so long ago and not so long ago: hanged, burned. Raped, and ripped. The ones that, if they did not wind up in smoke-shrouded trees, if they were not whipped to death, knew, like the hooded, bound bodies in Abu Ghraib, the power of the commanding state. The power of the gag. So long ago— And yes, it is true: that torture, like slavery, like the torture of slavery, like the various forms of enslavement with which forms of torture are invariably connected and without which they cannot succeed, requires a certain secrecy. (The world would know nothing, the U.S. public would know nothing, the citizens of Iraq would certainly know nothing.) Yet, as in the case of Abu Ghraib and other sites like it, an audience for the torture—an audience that at the very least participates in the torture by doing nothing to stop it—almost always exists. An audience, in the case of Abu Ghraib, that snapped photographs, and also jeered (“thumbs up”). Laughed.
Yes, they did. Back then, in that time (but not so long ago). All the time. They photographed them. Photographed the people in the trees, swaying from the trees if they were not already ash, with broken necks, with stretched necks. With fire-scorched bodies. Blackened hands. (Soot, ash.) Photographed the people dangling. Dangling from those limbs. (The leaves – how beautiful, how green, despite the smoke. . . . Oak? Ash? Beech? Sycamore? But never, as far as anyone has seen, any sort of pine, conifer.) They photographed themselves looking at the dangling people. And themselves sometimes laughing. A party. A party for all, provided that they were white. Provided that they were not Iraqi. Provided that (in the case of the unfortunates massacred at My Lai by American soldiers) they were not Vietnamese. “[W]e—and the rest of the world—are . . . bothered by the fact that the U.S. soldiers in the [Abu Ghraib] pictures (and presumably those taking the pictures) clearly got a kick out of what they were doing. In this respect, these photos resemble the postcards circulating in the United States in the early 20th century showing white people smiling and cheering at the lynchings of black men (and sometimes women)—the photos that showed us that racial animus can amount to a kind of giddy arousal.”
Sickened: the exact word. One is sickened, and shocked, by the brutality—by the sheer cruelty possible at American hands, revealed in the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib. (Although, yet again, if one can manage to live with an unflinching view of American history—of world history—one is not surprised. If one is black and living in the United States, one should certainly not be surprised.) As a member of U.S. society, as a human being, one might even be ashamed. Yet one learns—I learn—that shame, in the face of inhumane behavior, is not enough. Anger even is not enough, although it can fuel the correct sort of civic moves toward clarity and, in a case such as the Abu Ghraib abuses, justice. Already, here and there, various media in the U.S. and elsewhere are featuring stories about which individual in the president’s administration should or should not have kept more close watch over the prison, over the armed forces and the soldiers and officers assigned to the prison, and over the innumerable varying conditions—political, social, some glaringly evident, others less obvious—which may have contributed to the violence (in addition to war) inflicted on Iraqi bodies. Yet few gazes seem truly interested in the fact that not only did the U.S. soldiers’ behavior at Abu Ghraib betray a profound disrespect for, and even hatred of, Iraqi people and their culture, religion, and history (not surprisingly, of course—rare is the plunderer who would behave respectfully); the contempt and general inhumanity the American torturers displayed for their prisoners also clearly must in some way have been approved—encouraged—by some among their superiors, who, in one way or another, felt such contempt themselves. That contempt, known in some quarters as xenophobia or racism or both—a dire combination in men and women carrying guns, as often shown by U.S. police forces, especially when present in poorer neighborhoods and areas.
And so, in the wake of a memo written by the Assistant Attorney General and supported by the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel (of course), the current president of the U.S., a president not legally elected by the majority, believes that he and those who would follow him (and there are many) can disregard the Geneva Conventions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the U.N. Convention Against Torture. And so the U.S. government in this present historical moment will not only flout human rights at Abu Ghraib. It will also do so, as it has already done, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where who knows how many suspects of anti-U.S. government actions are being held. (Do their families know? Do they have legal counsel? Does anyone know where they are?) It will do so, as it did before, in Afghanistan. As it did at (among so many other places) My Lai. My Lai 1968 Vietnamese village more than 400 civilians murdered there by U.S. soldiers most of the murdered having been women children elderly
Afghanistan
Unfortunately, unlike Los Angeles in 1992, no one happened to be nearby with a video camera. How many voices yet to be heard
(But so important: to remember) (Yes, critical: to remember) (Utterly crucial: to remember) to not forget many would rather that we forget
A few of the abuses the American soldiers perpetrated upon their prisoners:
Abu Ghraib now they are in a pile bodies in a pile they made them get naked for the pile why is that woman walking the man on a dog leash why do they have those people wearing hoods Abu Ghraib so this is the prison Guantánamo but no one knows they are there no one knows the bodies are there why are the American soldiers here the soldiers care nothing for Islam outside Iraq is still burning one of the oldest countries the oldest civilizations in the world is burning so many bombs and limbs and torn people and bones and is it true that some of the women were raped in Abu Ghraib is it true that they are holding children there the soldiers the soldiers saluting the American flag the soldiers enjoying watching the male prisoners forced to simulate sex acts prison
But who cares? (A voice, one of many: out there. Heard, sensed, witnessed in the past. Recurring. Always there.) For after all, They are only
security, security,
The reasons for the U.S. soldiers’ taking those photographs of the Iraqi prisoners experiencing abuse? Photographs of men forced to simulate sex acts, including oral and anal sex, with each other; photos of a bound man cringing before a threatening guard dog; photographs of naked men wearing hoods (but so many photos like that), and of a man pulled along at the end of a dog leash, by a female soldier— “It was just for fun,” that female soldier remarked.
And doctors—
Doctors, yes. Doctors who, as disclosed in recent reports, also colluded with the torture of Iraqi bodies by doing nothing about it. Doctors seem to have colluded in covering up . . . deaths of detainees in Iraq . . . [a] well-known case was described . . . in which an Iraqi general suffocated after his interrogators pushed him upside down in a sleeping bag and sat on his chest. An on-site surgeon, whose report was initially posted on a Pentagon Web site, said the general had died of natural causes. One of the medics . . . was called to treat a prisoner who had been punched so hard that he could not breathe. While there, the medic saw detainees stacked naked in a pile—a now well-known photograph. He failed to report the incident. . . . Army regulations, the Geneva Convention and the federal War Crimes Act require all military personnel, not just medics, to report evidence of abuse or torture.
THE UNITED STATES AS A DECIMATING FORCE. THE GOOD CITIZEN, LANGUAGE, AND MEMORY In such a configuring alone—that of the U. S. as decimating force—the nation carries too much history. As if the Atlantic slave trade were not enough: the creation of (in that case) utterly unbearable history. (Yet it is astonishing—is it not?—how much human beings discover, over centuries or through nights and days, they actually can bear.) The erasing of millions of histories, including those of the peoples whose feet, millennia before, first roamed through all the ranges of the Americas. And no, we must not stop talking about it
for all of it, like so many other perpetrations, has not yet been fully remembered. In future times, we might become brave enough and honest enough to term all of it, correctly, what it was: an American Holocaust. In future times, we will perhaps be brave enough (honest enough) not to shrink before the word “Holocaust.” The United States still, today, evermore, as decimating force. As if its undermining and toppling of democratically elected governments all over the world were not enough. (And what was at stake in the particular toppling? Oil? Land? Private sector investment in, contracts with, U.S. corporate interests? The “threat” of Communism?) As if the constant denial of its own culpability in so much world misery were not enough. And so in the context of the corporate-driven empire, the anti-human empire, does memory become the Enemy of the Good Citizen? Does the Good Citizen, at his government’s behest, worship before amnesia’s crotch? Worship amnesia’s scent (foul or divine) and its substance? (The shape of its bulges…) Does the Good Citizen permit himself to swoon before amnesia’s caresses? If he does so, does it not follow that language itself then becomes a cloaking device?—a restrained and restraining device, the adversary of actual (as opposed to ideological, regime-shaped) truth? Language as prisoner of the censoring, monitoring state. Language: the most powerful resource of both dissidents and despots. Corralled language: restrained by -- cloaked within -- the state and state-ist regulated official untruths (“Iraq harbors weapons of mass destruction”). The language of official untruths in the grip of obscurantists and ideologues, including those of totalitarian regimes. Language that, in their grip, becomes not only the foundation of the Good Citizen’s amnesia (“Was the Vietnam War really that big a deal?” “Did the Holocaust really happen?” “Why do we have to keep talking about slavery?”) but also its most depraved counterpart as the enemy of testifying memory—the memory, state, faculty, that is most crucial to human dignity and possibility. The memory which refuses to forget that something happened here: Torture. Murder. Rape. Genocide. Invasion. The memory which refuses to bow before indifference. Indifference, the comrade-in-arms of amnesia and of corrupted, state-enslaved, ideological language. We must not forget Abu Ghraib Guantánamo And more More — What the United States government is perennially capable of What human beings are always capable of — 2004 |