The tale read ’round the world: And there was the Maximum Leader This is not My Lai. This is not the the war in Vietnam. This is different. But the lessons are Postscript:<\/B> Given the nature of human nature, the answer to that question is Coincidentally, an old college friend who’s now a psychiatrist on the clinical faculty of the Correction:<\/STRONG> In quoting my friend, I conflated Philip Another postscript: <\/B>A reader “As upsetting to me as anything about all of this is the fact that the 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-664","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-aI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n(London Evening Standard),
\nTroops<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> (The Scotsman),
\nTroops put harness on 70-year-old
\nwoman<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> (The Australian).<\/P>
\n
\nLondon, it begins: “U.S. soldiers who detained an elderly Iraqi woman last year placed a harness
\non her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a donkey, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s
\npersonal human rights envoy to Iraq said Wednesday.”<\/P>
\n
\nvideo: ‘President Bush in damage control on Arabic TV.’) The best commentary on that?
\nchiding angry Arabs for not appreciating the United States’ good intentions.”<\/P>
\n
\n
\n[The] belief, that the photographs are distortions, despite their authenticity, is
\nindistinguishable from propaganda. Tyrants censor; democracies self-censor. Tyrants concoct
\npropaganda in ministries of information; democracies produce it through habits of thought so
\ningrained that a basic lie of war — only the good is our doing — becomes
\nself-propagating.<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n
\nthe same. Will they ever be learned?<\/P>
\n
\n“probably not.” Here’s one reason: An experiment simulating prison in 1971 at Stanford
\nUniversity showed how fine the line is
\n
\nStanford medical school, had recalled the experiment for me yesterday. Seeing the ‘Fine Line’
\nreport this morning, he added: “The most horrific fact, which I underestimated, was that 2\/3 of
\nthe subjects pushed the button for electrical shock, following orders, all the way up to the lethal
\nlevel.”<\/P>
\n
\nZimbardo’s prison experiment at Stanford with Stanley Milgram’s “quite separate
\nexperiment at Yale,” another friend, Robert Cohen, at the University of
\nCalifornia, Irvine, messages me. In Milgram’s experiment pretend “investigators” had
\nvolunteers believe they were giving electric shocks to other volunteers. “Both experiments
\nwere done around the same time,” Cohen writes, “and both show how humans mindlessly
\ndo what they think is expected of them, but they were quite different in both methods and
\nresults.”<\/P>
\n
\nwrites, “The woman who is shown in several of the torture photos is from my home state of West
\nVirginia. What can I tell you except: ‘I’m sooooo proudddddd.’ (Irony intended.) The name of the
\nsoon-to-be court-martialed trailer park denizen turned military policewoman is <\/FONT>
\nfrom someplace called Fort Ashby, West Virginia. After the recent unpleasantness, they took her
\nphoto down from the Wall of Honor at the nearby Wal-Mart. To the best of my knowledge it was
\nNOT the pic of her smoking a cigarette and pointing at the private parts of one of the
\nprisoners.<\/FONT><\/P>
\n
\n
\nvideo game-conditioned nitwits in the photos shown shucking and jiving apparently think the faux
\nsodomistic tableaux they’ve arranged has something to do with humor. Frat boy wit rules! One
\nearly news story on the net about the sordid affair was presciently titled: “The Photos That Lost
\nthe War.” Let’s hope that seven months from now that can be amended to also read: “. . . And
\nThat Lost the Election.”<\/FONT><\/P><\/FONT><\/DIV><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"