Rethinking Abu Ghraib HBO's documentary "The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," aired a few days ago, is yet another attempt to
use the scandal to portray the Bush administration as soft on torture.
Conservatives, meanwhile, continue to minimize the significance of what
happened there. Some characterize Abu Ghraib as no big deal, what James
Schlesinger termed “Animal House on the night shift.” Others defende
Abu Ghraib as a way to get valuable information about potential
terrorist attacks. Rush Limbaugh claimed that “maybe the people who
ordered this are pretty smart” because, as an interrogation technique,
“it sounds pretty effective to me.”
Throughout the Muslim world, Abu Ghraib was viewed very
differently. To see why, we need to take a closer look at the scandal.
Fortunately we have a detailed picture of what happened, both from the
military’s 500-page report and from the trials of Private Lynndie
England and Private Charles Graner, the two main figures involved.
After marrying at age 19 “on a whim,” as she put it, England left her
husband and enlisted in the military. There she met Graner, who was
fresh from a divorce in which his wife had taken out three protective
orders against him. Shortly before they went to Iraq, England and Graner partied
together with another soldier friend in Virginia Beach. “They drank
heavily,” the New York Times reports, and when the other
soldier passed out, “Private Graner and Private England took turns
taking photographs of each other exposing themselves over his head.” In
Iraq, the two began an affair which they continued even though both
were warned that their sexual trysts on the night shift violated
military rules.
Soon Graner and England began to make videos of their sex acts.
They circulated the videos among their friends, and even mailed some to
friends back in America. In October 2004, Graner persuaded several
other soldiers to join him in staging and photographing prisoners. They
made Muslim men strip naked and simulate various sex acts for the
camera. They ordered male captives to put on female underwear,
sometimes on their heads. They compelled prisoners to masturbate while
they watched. At one point England said of a detainee, “Look, he’s
getting hard.” Graner said he was the one who took the infamous photograph
of England holding a leash around the neck of a crawling prisoner.
“Look what I made Lynndie do,” Graner boasted in an email with the
photo attachment that he sent to someone he knew. Graner said the
pictures he took of inmates masturbating were a “birthday gift” to
England. Graner made another unexpected present to England: he made her
pregnant.
England discovered the pregnancy two days after she broke up
with Graner. The reason for the breakup was that Graner was having an
affair with another woman, Specialist Megan Ambuhl. During their
courtship Ambuhl emailed Graner an article headlined, “Study Finds
Frequent Sex Raises Cancer Risk.” She commented, “We could have died
last night.” The army sent England home on account of her pregnancy, and
by the time the baby was born she was no longer speaking to Graner.
Graner proposed marriage to Ambuhl during his court martial, and
England found this out from her lawyers. Graner got 10 years in prison,
England three years. The other soldiers received lesser sentences. Paul
Arthur, the military investigator who was the first to question
England, quoted her giving a simple motive for her actions. “It was
just for fun.” Arthur added, “They didn’t think it was that serious.
They didn’t think it was a big deal. They were joking around.” Now we are in a better position to understand the Muslim
reaction to Abu Ghraib. Most Muslims did not view it as a torture story
at all. Muslims were not outraged at the interrogation techniques used
by the American military, which are quite mild by Arab standards.
Moreover, many Muslims realized that the most of the torture scenes in
the photographs—the hooded man with his arms outstretched, the prisoner
with wires attached to his limbs—were staged. This was simulated
torture, not real torture. The main focus of Islamic disgust was what Muslims perceived
as extreme sexual perversion. For many traditional Muslims, Abu Ghraib
demonstrated the casualness with which married Americans have affairs,
walk out on their spouses, and produce children without bothering to
take responsibility for the care of their offspring. In the Muslim
view, this perversion is characteristic of American society. Moreover, many Muslims viewed the degradation of Abu Ghraib
as a metaphor for how little Americans care for other people’s sacred
values, and for the kind of humiliation that America seeks to impose on
the Muslim world. Some Muslims argued that such degradation was worse
than execution because death only strips a man of his life, not of his
honor. In one crucial respect, however, the Muslim critics were
wrong. Contrary to their assertions, Abu Ghraib did not reflect the
shared values of America, it reflected the sexual immodesty of liberal
America. Lynndie England and Charles Graner were two wretched
individuals from Red America who were trying to act out the fantasies
of Blue America. Casting aside all traditional notions of decency,
propriety and morality, they simply lived by the code of
self-fulfillment. If it feels good, it must be right. This was
bohemianism, West Virginia-style.
At some level, the cultural left recognized this, which is why
most of its comments about Abu Ghraib assiduously avoided the issue of
sexual deviancy. The left’s embarrassment on this matter seems to have
drawn on class prejudice. For some liberals, soldiers like Graner and
England were poor white trash getting into trouble again. Of course if
Graner and England were professors at an elite liberal arts college,
their videotaped orgies might easily have become the envy of academia.
If they were artists staging these pictures in a loft in Soho they
could have been hailed as pioneers and encouraged by leftist admirers
to apply for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. But being low-life Appalachians, Graner and England inspired
none of these elevated thoughts. Instead, liberals moved
opportunistically to attack the military and discredit its prisoner
interrogation policies—even though these polices had nothing to do with
what actually happened. To his credit, President Bush made no attempt to defend Abu
Ghraib, firmly asserting that it didn’t represent America. What he
should have said is that it didn’t represent the values of conservative
America. In reality Abu Ghraib did reflect the values of a debauched
liberalism run amok. These values are ruining America’s image in the
traditional world. Many ordinary Muslims were scandalized to see how
some Americans behave, and how other Americans who should know better
try to cover these disgraceful things up. In minimizing Abu Ghraib,
some conservatives became cheap apologists for liberal debauchery.
By Dinesh D'Souza
Monday, February 26, 2007
Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, the former head of the interrogation center at
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, left, with legal counsel Capt. Samuel
Spitzberg, arrives at a military court in this Oct. 20, 2006 file
photo, at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland. Jordan, the only U.S.
military officer charged with a crime in the Abu Ghraib scandal will be
court-martialed on eight charges, including cruelty and maltreatment of
prisoners, the Army said Friday Jan. 26, 2007. (AP Photo/ Steve Ruark,
File)
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