In the Penal colony
("what else can I be, but all apologies"- Nirvana) The other night wednesday, Ted Koppel rounded up his broadcast by mentioning Hannah Arendt, This was nice they don't they mention Arendt enough on network TV. Her mentioned her in reference to her phrase the banality of evil which comes from her observations of the Eichmann trial. Her point was that it was not that evil was to be denied, but that one of its enduring facets was the way it could be scaled and accomplished in the most routine, organizational, dutiful, and pedestrian manner, by the most ordinary human beings, even and maybe often accompanied by vague feelings of righteousness.
Currently the Washington Hot Seat belongs to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The President spent the week in the midwest, and the Secretary of State is making few public statements. Powell at least resisted the temptation to draw a rhetorical ring around a handful of enlisted people and brand them fundamentally un-american, and blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman even, as Rumsfeld did. The President took care to distance himself from the Secretary both physically and politically - being in a different state while leaving an private reprimand of Rumsfeld behind to be officially leaked across the media. He also ramped up his rhetoric through the week toward something akin to a genuine apology Bush Again Apologizes for Abuse of Iraqis
As an ordinary citizen there was little to do this week but watch glumly from the side lines as this played out. This being of course the treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison complex. Having been a junior enlisted person myself I can't imagine the notion of the President having to apologize to the world for something I did. In the news hollow of the week end. Its worth trying to abstract a few general lines out of this situation. First this situation is turning around the activities of one unit, individuals within one company, but this is only because of the pictures. It is really the pictures driving this not the activities. The question is whether reservists of the 372 Military Police Company are an assortment of anomalous bad apples or rather the one weak link in extended regular army, reserve army, contract interrogator chain that couldn't stay with the program and broke down. there are a couple of perspectives to take on that last.
Also what we're seeing here is the nexus of a number of different threads that have marked the current approach to the wars we are fighting. The abstraction and objectification of the enemy as the damned, pre stripped of their humanity. This is true of any war, but its never completely natural and always requires a bit of manufacture. This feed directly into the next thread is is the very large number of prisoners of the "war on terror" which despite its bellicose nomenclature does not produce prisoners of war, but rather detainees. These detainees are not accorded the formal rights that a prisoner of war would receive, they don't in fact have any formal legal status at all. They are at the mercy of a bureaucracy that does not see them as having reason, cause, or culture, only information. This has spread from the initial campaign against active Al Qaeda terrorists, to everyone rounded up in the Afghanistan war, and from there to the war on Iraq and continuing insurgency. It has been passed on by the Supreme court has has passed onward to becoming an American institution. As a Washington Post editorial A System of Abuse, an NYT Editorial The New Iraq Crisis: The Military Archipelago
And the Guardian all sketched out last week This is the new gulag.
The Washington Post also weighed in with a large recapitulation of the the events with a time line on Sunday
Search for Solutions Had Opposite Effect. Although most of this information did not go beyond what weblogs like Whiskey Jar had written up by midweek (something the Post actually admitted - they even referenced Alternet - on page e7 of the "webwatch" column of the Sunday business section). All this data make one thing clear the general policies on place; the 20 approved methods were approved at the highest levels of government. All this was thrown into the chaos of occupied Iraq; deliberated extended on the advice of General Miller - in contrapoint to the report of General Tagbula (
NPR : Taguba: 'Failure in Leadership' Led to Iraqi Prison Abuse). The Officer corps of the military police seeing responsibility for detainee's given to military intelligence seemed to have decided to stay away from Abu Ghraib and other prisons alltogether.
This last strain is the most problematic: Military Intelligence like so much else in Iraq and in the New Model Military seems to have been largely outsourced to civilian contracted entities. In the interest of avoiding a lot of unneccesary words on this, the purpose of this is very obvious, it is not a cost-cutting measure. It is for the purpose of shortcircuiting accountability and placing the civilian leadership of the War Department in direct and out-of-sight control of American foreign policy. It is a trend which is on a very straight and downsloping road towards privately operated militaries.
Donald Rumsfeld has said that this, while being cruel and in-humane was not torture. If that is so, may I take him by the hand and lead him into his penal colony through the doors Abu Ghraib, the kids of the 372nd strip him bare and douse him with freezing water and leave him in an empty cell and in the morning they take him down to my "special" room. Here I have my borrowed creation - one of a kind really. It is like a sewing machine. I place him on the gurney below it strap him down and start the motor. It reads his heart and begins: the scapel hand lowers and makes the rectangular incision, through the skin, on a separate rotor a device similarto garden shears reaches down and snaps away the masking bones of the rib cage. There the machine and needle embroider on the naked flesh of his living heart. "I was outraged - when I saw the photographs."
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Added a few more links I intended to put in and, cleaned this up a little when I got home from work circa 11May04 20:00 edt.
11:33:35 PM  ;;
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