Torturegate originates in U.S. culture: the media moves from lap dog to watchdog status

National Catholic Reporter, June 4, 2004 by Raymond A. Schroth

Pfc. Lynndie England, 21, drags the naked form of a male Iraqi prisoner across the floor of Abu Ghraib prison--as if he were her dog yanked out for his evening walk.

USA Today lined the pictures up for us--from the dogs trained on black students in Birmingham in 1963 to the Los Angeles police pummeling Rodney King in 1991--both to put today's news in historical context and to dramatize the power of photography to change political consciousness. It is a bold step in a month in which the media, which have slumbered while the Bush administration abused its power, moved from lap dog to watchdog status.

The pundits' photo analyses have helped us see more clearly what has long been right in front of our eyes. The Village Voice' s Richard Goldstein writes that Abu Ghraib pictures reveal the "real-world manifestation of the snarl-behind-the-smile that Rummy wears so well." Now we know why "the rest of the world reads this leer as the look on America's face." The New York Times' Sarah Boxer says their precedent is not pictures of Nazi death camps corpses but "humorous" snapshots, like those travelers who pose in front of Michelangelo's David's groin. They remind me of the photos I saw in the Hanoi war crimes museum of an America GI holding up the shredded remains of a Viet Cong.

How did the story break? In several ways. Soldiers, including one who recently spoke to ABC News, broke silence and exposed the cover-up. A National Guard officer, featured in People magazine, discovered the abuse and informed superiors in September. Another soldier found the pictures on a CD being passed around and informed superiors. The uncle of one who was accused called military muckraker David Hackworth, who called "60 Minutes II." Unnamed persons passed Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's report and CDs to reporter Seymour Hersh, the same man who exposed the Vietnam massacre at My Lai and whose three articles in the New Yorker have transformed the way America looks at the Iraq war.

Naked men, hooded, simulate fellatio, pile up piggyback and collapse in a grotesque embrace. They stretch out, chained to bunks and jail cells. Female soldiers with silly grins point in ridicule at the prisoners' genitals.

The American public enjoys male nudity--when the men are athletes, actors, or models displayed by fashion photographers for our entertainment--to sell underwear, perfume, sex and other basic American values. But these Iraqi men are anonymous, ordinary, dark-skinned, cowering in their disgrace and fear. Theirs is the nakedness of the bombing victim whose clothes have been blasted away, the nakedness of Jesus on the cross.

Their nakedness is part of their torture. As Robert J. Lifton writes in The Nation, interrogators were under pressure to find the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Impatient with the war's progress, writes Hersh, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved a secret group trained to hit suspects hard and sent them to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Arab men, unlike Western men accustomed to the sports locker room, do not appear naked in the presence of one another. Either these men would cooperate with their interrogators, even serve as our spies, or the pictures would be circulated in their home neighborhoods.

Ironically, these scenes appear in the context of the Bush administration and its surrogates' attempts to blot other pictures from public view: flag-draped coffins arriving from Iraq and the faces of the war dead quietly celebrated in a special edition of ABC's "Nightline." Then, when this story began to surface, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff convinced a compliant CBS to postpone "60 Minutes" two weeks until the Army got its act together. Finally, to stifle more disclosures from the 1,800 still-secret scenes, senators and congressmen were allowed a peek at a closed showing.

How could this have happened? As the USA Today collection implied, the violence virus deep in American culture has resurfaced.

Rush Limbaugh inadvertently said something true. These scenes are not that rare: They're fraternity hazing, Yale's Skull and Bones. DePauw professor Jonathan Nichols-Pethich told MSNBC that humiliation is the stuff of "reality" TV. Every night on TV, Howard Stern strips young women bare and ridicules their body parts, and the girls pretend to love it. High school athletes inflict sexual humiliation--sodomy--on their teammates at football camp. It builds team spirit. And how many romanticized Hollywood and TV cops have we watched slap around a suspect as if this is standard behavior? Two of the indicted GIs were prepared for the Abu Ghraib rituals by their experience as hometown prison guards.

In public policy, the torture gate opened when President George W. Bush divided the world between good and evil and gave himself a license to deny human rights to "bad guys." And Rumsfeld, in his first public response to the scandal, employed the distinction between "torture" and "abuse." Abuse, he implied, was not so bad.

Now The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NPR, The New Yorker, Newsweek, Time, (which reports that the accused soldiers will use the photographs to prove they were following orders), the International Red Cross, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch all make one thing clear. Torturegate stems from the violence in our culture--from the American prison system (particularly in Bush's Texas) and reaches to Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, the CIA, the Pentagon and back to the White House.