Abu Ghraib

"Father of the Raven" in Arabic, and the place where America's exciting new status as a torture state was publicly announced. And while it is more commonly associated with England, Abu Ghraib is an all-American project and has been since its inception; it was designed (in 1959, long before Saddam Hussein was master of Iraq) by an engineering firm located in New York state and built by their British subcontractors.

When Saddam Hussein departed for a lengthy vacation in March of 2003, Abu Ghraib was rehabilitated by the American army; the former dictator's portrait was replaced by a large banner with the delightfully Stalinist slogan "AMERICA IS A FRIEND OF ALL IRAQI PEOPLE". Among the friendly people (Later coined The Bad Apples) who dispensed friendly treatment (including friendly beatings, amiable sodomy, affable rape, chummy burning with sulfuric acid, comradely sleep deprivation, genial forcible masturbation, good-humored smearing with human shit, cordial dog attacks, sociable mock executions, jolly failure to treat open wounds, convivial urination, and at least one neighborly homicide) were the debonair Lynndie England, the charming Charles Graner, and the sexy, sassy Sabrina Harman, who made the transition from pizza chain assistant manager to torturer with suspicious ease. Also bringing his expertise to the clubby atmosphere of Abu Ghraib was private-sector prison designer Lane Mc Cotter, a former director of the Utah Department of Corrections whose had to leave that job when a mentally ill inmate under his care was chained to a chair for sixteen hours and 'accidentally' died. Of course, Mc Cotter, much like Graner et al's commanding officers, was spared the embarrassment of a trial, leaving the burden to the poor white trash who no doubt deserved 100% of the blame, being bad apples and all. In the America that exists in the amber-tinted dreams of the hopelessly naive, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld might have resigned after the revelations that members of his armed forces engaged in systematic torture; but in the America we live in, the jury in Charles Graner's court-martial was chosen on the same day as the (ultimately successful) nomination hearings for future attorney general Alberto Gonzalez, to whom the Geneva Conventions are pathetically outdated relics of the days of petticoats and birch beer. (Likewise, President George W Bush threatened a veto of any spending bill that contained a provision banning torture only one week after Lynndie England's conviction.)

In their defense, the men and women accused of torture at Abu Ghraib -- men and women who found themselves at the bottom of a pyramid of power not too different from the ones to which they'd subjected Iraqi prisoners -- claimed that there was something like a 150:1 ratio of prisoners to guards, making their jobs untenably difficult, and that they had never received the training necessary to act as law enforcement agents or corrections officers. Still, one wonders, why were there so many prisoners in the first place? Almost 50,000 Iraqis have been imprisoned since March 2003; less than 2% have been convicted of a crime. And how much training does one need, really, to know that you shouldn't strip prisoners naked and force them to masturbate, or shove nightsticks up their asses, or pour acid and shit all over them?

Then again, there are those who suggest that outrage over the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib is misplaced. Senator James Inhofe -- a caring sort who had previously noted, the day of the terror bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, that there probably wouldn't be many people hurt because government employees are never at the office by 9AM -- said of the scandal, "I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment. (The Iraqi prisoners) are not there for traffic violations...they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals." It's just that sort of torture-first, trial-later-if-ever attitude that has covered America in glory, and sent a clear signal to those still living in those hazy amber dreams of what this country means that it's time to wake up.

(Sources: Wikipedia entries on Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal; CNN reports on Ron Graner and Lynndie England trials; Jo Ann Wypijewski's article "Judgment Days: Lessons from the Abu Ghraib courts-martial" in the February 2006 issue of Harper's magazine.