SHAMEFUL

I'm so heartsick, physically disgusted, after reading Seymour Hersh's new revelations about the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib (see www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/25/070625fa_fact_hersh), which include:

“a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee”

“the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees”

“a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum”

“These were people who were taken off the streets and put in jail—teen-agers and old men and women”

And then there is Tara McKelvey's new piece on the prison (available at www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=robotripping_at_abu_ghraib):

"There were brains splattered across the wall. The wall was red—a really old, dark, dried-blood red. There were pieces of matter in it"

"It wasn't just a few bad apples or an outbreak of sadism. It was policy. Those MPs thought what they were doing was acceptable"

"Seventy to ninety percent of the detainees at Abu Ghraib, according to an October 2003 International Committee of the Red Cross report and sworn statements made by members of the 470th Military Intelligence Group, the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, and the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion, were arrested by mistake or had no intelligence value."

To read this is to feel the way it feels to read about the Holocaust, the slave trade, the Trail of Tears. But this is now, this is us. And it’s still happening (see Rosebud #115). Why don’t people care? How can they argue that this sort of unspeakable degradation of human beings is somehow necessary in the so-called War on Terror, a phrase which has George Orwell spinning in his grave.

This is George Bush's America, a place where million-dollar-a-year pundits sit in air conditioned TV studios and argue for the necessity of sadism. And the do-gooders—bless their hearts—admonish us to save the children, except they never mention the children in Iraq, especially not the ones at places like Abu Ghraib.

But most of us do care; we just haven’t figured out what to do about it. Yet. Getting upset is the first step, so even though it is upsetting, please read, get upset, and then act. Act for the detainees, and for Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, who wrote the classified report about the prison which was leaked to the press. (In 2006, Taguba was ordered to retire, with no explanation after a 34-year career of military service.) Act for all the other whistleblowers. Act for the right to dissent. Dissent. If not, then how are we not complicit?

Come to think of it:
To The Times Ethicist:
Dear Randy, I know you're very busy answering mail about important stuff like if it's stealing if I take home coffee from the office, but something's really been bugging me. If the American military is rounding up innocent people off the streets of Baghdad and doing some really bad shit to them, is this my fault? If not then how come it bugs me so much?
Can't sleep nights, and it's not the stolen coffee,
John Q. Public