Globalizing Abu Ghraib:
Four Meditations on Rhetoric and Violence in An Age of Empire
On January 29, 2002
President Bush delivered
the
State of the Union Address
to 52 million furious Americans
and a roiling chamber of
flag-pinned
patriots
thundering wave after
wave of boisterous applause
in an imperial Capitol
where
mourning became vengeance
so quickly that just sixteen days
following the horrors of
9/11
a
CIA paramilitary team
landed in Afghanistan
where trunks of crisp $100
bills bought allies
who
before the capture of Kunduz on 25 November
allowed Bin Laden to slip over the
border
in the massive Pakistani
airlift
where
Musharraf saved his rotten regime
by rescuing hundreds—perhaps
thousands—
of Pakistani Army men and
Inter-Service
Intelligence operatives
supposedly our allies
who had been fighting
shoulder-to-shoulder
with the Taliban
the hunt for Bin Laden was
thus already lost
the
War on Terrorism already botched
when the president boldly proposed
a Brave New World
of
endless wars
of nameless foes
of
perpetual violence[1]
* * *
While Rummy¹s ham-handed
war
enabled Bin Laden
to slither away from capture
the president warned that
night that
rogue
states and their terrorist allies
constitute an axis of evil
planting thousands of dangerous
killers
. . . throughout the world
like ticking time bombs
the president then pledged
to
eliminate the terrorist parasites
thus turning inanimate bomb-like
terrorists
into a teeming pool of
sub-human leeches
threatened
with yet another of the president¹s
open-ended death sentences[2]
the nation¹s most practiced
executioner
was
globalizing the death penalty
reminding the world American justice
has progressed little since
1839
when Sarah Grimké walked down
a steamy red clay back road
in
the slave South to stumble upon
a human head stuck up on a high pole. . .
a runaway slave . . . had been shot there
his
head severed from his body
and put upon the public highway
as a terror to deter slaves from running
away [3]
2. Abu Ghraib & The Imperial Gulag
Two-and-a-half years after
the U.S.
lost
Bin Laden and his henchmen
in the drug infested hills of
Afghanistan
David Brooks wailed in his
weekly sermon
as
the New York Times¹ favorite conservative
that the civilized world was under
assault
by a cult of death that thrives on
the
sheer pleasure of killing and dying
It¹s about massacring people
It¹s about experiencing
the total freedom
of
barbarism. . . It¹s about the joy
of sadism and suicide [4]
while Brooks was responding
to
another terrorist strike
on the southern fringe of Russia
his words best describe
the
grinning thugs
of Abu Ghraib prison
we first saw the images
in
the spring of 2004
of dogs attacking prisoners
men raping women
men
raping men
parades
of naked bloodied bodies
hooded
prisoners jacking off in front of guards
beatings
of every form
post-beating
gloatings
—high
fives all around![5]
two months before the images
were
leaked to the press
Major General Antonio Taguba
reported that U.S. troops
intelligence
officers
and private contractors
had been reveling in sadistic
blatant
and wanton criminal abuses
one perpetrator described long nights
of
gratuitous and random
violence
marked by
twisted
joviality
So now Mr. Brooks
who revels in the joy of sadism?[6]
Salah Edine Sallat responded
by painting
a
heart-breaking mural on another
crumbling wall in Sadr City, Baghadad
on the right side of the
painting
we
see a torture victim
standing hooded on a box
waiting to be electrocuted
by
wires attached to
his hands and penis
the
pose is a standard torture
device
called the Vietnam
by intelligence
personnel [7]
the wires trace across the
wall
to
the left side of the painting
where our beloved Lady
Liberty is debased
in
the cowardly costume
of the Ku Klux Klan
a book of laws in one hand
she
reaches with the other
to throw the switch on a fuse box
suggesting the U.S. is a
Klansman
justice
is blind
torture our way of life[8]
* * *
are damaged working class
thugs
who learned the craft of
torture
in
our local lockups and pens
Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick
II—nicknamed Chip—
one
of the ring-leaders of the abuse
worked six years as a prison guard in
Virginia
Lane McCotter an independent
contractor
brought
to Abu Ghraib a trail of human rights abuses
tracing back to the Utah Department of
Corrections
Army Specialist Charles
Graner Jr.
the
grinning gloved strongman
in the infamous naked pyramid scene
was an abusive guard
in
a county jail and state prison
in
the rolling hills of Pennsylvania
John Armstrong another Abu
Ghraib contractor
led
the Connecticut Department of Corrections
when it was hit in 2003 with a lawsuit
about wrongful deaths
Terry Stewart and Chuck Ryan
prison
consultants in Iraq
were implicated in abuse scandals
while running Arizona
prisons
where
their disciplinary practices
were described as absolute
brutality [10]
rather than renegade rotten
soldiers
in the name of great
decency
and unselfish courage[11]
these
prison-industrial-complex castaways
these happy champions of torture
are the product of colonial
outsourcing
globalization
in the worst
most violent sense of the word
for this hidden global
internment network
stretches
from Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay
to military bases in Afghanistan
to dungeons in Morocco
to jails in Syria
to
prisons in Egypt
to
detention centers in Azerbaijan
to
holding pens in Thailand
to
interrogation rooms in Qatar
to
unmarked cells in Saudi Arabia
to
unnamed Soviet-era compounds
dispersed
across several
Eastern
European democracies
the tortures at Abu Ghraib
thus point toward
an
imperial archipelago of prison camps
where the innocent are tortured
in
the name of democracy[12]
3.
The Brave New World of Managed Information Dissemination
In 1945
Theodor Adorno was yet again disappointed
his
émigré neighbors in L.A. were succumbing
to the decadent
pleasures of West Coast life
juiced with
cocktails weed designer drugs
grapefruits
the size of basketballs
drenched in the
indiscriminate California
sun setting
now in mesmerizing glory
as
schools of dolphins skim the waves
pelicans glide
like dinosaurs
with
unlucky fish writhing all the way
down
their bucket-like gullets
water trailing
from their immense wings
spraying
the surfers waiting for rides
while
trading war stories
God Damn it¹s
good to be home
while
California glided toward
the
New World sublime
Adorno¹s beloved
Europe sank
into
starvation-fueled food riots
post-Nazi
bloodletting
and the early
necessary stages of amnesia
where taste
would be smashed by capital
high
art overrun by banality
truth chewed up
by the culture industry
and so he
wrote that
things
have come to pass
where lying
sounds like truth
truth
like lying. . . .
The
confounding of truth and lies
making it almost
impossible
to
maintain a distinction . . .
[marks]
the conversion of all questions
of truth into questions
of power [13]
Sixty years
later Adorno was surely rolling in his grave
when
the Defense Science Board released its
Task Force Report
on Strategic Communication
a stunning
rebuke to the Bush administration
portraying
the War on Terrorism
as a deadly
fiasco
the DSB
nonetheless proposed
to
right the sinking ship of state
via the better
manipulation of
strategic
communication employed
to
shape context and build relationships
that enhance the
achievement
of
political economic and military objectives
thus
mobiliz[ing] publics in support
of major policy
initiatives
this Brave
New World of imperial propaganda
will
be run by a whiz-bang
Office of
Strategic Influence
producing tactical
influence efforts and
broader
influence efforts like Public Diplomacy
and managed
information dissemination [14]
and so as Teddy knew it
would
the
production of lying
that sounds like truth
has become government policy
wrapped
now
in the democracy-destroying
flag
of anti-terrorism
4. The Topography of Empire
released one year following 9/11
the
National Security Strategy of the United States
also known as the Bush Doctrine
claims the twentieth century
closed
with
a decisive victory for the forces of freedom
—and a single model of national
success:
freedom, democracy, and
free enterprise. . . .
these
values of freedom are right and true
for every person, in every society
the Bush Doctrine thus
proposes
to
Americanize the world
bringing our crazy chaos
to every corner of the
world
for
U.S. norms are right and true
for all people everywhere [15]
that¹s all people
everywhere
every
person
in
every society
in
every corner of the world
that¹s more than 5 billion
beings
inhabiting
almost 200 countries
speaking innumerable languages[16]
praying to infinite Gods
all
apparently waiting to be saved
by my bumbling murderous president
and so my beloved America
gallops
toward empire
building a world of Abu Ghraibs
where torture is cheered
where
fantasies replace facts
where obliterating innocents is good
sport
where the best hopes of free
men and women
are
dragged through the dirt
in the name of peace of justice
--Stephan Hartman
[1]. 52 million and first
quotation from Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2004), 92 and 6, and see 85-92 on the internal White House debates
preceding the ³axis of evil² speech; for a counter-history of the invasion of
Afghanistan, see Seymour Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu
Ghraib (New
York: HarperCollins, 2004), 121-161, quotation from 130; on the relationship
between the Northern Alliance and drugs, see Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil,
and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (New York: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2003); Christian Parenti, ³Who Rules Afghanistan?² The Nation (15 November 2004): 13-18;
and Carlotta Gall, ³Afghan Poppy Growing Reaches Record Level, U.N. Says,² New
York Times
(19 November 2004): A3.
[2]. President Bush, ³State of the Union Address² (29 January 2002)—this and all other presidential sources are available from the White House at www.whitehouse.gov; for further analysis of President Bush¹s imperials speeches, see Stephen John Hartnett and Laura Ann Stengrim, Globalization and Empire: The U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Free Markets, and The Twilight of Democracy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), esp. chapters 1 and 2; for comments on the political work of the term ³evil,² see Robert Hariman, ³Speaking of Evil,² and James McDaniel, ³Figures of Evil: A Triad of Rhetorical Strategies for Theo Politics,² both in Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6:3 (Fall 2003): 511-517 and 539-550
[3].
See Grimké¹s comments in American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of A
Thousand Witnesses, ed.
Theodore D. Weld (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), 23; in an
especially gross version of this post-execution production of terror, the body
of the dead slave named Mark was hung in iron chains in the commons of
Charlestown, Massachusetts, for three years, from 1775-1778 (see Thomas McDade,
The Annals of Murder: A Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets on American
Murders from Colonial Times to 1900
[Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961], xxxiii); on the uses of gibbeting
to fight pirates, the eighteenth century¹s version of terrorists, see Peter
Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves,
Commoners, and The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).
[4]. David Brooks, ³The Cult of Death,² New
York Times (7 September 2004): A27; Brooks¹s stunning inability to distinguish
between the national liberationist violence of the Chechen rebels and the
international jihadist violence of Bin Laden is but one mark of the right¹s
convenient collapsing of all forms of violence into supposedly U.S.-threatening
terrorism (for a critique of this maneuver see Michael Mann, Incoherent
Empire [London: Verso, 2003], 159-193).
[5].
The images described here have been distributed widely on the web; some
were first printed in The New Yorker (10 May 2004), 42-43,
others in the New York Times (7 May 2004), A11; many more are available
online via the Washington Post;
and read the graphic textual descriptions in Seymour Hersh, ³Chain
of Command,² The New Yorker (17 May 2004): 37-43; also see James
Risen and David Johnston, ³Photos of Dead Show the Horrors of Abuse,² New
York Times (7 May 2004), A11; for an introduction to the scandal see
Mark Danner, ³Torture and Truth,² New York Review of Books (10 June
2004): 46-50.
[6].
Major General Antonio Taguba, Article 15-6: Investigation of the 800th
Military Police Brigade (the Taguba Report, as printed in Mark Danner,
Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror [New
York: New York Review Books, 2004], 279-328 in full, quotation from 326,
Taguba¹s list of abuses on 292-293); for analysis of the Taguba report see
Seymour Hersh, ³Torture at Abu Ghraib,² The New Yorker (10
May 2004), 42-47, and ³Excerpts from Prison Inquiry,² Los Angeles Times
(3 May 2004), A8; for additional documentation of these abuses, see George
R. Fay, AR 15-6: Investigation of the Abu Ghraib Detention Facility and
205th Military Intelligence Brigade (August 2004, downloaded from www.findlaw.com), 68-95; ³twisted joviality²
from Kate Zernike, ³Accused Soldier Paints Scene of Eager Mayhem,² New
York Times (14 May 2004): A1, 10.
[7]. ³The
Vietnam² from John Barry, Michael Hirsh, and Michael Isikoff, ³The Roots
of Torture,² Newsweek, accessed at www.msnbc.com
on 19 May 2004; and see Josh White and Scott Higham, ³Sergeant Says Intelligence
Directed Abuse,² Washington Post (20 May 2004): A1; on the larger
implications of the ³Vietnam,² see Susan Sontag, ³Regarding the Torture
of Others,² New York Times Magazine (23 May 2004): 24-29, 42; Bonnie
Kerness, ³This is the America We Know,² The Vision (the publication
of the American Friends Service Committee¹s Criminal Justice Program) (Summer
2004): 2; and the cover of the The New Yorker (18 October
2004), where the image is inscribed lightly over a U.S. flag, hence showing
how Abu Ghraib casts a shadow over the U.S.
[8]. Salah Edine Sallat¹s mural is reproduced in
Mark Danner, ³The Logic of Torture,² New York Review of Books (24
June 2004): 70-74, image on 70, and in Lisa Hajjar, ³Our Heart of Darkness,²
Amnesty Now (the publication of Amnesty International, Summer 2004):
4-7, 15, image on 7.
[9].
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Report on the Treatment
by the Coalition Forces of Prisoners of War and Other Protected Persons
by the Geneva Conventions in Iraq during Arrest, Internment and Interrogation
(Geneva: ICRC, November 2004), page 8 of the printout downloaded from the
Guardian; James R. Schlesinger, Chair, Final Report of the Independent
Panel to Review DOD Detention Operations (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, August
2004), 61, 29; for analyses of the Schlesinger Report, see Eric Schmitt,
³Rules on Inmates Need Overhaul, Abuse Panel Says,² New York Times
(25 August 2004): A1, 10, and Mark Danner, ³Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story,²
New York Review of Books (7 October 2004): 44-50; for further evidence
of the innocence of many of the Iraqi prisoners, consider the fact that
U.S. forces have begun emptying Abu Ghraib, releasing 624 wrongfully arrested
Iraqis on 28 May 2004 alone (see Christine Hauser, ³To Frenzied Scenes,
Abu Ghraib Frees 624 Prisoners,² New York Times [29 May 2004]: A8);
for a grueling account of how the disappearance squads whisked innocents
into months of torture, see Luke Harding, ³After Abu Ghraib,² Guardian (22 September 2004), where he recounts the story of Huda Alazawi,
one of the first Iraqi women to discuss her treatment in Abu Ghraib.
[10]. Information on Frederick from Hersh, ³Tortur