- How, reporters and pundits have asked, could good American
heroes behave so badly as to become torturers? There are at least three
answers that most of the U.S. media will not touch.
-
- One is that many of our soldiers entered the Army or
the National Guard or Reserves bringing with them all the frustration of
a class-divided society running low on living-wage jobs. Many families
have filed for bankruptcy as a result of extended service in Iraq, compulsory
service that is distinguishable from a traditional draft only in targeting
exclusively those who have already served. Better that these people torture
Iraqis than that they grow too hostile toward Ken Lay or Bill Gates, right?
-
- The second answer is that what has been done to prisoners
in Iraq is not entirely unlike common occurrences in prisons in the United
States. Rape, torture, and murder happen in U.S. domestic prisons with
a frequency that would appall most people if they knew about it. Human
Rights Watch and other groups have worked to document these problems in
the world's largest per-capita prison system, a system that is also one
of the most secretive and which suffers from an uninterested media. Of
course, various members of the Army, Guard, and Reserves have previously
worked in U.S. domestic prisons, not to mention the legal limbo of Guantanamo
Bay - the disturbing accounts from which have not terribly interested our
visually stimulated media.
-
- The third answer is that our soldiers have been behaving
badly for over a year in ways we have known about, if you include among
bad actions illegally invading another country to facilitate the seizing
of its natural resources and public services. Our soldiers have been taught
that Iraqis are terrorists, that Muslims are terrorists, that those fighting
for their homes are "enemies of democracy." Our soldiers, acting
on faith in this nonsense, have killed more innocent civilians than Ted
Koppel could name in a month, but I encourage him to try.
-
- Why is cruelty worse when performed up close than when
accomplished with missiles, bombs, and tanks? For over a year, the rest
of the world has been looking at images of men, women, and children torn
limb from limb in Iraq, houses crushed, skulls crushed, legs lost, eyes
destroyed.
-
- The U.S. media still will not show us those images but
has suddenly begun showing us over and over again photos of American soldiers
humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners. Presumably the perverse calculation
of news-worthiness on the basis of ratings plays a role here, if not in
keeping out the blood and gore then in allowing in the naked men threatened
by snarling dogs.
-
- But what is the official government/media argument? Why
is reporting on American deaths controversial but reporting on Iraqi deaths
unthinkable? And why is the cruelty in the prisons reported on so much
more than the cruelty outside of them?
-
- The answer may be even more disturbing than the ubiquitous
photographs. The answer, I think, is that the suffering caused by bombs
and bullets in war - what's often dishonestly called "collateral damage"
- is understood by our media to be a part of war that we (the "consumers")
understand without having to be told. It's an accepted part of war and
one that it's not in good taste to dwell on. While various U.S. authors
and pundits have pushed for acceptance of torture over the past few years,
torture by the US government is still new and shocking. It has not yet
become acceptable. If it ever reaches that point, we will be expected to
know that torture is going on without being told, just as we are currently
expected to know without being told about children suffering severe burns
because that's what happens in wars, or about prisoners being raped because
that's what happens in prisons.
-
- "There are a lot more photographs and videos that
exist," Secretary of "Defense" Donald Rumsfeld told Congress
last week. "If these are released to the public, obviously it's going
to make matters worse. That's just a fact." Worse for whom? Rumsfeld
is asking the media to move torture of prisoners into the great realm of
the acceptable but tasteless. He is asking the media to assume along with
him that he knows better than the rest of us what should be kept from us
for our own good.
-
- While Rumsfeld stuttered and stammered his way through
his testimony, he would seriously choke if anyone ever asked him to recite
certain statements made by Thomas Jefferson, such as this: "The opinions
and dispositions of our people in general, which, in governments like ours,
must be the foundation of measures, will always be interesting to me."
Rumsfeld would state the reverse. So, clearly, would George W. Bush.
-
- The Washington Post's new tabloid for Metro riders, "The
Express," printed a letter last week from a reader who said that the
mistreated Iraqis deserved little sympathy since they had attacked and
killed Americans and hung them from a bridge. But this attitude is not
a reason to have less faith in the public. It's a reason to tell people
the truth so that they can draw wiser conclusions.
-
- We need to stop lumping all Iraqis together, so that
the individuals tortured in prisons can be recognized as distinct people
from those who committed some act of violence against an illegal occupying
army or its corporate bosses. And we need to recognize the fundamental
mistake in occupying another country in order to "liberate" it.
Clearly we've liberated many people to death, and they may have been among
the lucky ones.
-
- - David Swanson is Media Coordinator at the International
Labor Communications Association. The views expressed are his alone.
-
- © : t r u t h o u t 2004 http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/051104D.shtml
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