There are 60 more photos from Abu Ghraib that the ACLU succesfully got released by suing the US government. Some were just shown on Australien TV. It wasn't reported that widely here in the US, but Europe and Middle East are quite shocked, coming fresh out of the recent wave of riots, having to deal with Hamas and nuclear bully Iran. And there is a big difference between autocratic govermnents manipulating their uneducated masses into rioting because of some cartoons in a paper whose name they can't pronounce from a country they didn't know anything about two weeks ago, and the outright and justified anger of being conquered in the name of freedom of democracy by a nation of torturers.
But all is quiet on the Middle Easter front. I talked to NYU historian Bernard Haykel, who's currently in Ryadh on a research project about the modern history of Saudi Arabia. He said most people in Saudi-Arabia talk about the surging stock market. He was at a dinner on Tuesday and nobody even mentioned the new Abu Ghraib photos. "Most people think that everything that is to be said about America and the West has been said. Those images just reconfirm what everybody knows anyway." The pan-Arab newschannels Al-Jazzeera and Al-Arabia showed mostly restrain and didn't broadcast the images of naked prisoners. Because according to Haykel those images would be far worse than the actual torture pictures. He said it's hard to imagine for Westerners, what these images trigger in a Muslim. They destroy a person's dignity, which makes the sexual degradation real torture. Haykel said the US armed forces most likely wouldn't have come up with this culturally based form of torture themselves, but probably had secret services from Egypt in Jordan help them set up a system of degradation in Abu Ghraib.
The worst part of the pictures is the great value they have as a recruiting tool for the Islamists. US rank and file do realize these longterm effects of the pictures. "Abu Ghraib is a graduate-level training ground for the insurgency", an American officer told the New York Times. In military and intelligence circles the prison is supposedly already known as Jihad University. With 325.000 people on the terrorist watchlist and a British hacker begging his hometown court not to extradite him, because he might end up in Guantanamo for having hacked US government computers five years ago, this nation sure has some serious PR problems. And Karen Hughes was definitely not the person to put in charge. This ain't no spin to doctor. This is the world watching...
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See the latest batch of images from Jihad U.
If you want to know how we got to Abu Ghraib, read the brillant collection of documents, files and essays "The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib" by the director of the NYU's Center on Law and Security Karen Greenberg and the President-elect of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Joshua dratel.
1 comment:
One major problem - if you want to democratize the Middle East, want to propagate human rights and be accepted as the stalwart of modernity, you have both lead by force and example. That will always be a big strategic disadvantage, but if the US can't behave like a civilized society, it will always be a great way for the brute forces out there to justify their horrendous deeds.
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