Jailhouse Rot

Al Miskin

May 2004

As right-wing pundits echoed Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) in expressing "outrage at the outrage" over activities at Abu Ghraib prison some characterized as "prankish," and liberals tired of wringing their hands decided to wash them instead, members of Congress got a preview of hundreds more snapshots and videotapes showing the kinds of violence and human suffering Americans were spared from watching by blanket censorship of negative images during the first year of the Iraq campaign. The White House, the Defense Department and a compliant commercial media, after creating an atmosphere of impunity for brutal dehumanization of enemy prisoners, now promise to demonstrate a model of justice for Americans that has been denied to Iraqis. The photographs themselves and the public debate both reflect the presumption of absolute domination of an occupied population.

Until material evidence captured with amateur candor by participant-observers at Abu Ghraib was published, one of the great successes of the Iraq war launched in 2003 was the near total ban on images of flag-draped coffins, civilian casualties and close-up violence. Until samples from the jailhouse portfolio of Spc. Jeremy Sivits and his cohort popped up online, the US government had succeeded in controlling photographic depictions of the war, keeping cameras at a distance and depersonalized. Leaked to the press from within the military itself, where censorship was evidently incomplete, the Abu Ghraib images were shocking to Americans because of the deeply personal nature of the abuse. Meanwhile, the focus by the administration, the army and the press on the visual documentation of a few cases perpetuates what can only be described as a thoroughly colonial mentality.

Most Americans reacted to the Abu Ghraib with disgust and demands for the persons responsible to be brought to justice. There was little disgust, however, when Sivits received a paltry one-year sentence, and calls for his superiors to stand trial are fading with news that Gens. Ricardo Sanchez and Janis Karpinski will lose their commands. When the US brings Arabs "to justice," moreover, it does so en masse. Shortly before CBS broke the Abu Ghraib story, on which it had obligingly sat for two weeks at the request of the Pentagon, a mob mutilated the corpses of four American mercenaries who had taken a wrong turn in Falluja. Somebody dragged two of the charred bodies from the back of a car and then hung them from a bridge. In "overwhelming" response, US troops and tanks laid siege to the town, allowing some women and children to become short-term refugees to escape the gunfire. Punishment, as Iraqi Governing Council member Adnan Pachachi declared to al-Arabiyya TV, was collective.

Throughout Iraq as well as in Abu Ghraib, the International Committee of the Red Cross suspects that 70-90 percent of the Iraqis detained in mass roundups and then held in a legal netherworld governed by neither criminal law nor international protections for prisoners of war were detained by "mistake." In 1991 and 2003, Iraqi families endured intense aerial bombardment (try it sometime, if you think the noise alone isn't terrifying), bookending twelve years of economic sanctions as punishment for the announced sins of one bad guy. Disclaimers galore notwithstanding, many Americans blamed Muslims or Arabs generally for blowing up the World Trade Center. The invasion of Afghanistan was rationalized on the premise that those who housed the evil-doers must be held accountable. Vague "links" to al-Qaeda may be grounds for a presumption of guilt by association. Charges have yet to be brought against hundreds of Arabs and other Muslims captured around the world and interned in cages at Guant