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Whatever comes of allegations of abuse of Iraqi
prisoners by United States’ and British forces, the whole sorry mess
is the best international Rorschach test I’ve seen in a long time.
Until there are more answers and fewer questions, what people see in
the story tells more about them than about the actual events.
The pictures I’ve seen so far are repugnant, with much
worse said to be coming. Fortunately not all of the photos have
proven genuine; many allegedly documenting abuses by British troops
have proven to be fakes while others supposedly showing sexual
assaults were found to have been downloaded from two particularly
twisted Internet porn sites.
So until the investigations are complete, we can’t be
sure what is real and what was trumped up to manipulate world
opinion. Many of the photos are undoubtedly authentic, but even
what those mean depends on who’s looking.
Americans have long hated the abuse of prisoners. The
only man executed for war crimes after the Civil War was Captain
Henry Wirz, the commander of the Confederacy’s notorious
Andersonville prison camp. Grainy black and white pictures of
Allied prisoners of war and concentration camp detainees freed at
the end of World War II dot our history books, reminding us why the
war was fought and serving as a warning against abuse of the
captor’s power.
It is natural, then, that photos of naked men on leashes
conjure up older images, visions of walking skeletons, gas chambers,
and the smoke of Auschwitz.
Natural, but not factual. Even the worst allegations,
including unreleased prison photos that are said to show physical
cruelty rather than just humiliation, aren’t in the same universe as
death factories like Auschwitz and Dachau. Nor do these incidents
compare to what Iraqis endured during 30 years of Saddam Hussein’s
hideous rule.
Or, as some point out, to the over 700 American lives
lost while freeing Iraq and the horrendous abuse of some of their
bodies. While I was writing this, an email with the subject line
“Why should we be embarrassed?” pinged my in-box. Its point, which
I will paraphrase to spare the time it would take to correct the
spelling and grammar, boiled down to “They got what they deserved.”
The problem with that little lapse in logic is that the mistreatment
of prisoners reflects on the abusers, not the abused.
Do these incidents also reflect on all Americans? The
press would have us believe the world thinks so, and perhaps they
do. If they do, it again means more about them than us. Since the
fall of Saddam the world has seen photos of mass graves, organized
torture centers, and blood soaked prison cells, each of which have
received less attention than the photographs of a few naked
prisoners that had been published by the time I finished this
column. The systematic torture, rape, and murder of Iraqi citizens
by order of their own government drew yawns out of Europe for 30
years and even less notice in the Arab world. That their outrage
now rings a bit hollow shouldn’t surprise them.
It could be that the world simply expects more from us,
and it should if it’s been paying attention. Yet the proof of our
national mettle is not whether a handful of goons abused or tortured
a handful of prisoners but how we handle the criminals who did and
any of their superiors who knowingly permitted it to happen..
And it will be handled. Eason Jordan, CNN’s chief news
executive, confessed last year that his network covered up
atrocities by Saddam’s government out of fear of retribution. That
the media need not fear now and the U.S. public’s demands for
justice is the real proof of who we are.
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