• Home
  • About
    • Straight Up
    • Jan Herman
    • Contact
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

SHIT HAPPENS

May 8, 2004 by cmackie

The International Committee of the Red Cross
warned many high officials in the U.S. government last January and earlier that it had observed
widespread abuse of Iraqi prisoners “tantamount to
torture.”
The ICRC characterized this treatment not as the aberrant
behavior of a few but “a pattern and a system,” which, like the Army’s own report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba,
gives the lie to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker and his boss, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Meyers.

Schoomaker claimed as recently as yesterday in
his Senate testimony that what happened at Abu Ghraib prison was the “inexcusable behavior of a
few.”
  He was hewing to the line set by Meyers, who, you may
recall, spent last weekend on the morning talk shows blaming a mere “handful” of low-ranking
soldiers and complaining about inaccurate reporting by the press.


On the same day of their testimony in Congress, the ICRC director of operations, Pierre
Kraehenbuehl, said the abuse represented more than isolated acts, and the problems were not
limited to the Abu Ghraib prison. “We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts.
There was a pattern and a system,” he told a news conference
in Geneva
.


The ICRC’s 24-page report, leaked Friday in The Wall Street Journal, “described prisoners
kept naked in total darkness in empty cells at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison and male prisoners
forced to parade around in women’s underwear. Coalition forces also fired on unarmed prisoners
from watchtowers, killing some of them.”


Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, and U.S. military commanders were given this
report, which summarizes previous ICRC investigations, in February. (The ICRC, based in
Switzerland, is a neutral organization. Under the Geneva Conventions it visits prisoners of war
and others detained by an occupying power, to see that countries fulfill their obligations under the
1949 accords.)


Equally astonishing are this morning’s
revelations
in The New York Times that the official “who directed the
reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under
pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while
shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was
kept naked the whole time.”


The official, Lane McCotter, 63, “later became an executive of a private prison company, one
of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part
of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs.” And who picked McCotter
and the others? That exemplary enforcer and protector of the law, none other than Attorney
General John Ashcroft.


As Fox Butterfield reports: “When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to
restore Iraq’s criminal justice system last year, including Mr. McCotter,” here’s what Ashcroft
said: “Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that freedom
permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable criminal justice system based on the rule of
law and standards of basic human rights.”


You might conclude from this that our Maximum Leader’s apology to the world for America’s
moral hypocrisy is less than sincere. You might even conclude from this that “torture and abuse”
(to use Sen. Edward Kennedy’s forthright phrase in yesterday’s Senate hearing) is as American as
apple pie. To read Butterfield’s report, you wouldn’t be wrong.


“Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes
place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern,” he writes. Merely have a look
at the photo of the naked Araqi prisoner bound to a bed in Abu Ghraib with women’s panties
covering his face (fourth image in the Washington Post
slideshow
) and compare it to Butterfield’s description that
prison inmates in Pennsylvania and other states “are routinely stripped in front of other inmates,”
and in an Arizona jail male inmates “are made to wear women’s pink underwear as a form of
humiliation.”


The ugly icing on this rotten cake? Experts told Butterfield, “the worst abuses have occurred
in Texas,” where the prison system had to be put “under a consent decree during much of the time
President Bush was governor because of violence by guards against inmates. …”


So when our Maximum Leader, his Rummy boy and the Pentagon generals defend American
honor with, respectively, expressions of regret, a deep apology, and hangdog looks on their faces,
it should surprise no one that people will doubt their sincerity.

Share on email
Email
Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on reddit
Reddit

Filed Under: main

Jan Herman

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.
Another strange fact... Read More…

About

My Books

Several books of poems have been published in recent years by Moloko Print, Statdlichter Presse, Phantom Outlaw Editions, and Cold Turkey … [Read More...]

Straight Up

The agenda is just what it says: news of arts, media & culture delivered with attitude. Or as Rock Hudson once said in a movie: "Man is the only … [Read More...]

Contact me

We're cutting down on spam. Please fill in this form. … [Read More...]

Archives

Blogroll

Abstract City
AC Institute
ACKER AWARDS New York
All Things Allen Ginsberg
Antiwar.com
arkivmusic.com
Artbook&
Arts & Letters Daily

Befunky
Bellaart
Blogcritics
Booknotes
Bright Lights Film Journal

C-SPAN
Noam Chomsky
Consortium News
Cost of War
Council on Foreign Relations
Crooks and Liars
Cultural Daily

The Daily Howler
Dark Roasted Blend
DCReport
Deep L
Democracy Now!

Tim Ellis: Comedy
Eschaton

Film Threat
Robert Fisk
Flixnosh (David Elliott’s movie menu)
Fluxlist Europe

Good Reads
The Guardian
GUERNICA: A Magazine of Art & Politics

Herman (Literary) Archive, Northwestern Univ. Library
The Huffington Post

Inter Press Service News Agency
The Intercept
Internet Archive (WayBackMachine)
Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Doug Ireland
IT: International Times, The Magazine of Resistance

Jacketmagazine
Clive James

Kanopy (stream free movies, via participating library or university)
Henry Kisor
Paul Krugman

Lannan Foundation
Los Angeles Times

Metacritic
Mimeo Mimeo
Moloko Print
Movie Geeks United (MGU)
MGU: The Kubrick Series

National Security Archive
The New York Times
NO!art

Osborne & Conant
The Overgrown Path

Poets House
Political Irony
Poynter

Quanta Magazine

Rain Taxi
The Raw Story
RealityStudio.org
Bill Reed
Rhizome
Rwanda Project

Salon
Senses of Cinema
Seven Stories Press
Slate
Stadtlichter Presse
Studs Terkel
The Synergic Theater

Talking Points Memo (TPM)
TalkLeft
The 3rd Page
Third Mind Books
Times Square Cam
The Tin Man
t r u t h o u t

Ubu Web

Vox

The Wall Street Journal
Wikigate
Wikipedia
The Washington Post
The Wayback Machine (Internet Archive)
World Catalogue
World Newspapers, Magazines & News Sites

The XD Agency

Share on email
Email
Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on reddit
Reddit
This blog published under a Creative Commons license

an ArtsJournal blog

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in