Abu Ghraib: all too familiar

Catholic New Times, June 6, 2004 by Negroponte

"As Americans we are inclined to be a bit insular," writes spiritual writer Sr. Joan Chittister. "We see ourselves as the center of the globe, the biggest, the best, the latest, the smartest, the most advanced, the most powerful, the most right, the paragon of all paragons in all things."

This much-travelled and deeply-anchored Benedictine has the requisite humility to place herself in context of God's human family. Like her fellow Catholic, Michael Moore, she is free enough and American enough to criticize the appalling misadventures of the current American administration and the most incompetent president in living memory.

This is a presidency which has deeply shamed the American people with its imperial bluster and swagger, its thumbing its nose at international institutions and norms and its ignorance about how the rest of the world lives.

For many, the degraded revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib are not surprising. To the average decent American, they have been a staggering blow to a psyche already wounded by 9/11. Those of us north of the 49th parallel can easily and willingly testify to the basic goodness and generosity of American people and can say that these revelations are indeed uncharacteristic of Americans. They are however, totally in character of the foreign policy of the United States ,certainly in the post war period.

We should distinguish then the torture and wanton destruction in places like Fallujah are not so much reflections of Americans, but symptoms of empire. Surprisingly, it was the conservative columnist George Will who made the link between torture and empire. He said, "Americans must not flinch from absorbing the photographs of what some Americans did in that prison. And they should not flinch from this fact: that pornography is almost inevitably part of what empire looks like ... empire is always about domination."

Stunning, hubristic blindness

What shocks many is that commentators like Will and too much of the American corporate press have been enthusiastic proponents of American power for over 40 years. An imperial power ,be it Spain, Britain, France or in this case, the United States will do anything it has to do to keep its relentless appetite for consumer goods flowing, whether it is thirty per cent of the world's energy or strawberries in winter. And the attitude will always be: I don't want to know where it comes from or why it is so cheap.

Ten thousand Iraqi civilians dead you say? No WMD? Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11? I did not know that. Five hundred thousand Iraqi children starved during the blockade of the 1990s. Too bad, I'm busy worrying about Friends and Sex in the City and who got voted off the island. Even though fifty per cent of us do not vote (the worst record in the western world) I am sure we are exporting democracy to the "Eye-rakees," as Lynndie England, the sad fall girl with the dog collar, called her Arab prisoners.

It is this stunning hubristic blindness which the "ideological institutions--the schools, the media and much of scholarship" as Noam Chomsky keeps repeating--a worn-out mantra extolling U.S virtues, all facts to the contrary, one of which is that that the U.S. has a profound concern for human rights and the raising of living standards and democratization. As professor John McMurtry asks (p.8), "Will the group-minded slogans of 'The Free World' versus 'The Terrorists' fool the public once more?"

Why would anybody be amazed at American torture when hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, mutilated and murdered in record numbers by thugs trained at the School of Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, a scandalous insult to true American values and which tens of thousands of brave Americans have been trying to close in the past decades. Guatemala alone has been a charnel house since the US government subverted the Arbenz government in 1954 at the request of the United Fruit Company.

Negroponte: a classic case study

Why is it that no senator, congressperson or the so-called "free press" has raised their voice when the ultimate insider, John Negroponte, was named the new ambassador to Iraq as of July 1. From Quito to Mexico City to Manila to Tegucigalpa, Negroponte has done the empire's bidding. In 1981, he was sent by Ronald Reagan to turn Honduras into a military command post against the Sandinistas in nearby Nicaragua. It was here that according to the Baltimore Sun, Negroponte allied himself with General Augusto Alvarez a brutal army officer who had learned his trade in the Dirty War in Argentina in the late 1970s. Alvarez headed the notorious Battalion 316, a rampaging death squad trained and supplied by the CIA. It used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners were "often kept naked and, when no longer useful killed and buried in unmarked graves." As well, the Sun said that the embassy knew all of this and were told to omit any references to these abuses in their reports. Alvarez was finally deposed by his fellow officers and Negroponte returned to the U.S.