Creeping Toward a Conspiracy?

Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The last thing you want to do is let the Arab world know how you treat Arab males in prison.

The unraveling of the abuse of the Iraqi detainees seems to be assuming the form of a conspiracy. The Yahoo! News, May 16, 2004, quoting a report published in the recent issue of The New Yorker (Issue of 2004-05-04), wrote, “Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the expansion of a secret program that encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to obtain intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.”

It appears that sexual humiliation was not an arbitrary concoction of the interrogators at the spur of the moment; they didn’t do it for ‘kicks’ and titillation. It was a part of well considered plan in Pentagon. Seymour Hersch referred to a book “The Arab Mind” in his report in The New Yorker, which was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” The book was written by Raphael Pataki, a cultural anthropologist, and was first published in 1973. The book includes a whole chapter of 25 pages on Arabs and Sex, “depicting sex as a taboo with shame and repression.” According to Hersch, “Homosexual activity, or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private….In their (neocons’) discussions, … two themes emerged – one, that Arabs only understand force and two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.” Their rationale was that some prisoners would do anything to avoid dissemination of pictures taken of them showing engagement in sexual acts. According to the New Yorker report, “..the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population. The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action….If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.”

The Defense Department has strongly rejected the claims made in the New Yorker report. Pentagon spokesman Lawrence De Rita has issued a statement calling the claims “outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.” However, it appears that the report cannot easily be swept away or shoved under the carpet by such a curt and summary rebuttal. There is material in the report which is much more serious and appears to be spiraling upward to the high-ups in the chain of command.

According to Hersch’s report, “The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.” This is in conformance with what Mr. Rumsfeld also testified in the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings. But President Bush said earlier this month that he leaned of the Abu Ghraib abuse from the CBS pictures and that he was mad at Donald Rumsfeld that he hadn’t informed him earlier.

The report further revealed that “The Pentagon’s attitude last January…was ‘Somebody got caught with some photos. What’s the big deal? Take care of it.’ Rumsfeld’s explanation to the White House …was reassuring: We’ve got a glitch in the program. We’ll prosecute it. The cover story was that some kids got out of control.”

There are many unanswered questions in the Abu Ghraib fiasco. Many people did not know, who ought to know by virtue of the office they hold, much about the methods that were used in detainees’ abuse and torture. They were as much shocked by the recent revelations as any ordinary innocent Joe, man in the street, who believes in American values of justice and fairness and places a high premium on the American form of democratic governance. It appears that Senator Hilary Clinton was also taken by surprise as her comments in the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing show:

If, indeed, General Miller was sent from Guantanmo to Iraq for the purpose of acquiring more actionable intelligence from detainees, then it is fair to conclude that the actions that are at point here in your report {on abuses at Abu Ghraib} are in some way connected to General Miller’s arrival and his specific orders, however they were interpreted, by those MPs and the military intelligence that were involved…Therefore, I for one don’t believe I yet have adequate information from Mr. Cambone (undersecretary for military intelligence) and the Defense Department as to exactly what orders, and the connection between his arrival in the fall of ’03 and the intensity of the abuses that occurred afterwards.

The Abu Ghraib expose’ seems to have caught fire and spreading out of control. Where will it eventually lead to and how will it end, in the end, remains to be seen. Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, is also embroiled in the abuse scandal flames and his resignation has already become a topic of discussion and demand in the British press. His job is on the line.