The last man standing
Quotes of the week
‘Mistreatment was not only widely known but also apparently tolerated, so much so that a picture of naked detainees forced into a human pyramid was used as a screen saver on a computer in the interrogations room. Other soldiers easily stumbled onto photographs of naked detainees left on computers in the Internet café at [Abu Ghraib] prison.‘ (Kate Zernike, ‘Only a Few Spoke Up on Abuse As Many Soldiers Stayed Silent,’ New York Times, 5/22/04)
‘He said one soldier continued to abuse him by striking his broken leg and ordered him to curse Islam. ‘Because they started to hit my broken leg, I cursed my religion,’ he said. ‘They ordered me to thank Jesus that I’m alive.’ ‘The detainee said the soldiers handcuffed him to a bed. ‘Do you believe in anything?’ he said the soldier asked. ‘I said to him, ‘I believe in Allah.’ ‘So he said, ‘But I believe in torture and I will torture you.’‘ (Scott Higham and Joe Stephens, ‘New Details of Prison Abuse Emerge,’ Washington Post, 5/21/04)
Down the Memory Hole?
Just the other day I heard Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers say for the first time that we should expect the violence in Iraq to worsen after the transfer of ‘sovereignty’ on June 30th:
‘On Friday… Myers, told the House Armed Services Committee that, far from calming the violence in Iraq, the June 30 turnover is likely to usher in a period of more turmoil, comments echoed by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker. ‘The threat will continue to intensify after June 30,’ Myers said. ‘There will be those, including (Abu Musab al) Zarqawi and the foreign fighters, who will try very hard to keep us from having any political progress in Iraq. There is reason for great hope, but the situation is not without its challenges, both military and political.’
‘The ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, asked Myers, ‘Are we on the brink of failure?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Myers replied. ‘It is going to be tough. But I think we are on the brink of success.’
This is a distinct change of line and the President seems ready to following suit in his Monday speech on Iraq, the first of six speeches leading up to ‘sovereignty.’ He’s already saying, ‘It will be tough work after sovereignty is transferred because there will still be people there trying to derail the election progress.’ (Guardian, 5/20/04)
Success, I guess, is in the eye of the beholder, though for many months a definition of success in Iraq was offered by this administration. We were told again and again by American officials and spokespeople, military and civilian, in Washington and Baghdad, that because they wanted us to fail, they would increase their acts of violence as we got ever closer to the so-called transfer of power. That spike of violence would be a sign of enemy ‘desperation.’ As we close in on June 30, however, the line has suddenly changed. The former starting spot for what was to be a long Iraqi slide downhill, if not into peace, at least off the front pages of American papers in time for the November election, has now become but another moment after which we are to expect a further escalation of violence — undoubtedly because they see us at that ‘brink of success.’ (General Myers’s statement, by the way, gives new meaning to an old Cold War phrase, ‘brinkmanship,’ or perhaps it just redefines delusional behavior.)
Most strikingly, neither General Myers, nor the President, nor anyone else in a position of what once would have been called responsibility has acknowledged that anything new is being said. Isn’t that exactly the way language works in Bush World? The words just alter slightly and everyone carries on. I think George Orwell once wrote something about this, but I can’t seem to remember what. It must have gone down a personal memory hole.
Or how about our denials. Some modestly enterprising reporter could write quite a striking little history of these. Whatever any part of the Bush administration is accused of, it promptly issues a flat denial and then wings it from there. The most recent of these charges involved a slaughter in a small village in the Iraqi desert near the Syrian border of 40-odd people, including children, women, musicians, and evidently a well-known Iraqi wedding singer. The inhabitants claimed theirs was a wedding party. Our military immediately denied this. Couldn’t be. Terrorists, foreign fighters, a gang of arms smugglers. And, of course, they shot first. Gen. Kimmett, our military spokesman in Baghdad, quickly leaped into the fray:
‘We took ground fire and we returned fire… We estimate that around 40 were killed. But we operated within our rules of engagement.’ (Guardian, 5/21/04)
Okay, it was three in the morning and the Iraqis claim everyone was in bed. Next came Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, who ‘was scathing of those who suggested a wedding party had been hit. ‘How many people go to the middle of the desert … to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let’s not be naive.’
It’s well known, evidently, that people don’t get married or have parties in small desert villages. It’s uncivilized.
When, according to Rory McCarthy of the British Guardian, ‘reporters asked [Gen. Mattis] about footage on Arabic television of a child’s body being lowered into a grave, he replied: ‘I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don’t have to apologize for the conduct of my men.’
But, of course, the reports coming in, including the first video of the aftermath, haven’t exactly looked great — what with those shots of dead kids from the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza already all over Arab and American television news. McCarthy, for instance, interviewed one of the wedding party members, who survived while most of the rest of her family died around her, in a hospital. She told a harrowing tale. McCarthy described the scene this way:
‘As Mrs Shihab spoke she gestured with hands still daubed red-brown with the henna the women had used to decorate themselves for the wedding. Alongside her in the ward yesterday were three badly injured girls from the Rakat family: Khalood Mohammed, aged just a year and struggling for breath, Moaza Rakat, 12, and Iqbal Rakat, 15, whose right foot doctors had already amputated.’
Though the henna was surely a terrorist trick, some fall-back position still seemed to be in order for the denial-pressed Americans. Indeed, a day later there was Kimmett, according to Ian Fisher of the New York Times (5/22/04), no longer quite dismissing:
‘the possibility that there was a wedding nearby, saying, however, ‘the probability of this being the case is certainly greater than zero, but a low, low probability.’ ‘Could there have been a celebration of some type going on?’ he wrote in an e-mail in response to a reporter’s questions. ‘Certainly. Bad guys have celebrations. Could this have been a meeting among the foreign fighters and smugglers? That is a possibility. Could it have involved entertainment? Sure. However, a wedding party in a remote section of the desert along one of the rat lines, held in the early morning hours strains credulity,’
You would think that that ‘rat lines’ zinger would kind of sew things up, but just in case, an investigation was also been launched and already exculpatory exhibits are appearing from the decimated village (not exactly surprising given that, as ever, we’re investigating ourselves). As it happens, there have been many such investigations, scads of them — they go along with the denials — just about all of which (until the Abu Ghraib photos came out) sunk into the sands without a trace. (Who remembers the investigation of that [denied] bombing of a market in Baghdad during the brief Iraqi invasion or the investigation of the [denied] bombing of an Afghan wedding party in which children also died?)
There is, of course, a pattern here, but our media in recent years has been a tad weak on patterns. Connecting what dots? It’s not a major journalistic concept at present. Otherwise, they couldn’t write such pieces as interminable he-said/she-said reports, invariably giving better than equal weight to the initial American denials at the moment when impressions are formed, before the arguments over who-did-what-to-whom retreat to the inside pages and are buried by the next round of news.
Here’s the thing: If anyone could point to just a couple of times in which, during the war on terrorism, charges were made and any official spokesman quickly stepped to the plate and said, ‘Yes, it was us. We erred. Blame us. We deserve it,’ then maybe we could take the denials seriously. But shouldn’t there be a news note attached to such denials by now — like the warnings on a cigarette pack — indicating the dangers of taking them at face value?
As the tortures and humiliations at Abu Ghraib were let loose, thanks to a torture system created at the highest levels of government, so the Bush administration — like its President who, when queried at a press conference, couldn’t recall a single mistake he’d ever made — has created an atmosphere of denial at the highest levels. The endless denials and slow back-downs offered on every piece of misinformation deployed to lead us into war with Iraq, set a tone which has permeated the ‘war on terrorism.’ But, hey, down the memory hole with that, too.
The Last Man Standing
Okay, speaking of denials and back-downs, let’s consider the splendid adventures of former neocon darling Ahmad Chalabi, whose compound/headquarters was recently ‘ransacked’ or, to chose another New York Times word, ‘pillaged’ by the Iraqi police accompanied by American intelligence or military officers. Here’s the way Dexter Filkins and Douglas Jehl of the Times reported it (5/21/04): ‘[B]acked by American soldiers and unidentified men in civilian clothing who Iraqis said were American agents, [they] stormed into Mr. Chalabi’s headquarters, carted away computers, overturned furniture and smashed photographs of Mr. Chalabi and his family.’
Chalabi — for those of you who have been setting up military bases in the ‘stans of Central Asia
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