DONKEY TALE

The tale read 'round the world: Woman harnessed like a donkey (London Evening Standard), Elderly Woman 'Ridden Like A Donkey' by US Troops (The Scotsman), Troops put harness on 70-year-old woman (The Australian).

As reported by the Associated Press in London, it begins: "U.S. soldiers who detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey, Prime Minister Tony Blair's personal human rights envoy to Iraq said Wednesday."

And there was the Maximum Leader preaching to the Arab world. (Click on the video: 'President Bush in damage control on Arabic TV.') The best commentary on that? Try this: "Mr. Bush sometimes sounded as if he was chiding angry Arabs for not appreciating the United States' good intentions."

< EM>Or this:

[The] belief, that the photographs are distortions, despite their authenticity, is indistinguishable from propaganda. Tyrants censor; democracies self-censor. Tyrants concoct propaganda in ministries of information; democracies produce it through habits of thought so ingrained that a basic lie of war -- only the good is our doing -- becomes self-propagating.

This is not My Lai. This is not the the war in Vietnam. This is different. But the lessons are the same. Will they ever be learned?

Postscript: Given the nature of human nature, the answer to that question is "probably not." Here's one reason: An experiment simulating prison in 1971 at Stanford University showed how fine the line is < FONT color=#003399>"Between 'Normal' and 'Monster.' 

Coincidentally, an old college friend who's now a psychiatrist on the clinical faculty of the Stanford medical school, had recalled the experiment for me yesterday. Seeing the 'Fine Line' report this morning, he added: "The most horrific fact, which I underestimated, was that 2/3 of the subjects pushed the button for electrical shock, following orders, all the way up to the lethal level."

Correction: In quoting my friend, I conflated Philip Zimbardo's prison experiment at Stanford with Stanley Milgram's "quite separate experiment at Yale," another friend, Robert Cohen, at the University of California, Irvine, messages me. In Milgram's experiment pretend "investigators" had volunteers believe they were giving electric shocks to other volunteers. "Both experiments were done around the same time," Cohen writes, "and both show how humans mindlessly do what they think is expected of them, but they were quite different in both methods and results."

Another postscript: A reader writes, "The woman who is shown in several of the torture photos is from my home state of West Virginia. What can I tell you except: 'I'm sooooo proudddddd.' (Irony intended.) The name of the soon-to-be court-martialed trailer park denizen turned military policewoman is Lynndie England. She is from someplace called Fort Ashby, West Virginia. After the recent unpleasantness, they took her photo down from the Wall of Honor at the nearby Wal-Mart. To the best of my knowledge it was NOT the pic of her smoking a cigarette and pointing at the private parts of one of the prisoners.