Random Thoughts

May 19, 2004

Where Will It End? “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!”
-- William Shakespeare, “Hamlet”

“The horror, the horror.”
-- Josef Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”

As a writer, I’ve met people who were self-admitted rapists, nighttime B&E specialists who lingered over sleeping couples’ beds, armed robbers and murderers, all of whom could talk about what they had done in an easy, reflective way. But I’ve never met a self-confessed torturer, or anyone who would dare admit that their violent abuse of someone amounted to torture. Some taboos are just too much of a horror to be spoken of.
So it says something that the United States has become the unspeakable horror of the world with the photos and stories coming out of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. When our own congressmen and senators say that the latest photos are “appalling” beyond words, we have to believe that our nation’s shame runs to the bone -- a horror that will haunt our footsteps for decades, the way the Germans have been haunted by the Nazis.
We are told that there are more than 1,600 new photos of prisoners who’ve been subjected to things so horrifying that the pictures should never see the light of day. Here are some accounts presented by lawmakers in an AP story:

“I saw cruel, sadistic torture,’’ said Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., who added that some of the images were of male prisoners masturbating. She said she saw a man hitting himself against a wall as though to knock himself unconscious.
Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., said he... saw people in body bags and a person with a face “virtually gone.’’ He saw ``people being stitched up above the eyebrow apparently unconscious.’”
Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., said, ``There were people who were forced to have sex with each other.’’
Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., said, ``There were some pictures where it looked like a prisoner was sodomizing himself’’ with an object. He said blood was visible in the photograph.”

And so on. Our representatives would have had more to say, but what they witnessed was depicted in a fast-click slide show that didn’t lend itself to closer examination. The prisoner whose face was “virtually gone” -- was it chewed off by a guard dog under the gleeful eyes of U.S. soldiers? We don’t know, but that’s probably the sort of story that has begun circulating around the Islamic world as urban legends make the abuse even more ghoulish than it already is.
Who should take the fall? Our own Rep. Bart Stupak had this to say last week:
“Once again, these new images are disgusting and it seems very clear these are not isolated instances of abuse by a handful of military soldiers, but actually a systemic pattern of behavior and treatment that I believe was encouraged from the top on down.”
Stupak reiterated his belief that President Bush should do the right thing under the circumstances: “I call on President Bush to immediately take action to restore our credibility and the first thing he should do is fire the Defense Secretary.”
Well, good luck on that score. As Sen. Edward Kennedy has noted: “We have blunder after blunder after blunder’’ through this whole sorry war masterminded by President Bush and his clueless advisors. As Andy Rooney noted recently on “60 Minutes,” President Bush has spent 40 of his last 60 days in office out on the road making campaign speeches to his fellow Republicans when what is needed is someone who’ll devote full time to fixing the historic disaster in Iraq. A disaster which has claimed the lives of more than 750 American soldiers.
Whatever happens, it’s clear from the beheading of Nicholas Berg that this has become a more dangerous world for Americans. The savagery of a few ignorant hicks at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has tarred millions of good-hearted Americans with the same sewage brush, making us fair game for all of the resentful, envious people of the world. It will be more dangerous to travel or work abroad as an American. More dangerous for our troops in Iraq.
In the novel, “The Heart of Darkness” (remade as “Apocalypse Now”), commander Kurtz is so horrified by the hand-chopping extremes of King Leopold II’s soldiers in the Belgium Congo that it drives him to madness and acts of savagery as well. He mutters, “The horror, the horror,” by his pyramid of skulls, stripped of his humanity. The lesson of the book, and the film, is that one bad thing can only lead to another.
We need to do the right thing, right now, to repair the damage to our nation. Unfortunately, that will take political wisdom and courage, both of which seem to be in short supply.