In defense of the indefensible

2004.05.30 — Government | War | Satire | by Barton Castor

There is a split among my colleagues on the right prompted by the scandal in Iraqi prisons. Some—the president among them—have taken the moral high ground and condemned the abuse without qualification. I am among them. But there are others, shockingly, who have attempted to sweep the scandal under the rug. And I'm not just talking about that idiot Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh is one of those, making light of the Iraq abuse, calling it a fraternity prank and saying the guards just needed to "blow some steam off."

On a tangent, I heard some old clips of Joe McCarthy talking the other day, and I would've sworn it was Limbaugh. Their voices and phrasing are very similar. I wonder if they are related.

Senator James Inhofe has stated emphatically that he is "more outraged by the outrage" than by the abuse. What does the senator propose? That we all express our shock and shame privately and only to family members?

Inhofe went on to claim:

You know, they're not there for traffic violations. ... They're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents.

The only problem is: they're not. Most of the people in prisons all over Iraq were picked up in random sweeps that netted anyone and everyone who seemed suspicious, who was fingered by their neighbors, or who otherwise was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The ones who were brutally interrogated were those deemed to be of "intelligence value" (in other words: anyone the spooks thought might know something about the insurgency). Inhofe was right about one thing: they weren't there for traffic violations... They were there for less.

The truth is that our administration instituted a broad policy, first in Guantanamo and later in Iraq, that sidestepped the Geneva conventions specifically to allow interrogators to treat prisoners more roughly than Americans have traditionally preferred. When it was carefully controlled by trained agents and used against known Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters from Afghanistan, it was defensible. But when it was applied to random suspects by untrained and undisciplined grunts, it turned into nasty, pointless torture.

I know Donald Rumsfeld said, "I'm not going to address the 'torture' word." I wonder if he'd be ready to use the T-word if I attached some electrodes to his shriveled genitalia and told him he had to stand in a "stress position" to keep from being shocked.

Yet some people act as tho the problem is really with the pictures or with the media attention to them. They seem to say, "The real issue here isn't that the soldiers allegedly sicked dogs on the prisoners. The issue is that the liberal media has chosen to frame this incident such that it makes our soldiers look bad. They've consistently spun the idea of dog attacks on prisoners as a bad thing."

I guarantee that most Americans will let this embarrassing episode be forgotten, much as they have the various cases of police brutality in our own country. They won't call for resignations of the officials who approved these policies and implemented them. That goes right up to Rumsfeld, but the real blame lies with General Miller, who took over Abu Ghraib and turned it into a Military Intelligence infotainment facility, and General Karpinski, who took his advice and stayed away from the prison, turning her back on her soldiers and her responsibility to their prisoners. But Karpiski hasn't been fired, merely relieved... by Miller.

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