Writing in yesterday's Christian Science Monitor, former Pentagon strategist Larry Seaquist said it best:
"With no weapons of mass destruction to be found and security an ever more elusive vision, the only remaining rationale for America's fierce grip on Iraq is that the Army's heart is pure. The U.S. stays only to plant the seeds of democracy. That noble goal alone justifies the huge cost in death and injury, money and material," he writes. "Goodbye."
The already epochal, graphic and haunting images of the systematic atrocities among the 50,000 or so detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison 20 miles west of Baghdad that CBS News aired last week, and revealed in conjunction with Seymour Hersh's explosive expose of the matter in the May 10 New Yorker magazine, are seared irreversibly into the corporate memory of our species.
The only thing more morally abject than such institutional cruelty is when it is wedded with grossest hypocrisy. By these actions, the U.S. has undercut any moral authority it may ever hope to coax, impose, or otherwise win from the world beyond, or for that matter, within, its own borders.
You don't play games with this sort of thing. As bad as the atrocities have been, it is even worse to learn that reports of such behavior stemmed back to U.S. military operations in Afghanistan following 9/11, and were documented as occurring systematically at Abu Ghraib in an official military report as long ago as last November, without any action being taken.
Indeed, the systemic refusal to take this documented evidence seriously, running the entire gamut of the U.S. military command right to the office of the Secretary of Defense, reveals a wanton lack of any sense of identity associated with America's mission as a force for good in the world.
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's confession that he'd ignored the report until it broke on CBS and in The New Yorker is prima facie grounds for his immediate dismissal. To ignore the existence of hard evidence, thoroughly reported utilizing official military means, of such a heinous debacle running so profoundly counter to everything the U.S. claims to represent to the world is the grossest form of dereliction of duty. And Rumsfeld has admitted to this, saying publicly that, as of last weekend, he still hadn't even completed reading the report that was completed in February.
Moreover, the report was classified by the Pentagon as "secret," allowing for no accounting to Congress or the public as the atrocities continued unabated. Indeed, when CBS announced plans to air some of the photographs on its "60 Minutes 2" last week, Rumsfeld's reaction was to urge the network to participate in the Pentagon cover up.
Indeed, an equally important question pertains to the level of command of the military and/or the Central Intelligence Agency that not only condoned, but authorized and supervised the atrocities.
Hersh quoted Gary Myers, one of the military defense attorneys in the My Lai prosecutions of the Vietnam era who is defending one of the soldiers at the prison charged with criminal offenses for participating in the atrocities. "My client's defense will be that he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in particular the directions of military intelligence," he said. "Do you really think that a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude?"
(Of course, there was more going on than walking around nude, as Hersh documents from Major General Antonio M. Tabuga's report. "While dehumanization is unacceptable in any culture, it is especially so in the Arab world," Hersh wrote. "Homosexual acts are against Islamic law. Being put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, it's all a form of torture." The Taguba report also cited the following: "Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.")
Horrifying in any case, these tactics were used against countless detainees herded into the prison without evidence of involvement in insurgent or criminal activity, and seldom achieve the allegedly-desired result of gaining vital intelligence. "Use of force or humiliation is invariably counterproductive," Hersh quotes a 36-year veteran CIA agent. "They'll tell you what you want to hear, truth or no truth. `You can flog me until I tell you what I know you want me to say.' You don't get righteous information."