Abu Ghraib Quotes

Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective. This hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick. ... We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it. We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state.

I saw a banner hanging next to city hall in downtown Philadelphia that read, "Kill them all, and let God sort them out." A bumper sticker read, "God will judge evildoers; we just have to get them to him." I saw a T-shirt on a soldier that said, "US Air Force... we don't die; we just go to hell to regroup." Others were less dramatic- red, white, and blue billboards saying, "God bless our troops." "God Bless America" became a marketing strategy. One store hung an ad in their window that said, "God bless America--$1 burgers." Patriotism was everywhere, including in our altars and church buildings. In the aftermath of September 11th, most Christian bookstores had a section with books on the event, calendars, devotionals, buttons, all decorated in the colors of America, draped in stars and stripes, and sprinkled with golden eagles. This burst of nationalism reveals the deep longing we all have for community, a natural thirst for intimacy... September 11th shattered the self-sufficient, autonomous individual, and we saw a country of broken fragile people who longed for community- for people to cry with, be angry with, to suffer with. People did not want to be alone in their sorrow, rage, and fear. But what happened after September 11th broke my heart. Conservative Christians rallies around the drums of war. Liberal Christian took to the streets. The cross was smothered by the flag and trampled under the feet of angry protesters. The church community was lost, so the many hungry seekers found community in the civic religion of American patriotism. People were hurting and crying out for healing, for salvation in the best sense of the word, as in the salve with which you dress a wound. A people longing for a savior placed their faith in the fragile hands of human logic and military strength, which have always let us down. They have always fallen short of the glory of God. ...The tragedy of the church's reaction to September 11th is not that we rallied around the families in New York and D.C. but that our love simply reflected the borders and allegiances of the world. We mourned the deaths of each soldier, as we should, but we did not feel the same anger and pain for each Iraqi death, or for the folks abused in the Abu Ghraib prison incident. We got farther and farther from Jesus' vision, which extends beyond our rational love and the boundaries we have established. There is no doubt that we must mourn those lives on September 11th. We must mourn the lives of the soldiers. But with the same passion and outrage, we must mourn the lives of every Iraqi who is lost. They are just as precious, no more, no less. In our rebirth, every life lost in Iraq is just as tragic as a life lost in New York or D.C. And the lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like six September 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.

In 2004, Jacques Derrida said that a change was under way. Torture damages the inflicter as well as the inflicted. It’s no coincidence that one of the Abu Ghraib torturers came to the military directly from a job as a chicken processor. It might be slow, Derrida said, but eventually the spectacle of our abuse of animals will be intolerable to our sense of who we are.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has abandoned its role as a champion of human rights and has perpetrated terrible and illegal abuses in prisons in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, sent prisoners secretly to other nations to be tortured, denied the applicability of the Geneva Convention restraints, and severely restricted time-honored civil liberties within our own country. Certain political leaders of other nations, who are inclined to perpetrate human rights abuses to quiet dissenting voices and were previously restrained by positive influence from Washington, now feel free to emulate or exceed the abuses approved by American leaders.

People had a drive to immortalize their past, even the evil stuff, like Abu Ghraib or the Holocaust. They liked to take pictures, keep journals, because they believed in what they were doing. No one, Naomi had learned, did evil without believing it was right at the time. Maybe this was why it was nearly impossible to talk them out of it?

Are the soldiers of Abu Ghraib, or even Auschwitz guards and ISIS hostage-takers, inherently different from you and me?

Denial helps the bystander. We don't want to know what the boys we send to Iraq have done to others out of terror, or what others have done to them. We would rather not know about terror or be confronted with evil. This is as true about Abu Ghraib as it is about person assaults and more private crimes, the crimes that occur inside families. But the victim, too, cannot bear to believe. She may bury or dissociate from or disown her pain...to be raped or abused or threatened with violent death; to be treated as an object in a perpetrator's dream, rather than the subject of your own - these are bad enough. But when observers become complicit in the victim's desire to forget, they become perpetrators, too. When authorities disbelieve the victim, when bystanders refute what they cannot bear to know, they rob the victim of normal existence on the earth. Bystander and victim collude in denial or forgetting, and in so doing, repeat the abuse. Life for the victim now begins anew. In this new world, the victim can no longer trust the evidence of her senses. Something seems to have happened, but what? The ground disappears. This is the alchemy of denial: terror, rage, and pain are replaced with free-floating shame. The victim will being to wonder: What did I do? She will being to believe: I must have done something bad. But the sensation of shame is shameful itself, so we dissociate that, too. In the end, a victim who has suffered the denial of others will come to see herself as a liar.

There have been extensive human rights violations by American psychiatrists over the last 70 years. These doctors were pad by the American taxpayer through CIA and military contracts. It is past time for these abuses to stop, it is past time for a reckoning, and it is past time for individual doctors to be held accountable. The Manchurian Candidate Programs are of much more than "historical" interest. ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, MKULTRA and MKSEARCH are precursors of mind control programs that are operational in the twenty first century. Human rights violations by psychiatrists must be ongoing in programs like COPPER GREEN, the interrogation program at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Such programs must be carried out within CIA units like Task Force 121 (The Dallas Morning News, December 1, 2004, p. 1A). Information pointing to ongoing human rights violations by psychiatrists is available in publications like The New Yorker (see article by Seymour M. Hersh, May 24, 2004). Yes the indifference, silence, denial, and disinformation of organized medicine and psychiatry continue. One purpose of The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations By American Psychiatrists is to break that silence.

Three years earlier, when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq became public, Rush Limbaugh—the most popular radio broadcaster in the United States, whose syndicated radio show has, at last count, 13 million listeners—described the prisoners who had been killed, raped, tortured, and humiliated by or at the behest of U.S. military personnel, as less than human. “They are the ones who are sick,” fumed Limbaugh.

But unlike those mornings at Abu Ghraib when I avoided prayer in order to ignore my own failures, I avoid it now because I have a debt to pay, and I have no right to petition someone else to pay it. I am a torturer. I

For the longest time the romantic explanation for low rates of female infection endured: Possession of a womb, it was supposed, conferred a gentleness which simply could not bear the viciousness of a lycanthropic heart. Female werewolves, masculine idiocy maintained, must be killing themselves in crazy numbers...It's quite extraordinary, given the wealth of historical evidence to the contrary, how long this fallacy of the gentler sex lasted, but the twentieth century (years before Myra and the girls of Abu Ghraib put their two penn'orth in) pretty much did away with it. Now we know: If women don't catch the werewolf bug, it's certainly not because they're sugar and spice and all things nice.

Winston Churchill once said that you can judge a society by how it treats its prisoners. You know, there was all this stuff about Abu Ghraib and what we're doing to Muslims in Iraq and Guantanamo and in Afghanistan and wherever else we've decided to lock up those whom we perceive to be a threat. People seem surprised by it, but all they had to do was look around them. We do it to our own people. We try children as adults. We lock up, even execute, the mentally ill. And we tie people naked to chairs in ice-cold rooms because their medication isn't working. If we can do that here, then how the hell can anybody be surprised when we don't treat our enemies any better? ~Aimee Price

The West has to take a critical look at itself and examine the apparent double standards at work that allow it to attack Iraq for possessing weapons of mass destruction but not North Korea, whose leader shared Saddam Hussein's megalomaniacal qualities; that permit it to rail against Iran about nuclear weapons but be silent about Israel's arsenal; that allow it to only selectively demand enforcement of UN resolutions. The West has to own up to the mistakes it has made: such as with Abu Ghraib and the torture in Afghan prisons; in the errant attacks on civilians; in its disregard for the basic precept of a civilized legal system, which maintains that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty.

In the last week of April 2004, a handful of the Abu Ghraib photographs were broadcast on 60 minutes and published in The New Yorker, and within a couple of days they had been rebroadcast and republished pretty much everywhere on earth. Overnight, the human pyramid, the hooded man on the box, the young woman soldier with a prisoner on a leash, and the corpse packed in ice had become the defining images of the Iraq war...Never before had such primal dungeon scenes been so baldly captured on camera...But above all, it was the posing soldiers, mugging for their buddies' cameras while dominating the prisoners in trophy stances, that gave the photographs the sense of unruly and unmediated reality. The staging was part of the reality they documented. And the grins, the thumbs-up, the arms crossed over puffed-out chests—all this unseemly swagger and self-regard was the height of amateurism. These soldier-photographers stood, at once, inside and outside the events they recorded, watching themselves take part in the spectacle, and their decision not to conceal but to reveal what they were doing indicated that they were not just amateur photographers, but amateur torturers. So the amateurism was not merely a formal dimension of the Abu Ghraib pictures. It was part of their content, part of what we saw in them, and it corresponded to an aspect of the Iraq War that troubled and baffled nearly everyone: the reckless and slapdash ineptitude with which it had been prosecuted. It was an amateur-run war, a murky and incoherent war. It was not clear why it was waged; too many reasons were given, none had held up, and the stories we invented to explain it to ourselves hardly seemed to matter, since once it was started the war had become its own engine—not a means to an end but an end in itself. What had been billed as a war of ideas and ideals had been exposed as a war of poses and posturing.

With the support and protection of Democratic legislators, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the major TV networks now undertook a relentless five-year propaganda campaign against the war, taking relatively minor incidents like the misbehavior of guards at the Abu Ghraib prison and blowing them up into international scandals damaging their country’s prestige and weakening its morale.

New Rule: If you're going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you may as well go ahead and make it about something. With all due respect to my friends Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, it seems that if you truly wanted to come down on the side of restoring sanity and reason, you'd side with the sane and the reasonable--and not try to pretend the insanity is equally distributed in both parties. Keith Olbermann is right when he says he's not the equivalent of Glenn Beck. One reports facts; the other one is very close to playing with his poop. And the big mistake of modern media has been this notion of balance for balance's sake, that the left is just as violent and cruel as the right, that unions are just as powerful as corporations, that reverse racism is just as damaging as racism. There's a difference between a mad man and a madman. Now, getting more than two hundred thousand people to come to a liberal rally is a great achievement that gave me hope, and what I really loved about it was that it was twice the size of the Glenn Beck crowd on the Mall in August--although it weight the same. But the message of the rally as I heard it was that if the media would just top giving voice to the crazies on both sides, then maybe we could restore sanity. It was all nonpartisan, and urged cooperation with the moderates on the other side. Forgetting that Obama tried that, and found our there are no moderates on the other side. When Jon announced his rally, he said that the national conversation is "dominated" by people on the right who believe Obama's a socialist, and by people on the left who believe 9/11 was an inside job. But I can't name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11 was an inside job. But Republican leaders who think Obama's socialist? All of them. McCain, Boehner, Cantor, Palin...all of them. It's now official Republican dogma, like "Tax cuts pay for themselves" and "Gay men just haven't met the right woman." As another example of both sides using overheated rhetoric, Jon cited the right equating Obama with Hitler, and the left calling Bush a war criminal. Except thinking Obama is like Hitler is utterly unfounded--but thinking Bush is a war criminal? That's the opinion of Major General Anthony Taguba, who headed the Army's investigation into Abu Ghraib. Republicans keep staking out a position that is farther and farther right, and then demand Democrats meet them in the middle. Which now is not the middle anymore. That's the reason health-care reform is so watered down--it's Bob Dole's old plan from 1994. Same thing with cap and trade--it was the first President Bush's plan to deal with carbon emissions. Now the Republican plan for climate change is to claim it's a hoax. But it's not--I know because I've lived in L.A. since '83, and there's been a change in the city: I can see it now. All of us who live out here have had that experience: "Oh, look, there's a mountain there." Governments, led my liberal Democrats, passed laws that changed the air I breathe. For the better. I'm for them, and not the party that is plotting to abolish the EPA. I don't need to pretend both sides have a point here, and I don't care what left or right commentators say about it, I can only what climate scientists say about it. Two opposing sides don't necessarily have two compelling arguments. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on that mall in the capital, and he didn't say, "Remember, folks, those southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German shepherds, they have a point, too." No, he said, "I have a dream. They have a nightmare. This isn't Team Edward and Team Jacob." Liberals, like the ones on that field, must stand up and be counted, and not pretend we're as mean or greedy or shortsighted or just plain batshit at them. And if that's too polarizing for you, and you still want to reach across the aisle and hold hands and sing with someone on the right, try church.

Another pattern was set at Uhud that played out across the centuries: Muslims would see any aggression as a pretext for revenge, regardless of whether they provoked it. With a canny understanding of how to sway public opinion, jihadists and their PC allies on the American Left today use current events as pretexts to justify what they are doing: Time and again they portray themselves as merely reacting to grievous provocations from the enemies of Islam. By this they gain recruits and sway popular opinion. Conventional wisdom among a surprisingly broad political spectrum today holds that the global jihad movement is a response to some provocation or other: the invasion of Iraq, the establishment of Israel, the toppling of Iran’s Mossadegh—or a more generalized offense such as “American neo-colonialism” or “the lust for oil.” Those who are particularly forgetful of history blame it on newly minted epiphenomena such as the Abu Ghraib prison scandals, which cast a shadow over America’s presence in Iraq in 2004. But the jihadists were fighting long before Abu Ghraib, Iraq, Israel, or American independence. Indeed, they have been fighting and imitating their warrior Prophet ever since the seventh century, casting their actions as responses to the enormities of their enemies ever since Muhammad discovered his uncle’s mutilated body.

The eyes of all people are upon us. And all they see is a mash-up of naked prisoners and an American girl in fatigues standing there giving a thumbs-up. As I write this, the United States of America is still a city on a hill; and it's still shining—because we never turn off the lights in our torture prisons. That's how we carry out the sleep deprivation.

Hard military power will remain crucial, but if its use is perceived as unjust, such as at Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo, then hard power undercuts the soft power needed to win the minds of mainstream Muslims and creates more new terrorists than are destroyed. For example, a leading terrorism expert concludes that anti-Americanism was exacerbated by the war in Iraq and the U.S. failure to tailor strategies for key countries. International jihadist groups increased their membership and carried out twice as many attacks in the three years after 2001 as before it.38 Similarly, the former head of Britain’s MI5 intelligence service told the commission investigating the origins of the Iraq War that the war had increased, rather than decreased, terrorists’ success at recruitment.

Water, which in itself is silent, is just waiting to make a noise. In itself completely motionless, it is just waiting to move. Perfectly cold and harsh in itself, it nonetheless has the tepidness of salt and the mineral softness of fabric. Total abhorrence of dominant ideologies. And anti-gulagism is the dominant ideology today. The anti-gulag priests are every bit as bad as the gulag torturers. The sheep have taken over from the beasts of the Apocalypse.

After the sacrifice of value, after the sacrifice of representation, after the sacrifice of reality, the West is now characterized by the deliberate sacrifice of everything through which a human being keeps some value in his or her own eyes. The terrorists' potlatch against the West is their own death. Our potlatch is indignity, immodesty, obscenity, degradation and abjection. This is the movement of our culture - where the stakes keep rising. Our truth is always on the side of unveiling, desublimation, reductive analysis - the truth of the repressed -- exhibition, avowal, nudity - nothing is true unless it is desecrated, objectified, stripped of its aura, or dragged onstage.

Of the veil or unveiling, which is the most alienating, the most humiliating, the most insulting? The immense hypocrisy of all those who denounce the veil, but are quite at ease with universal pornography. In any event, the question goes far beyond the veil and the female condition. At issue is a culture of obscenity that cannot but tear away all veils - according to the imperative of transparency. At issue is the profound jealousy of a ragged culture at all the ceremonial cultures - those cultures whose signs enwrap them, whereas our culture is laid bare by its signs themselves. This is merely the beginning of a general de-signification, in which all distinctive marks will become anathema, suspect of masking or even, quite simply, signifying something, and hence potentially terroristic. At the end of the process all that will be left will be lightweight, inoffensive signs - advertising signs or marks of the disembodied fanaticism of fashion. That, no doubt, is where the story of the veil will end.

Anyone want to help me start PAPA, Parents for Alternatives to Punishment Association? (There is already a group in England called ‘EPPOCH’ for end physical punishment of children.) In Kohn’s other great book Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community, he explains how all punishments, even the sneaky, repackaged, “nice” punishments called logical or natural consequences, destroy any respectful, loving relationship between adult and child and impede the process of ethical development. (Need I mention Enron, Martha Stewart, the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal or certain car repairmen?) Any type of coercion, whether it is the seduction of rewards or the humiliation of punishment, creates a tear in the fabric of relational connection between adults and children. Then adults become simply dispensers of goodies and authoritarian dispensers of controlling punishments. The atmosphere of fear and scarcity grows as the sense of connectedness that fosters true and generous cooperation, giving from the heart, withers. Using punishments and rewards is like drinking salt water. It does create a short-term relief, but long-term it makes matters worse. This desert of emotional connectedness is fertile ground for acting-out to get attention. Punishment is a use of force, in the negative sense of that word, not an expression of true power or strength. David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. author of the book Power v. Force writes “force is the universal substitute for truth. The need to control others stems from lack of power, just as vanity stems from lack of self-esteem. Punishment is a form of violence, an ineffective substitute for power. Sadly though parents are afraid not to hit and punish their children for fear they will turn out to be bank robbers. But the truth may well be the opposite. Research shows that virtually all felony offenders were harshly punished as children. Besides children learn thru modeling. Punishment models the tactic of deliberately creating pain for another to get something you want to happen. Punishment does not teach children to care about how their actions might create pain for another, it teaches them it is ok to create pain for another if you have the power to get away with it. Basically might makes right. Punishment gets children to focus on themselves and what is happening to them instead of developing empathy for how their behavior affects another. Creating

Zimbardo could not see the brutality himself because he was already too deep into his chosen role of Warden and lost his exterior view of his sociological “experiment”. He could not see clearly what was happening. More recently, Zimbardo has acted as a consultant to one of the arrested soldiers in the recent Abu Ghraib prison torture. He never denied the culpability of the individuals involved but was certain to bring up the lack of oversight and structure. In his recent book he states “Aberrant, illegal or immoral behavior by individuals in service professions, such as policemen, corrections officers, and soldiers, are typically labeled the misdeeds of “a few bad apples”. The implication is that they are a rare exception and must be set on one side of the impermeable line between evil and good, with the majority of good apples set on the other side. But who is making the distinction? Usually it is the guardians of the system, who want to isolate the problem in order to deflect attention and blame away from those at the top who may be responsible for creating untenable working conditions or for a lack of oversight or supervision. Again the bad-apple dispositional view ignores the apple barrel and its potentially corrupting situational impact on those within it. “A systems analysis focuses on the barrel makers, on those with the power to design the barrel.” Zimbardo isolated 7 social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil. I found myself in all of these seven steps, to a greater or lesser degree. They are: 1) Mindlessly taking the first step. 2) Dehumanization of others. 3) De-individualization of self (anonymity). 4) Diffusion of personal responsibility. 5) Blind obedience to authority. 6) Uncritical conformity to the group’s norms. 7) Passive tolerance of evil, through inaction, or indifference. In hindsight, I can see each one of these points were present in the apple barrel of Scientology that I lived through.   Acknowledgments                     There are numerous people I would like to acknowledge for their support and encouragement during the very difficult task of going back to some dark places in my past to get this book written. They do no want their names used, but they know who they are, and my appreciation is deep and well known to them. I would like to thank Jeferson Hawkins for both his Cover designs and other help along this road. I want to acknowledge Bernice Mennis, Ben Bashore for their personal help over the years. There is much I can say about Vermont College, but the simplest is that they gave me the environment, freedom and courage to study what I needed to write

Some examples from the American experience in Iraq help illustrate the contradiction between the physical and moral levels: The U. S. Army conducted many raids on civilian homes in areas it occupied. In these raids, the troops physically dominated the civilians. Mentally, they terrified them. But at the moral level, breaking into private homes in the middle of the night, terrifying women and children, and sometimes treating detainees in ways that publicly humiliated them (like stepping on their heads) worked powerfully against the Americans. An enraged population responded by providing the Iraqi resistance with more support at each level of war, physical, mental, and moral. At Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, MPs and interrogators dominated prisoners physically and mentally – as too many photographs attest. But when that domination was publicly exposed, the United States suffered an enormous defeat at the moral level. Some American commanders recognized this when they referred to the soldiers responsible for the abuse as, “the jerks who lost us the war.” In Iraq and elsewhere, American troops (other than Special Forces) quickly establish base camps that mirror American conditions: air conditioning, good medical care, plenty of food and pure water. The local people are not allowed into the bases except in service roles. Physically, the American superiority over the lives the locals lead is overwhelming. Mentally, it projects the power and success of American society. But morally, the constant message of “we are better than you” works against the Americans. Traditional cultures tend to put high values on pride and honor, and when foreigners seem to sneer at local ways, the locals may respond by defending their honor in a traditional manner – by fighting. After many, if not most, American military interventions, Fourth Generation war has tended to intensify and spread rather than contract.

Abu Ghraib is the symbol of American mistakes in Iraq, the place where the weird criminal perversions of bored, porn-surfing American teenagers clashed spectacularly with fastidious, sexually inviolate Islamic culture. It was also a most powerful symbol of our misguided perception of ourselves and our place in the world. We came into this war expecting to be treated like the GIs who went into France a half century ago—worshipped, instantly excused for the occasional excess or foible, and handed the keys to both the castle wine cellar and the nurses’ dormitory. Instead we were treated like unclean monsters by the people we liberated, and around the world our every move was viciously scrutinized not only by those same Europeans we rescued ages ago but by our own press. The failure of Abu Ghraib was the failure to accept the role we had created for ourselves as new masters of subject peoples. We wanted to rule absolutely and also to be liked, which was why our first reaction after the scandal broke was to issue profuse apologies, call for a self-flagellating round of investigations, and demand the prison’s closure. A hegemonic power more comfortable with ruling would have just shot the reporter who broke the story and moved on. But America has never been able to stomach that kind of thing, which is why, incidentally, this occupation of Iraq is probably not going to work. We are too civilized to make ourselves truly feared in public, but not civilized enough to properly restrain our power in private.

The Abu Ghraib debacle showed American soldiers not as liberators but as tormentors, not as professionals but as sadists getting cheap thrills.

At Abu Ghraib, several prisoners mixed it up with guards on October 18, 2003, led by a detainee with a smuggled pistol. A few of the MPs chose their own countermeasure, not unlike the 1-8 Infantry soldiers at the Tigris River. That night, five enlisted MPs pulled twelve Iraqi prisoners from their cells. They stripped the captives naked and then piled them in sexually humiliating positions. A week or so later, the same guards put a hooded man on a box with fake electrodes clipped on his fingers; the prisoner was told the wires were real, and if he stepped off the box, he’d be electrocuted. Three days later, the same MPs again stripped prisoners and put them in sexually embarrassing poses. This incident also involved K-9 police dogs. A trio of military intelligence soldiers participated. These abuses were not linked to any interrogation. The soldiers later explained that they were teaching the Iraqis a lesson, the same reason offered by the soldiers in 1-8 Infantry. The MPs, however, took a lot of pictures.

It smelled like a slaughterhouse. I was standing in the interrogation room of Saddam Hussein's Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad. A stench of blood and death permeated my senses, my clothes, my being.

For starters, there is the orgy of violence that the United States and its allies unleashed in Iraq in 2003, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and the sexual torture of Abu Ghraib. Also, the majority of suicide bombings during the twentieth century were not carried out by Muslims but by non-Muslims, and the majority of those carried out by Muslims targeted not Westerners but their fellow Muslims. Robert Pape, the world’s foremost researcher into suicide bombings, has shown that the overwhelming majority have been carried out by non-Muslims.

I Abu Ghraib, och kanske också i al-Mima, tvingades offret att delta i framställandet av just den bild som gjorde våldet möjligt. Blicken var en nödvändig del av både tortyren och terrorattackerna. Min blick. Jag slöt ögonen, hårt. Ett krig där blicken, den ömmaste beröring vi förmådde, hade blivit ett vapen.

We all try to explain away the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, or the Sabra Massacre by denying that we could ever do anything so horrible. The committers of those crimes are evil, other, bad apples; something in the German or American psyche makes their people susceptible to following orders, drinking the grape Kool-Aid, killing indiscriminately. You believe that you’re the one person who wouldn’t have delivered the electric shocks in the Milgram experiment because those who did must have been emotionally abused by their parents, or had domineering fathers, or were dumped by their spouses. Anything that makes them different from you.

Do you think we’re like you Americans in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo who torture people by keeping them thirsty? We have something called ra’fateh Islami”—Islamic kindness—“in this prison. Something you Americans have never heard of.” He genuinely believed that calling someone an American was an insult, and always said the word with a sneer.

Looking back, the only ones who really paid for Abu Ghraib were the enlisted personnel, who were following orders, and General Taguba, who brought the problem to light.

When we reflect on these incidents in Abu Ghraib prison and beyond, it seems that torture was systematic, not aberrant, and that its widespread proliferation was symptomatic of both command decisions and a crisis in the ranks over a failing pacification effort.

One of the incredibly deep ironies is that the [Abu Ghraib] photographs could serve as both an exposé and as a cover-up. That they would encourage people not to look any further and make them think they had seen everything.

Writing to the Washington Post in 2007, two top U.S. generals drew upon their years of command experience to warn of such a slippery slope. “As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture,” the generals wrote, “the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb. Our soldiers in Iraq confront real ‘ticking time bomb’ situations every day, in the form of improvised explosive devices, and any degree of ‘flexibility’ about torture at the top drops down the chain of command like a stone—the rare exception fast becoming the rule.

Late that year, one of the soldiers stationed at the prison [Abu Ghraib] reported the abuses to his superiors and said that photos had been taken by the abusers. The commanders in Iraq immediately took action and took steps to launch an investigation. Soon after that the news reached Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who told President Bush in early January 2004 that incidents at Abu Ghraib were being looked into. It seems nobody told these senior leaders that these incidents were truly horrendous.

4. Which gives rise to the truly mysterious question: how does this irresistible global power succeed in undifferentiating the world, in wiping out its extreme singularity? And how can the world be so vulnerable to this liquidation, this dictatorship of integral reality, and how can it be fascinated by it - not exactly fascinated by the real but by the disappearance of reality? There is, however, a corollary to this: what is the source of the fragility of this global power, of its vulnera-bility to minor events, to events that are insignificant in themselves ('rogue events', terrorism, but also the pictures from Abu Ghraib, etc.)?

One can imagine a high-definition democracy, in which they would show the human rights chart every day, in real time on the screens, in the way they do now for the weather. They would show the observance and violation of those rights over the whole planet, possibly with immediate penalties (which would obviously produce a constant worsening of the situation).

You don’t have to be an interrogator at Abu Ghraib to know that time never favors the suspect.

Just as Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib have eroded America’s moral authority, so the Bush administration’s fiscal housekeeping has eroded our economic authority.

Camp Bucca was the model U.S. prison camp to which inmates from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison were transferred after the scandal there.34 Unfortunately, while the crimes at Abu Ghraib provided a huge propaganda coup for the jihadis, the relatively relaxed conditions at Camp Bucca seem to have provided networking opportunities that would be at least as valuable in advancing the cause of jihad. Apparently al-Baghdadi was a natural leader who seemed to his American guards like a model prisoner. “He was respected very much by the US army,” a man who claims to have been one of his prison associates and colleagues in ISIS has said. “If he wanted to visit people in another camp he could, but we couldn’t. And all the while, a new strategy, which he was leading, was rising under their noses, and that was to build the Islamic State. If there was no American prison in Iraq, there would be no IS now. Bucca was a factory. It made us all.

Fear dominated our collective emotional life from 2001 to 2008, and the Bush administration sought to capitalize on it: WMD, anthrax, Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Homeland Security, the never-ending war on terror. During the Bush years, there was a repressive aura about life in Washington that unfortunately demoted our most cherished civil liberties to luxuries of the past. A kingdom of fear had been constructed in the United States, every day an orange alert. Our national rhythm had been hijacked.

It’s like Abu Ghraib, nursery edition.