Seymour Hersh had reported that there were other, unseen photos and videos from the Abu Ghraib prison. Congress has seen the photos and videos. The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see the photos and videos. A judge agreed and told the Pentagon to let the people see the photos and videos.
The Pentagon said no.
What is with these lawbreaking, criminal, tyrannical, lying, power-mad, treasonous, despotic oil pimps and their slavering lackeys that they don’t think they have to answer to the people and obey the laws of the people?
It took the national embarrassment of mourning 9/11 widows to even get them to deign to investigate! And only after begging and pleading and promising not to administer oaths or record anything did they bother to let the people ask them any questions about 9/11*.
Well, they sure didn’t like all that attention. The people forced them to actually do something not directly in their oil buddies’ best interests. Little things like trying to get their intelligence act together and protect the people from batshit crazy foreign terrorists blowing us up.
Then the intelligence gets worse and leads us into a war to protect ourselves from batshit crazy foreign terrorists with weapons of mass destruction and nuclear bombs. Except there were no batshit crazy terrorists, weapons of mass destruction, or nuclear bombs. They have the nerve to tell the people, “whoops, we got bad intelligence… again”, give the head of intelligence a Medal of Freedom, and tell us “did we say WMD? We meant liberate the Iraqi people and plant the glorious flowering seeds of democracy by bombing the hell out of them until they love us forever.” Oh, and now we’ve got a whole bunch of batshit crazy foreign terrorists, and a few domestic ones as well.
Lately we’ve had this whole Turd Blossom leak** fiasco, where we learn that they not only have contempt for any notion that the American people are their masters and not vice versa, we learn that they told really give much of turd about America, either. “You dare to tell the people the truth so maybe we don’t blindly rush into getting a couple of thousand servicemen killed, Joe Wilson? Well, screw protecting America’s intelligence assets, they never really worked out well for us anyway.” It’s only a CIA front company and a highly trained operative working undercover to track the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction so they don’t get into the hands of batshit crazy foreign terrorists. “Bitch shoulda told her husband to keep his mouf shut!”***
There are all those big heavy straws on the camel’s, I mean, the people’s back and so many more, like fraudulent elections, Tom DeLay, Duke Cunningham, ridiculous federal deficits, trying to steal our Social Security for Wall Street, wiping out the environment, ignoring global warming, Guantánamo, oh, how the people’s back is tired!
Then there’s a whole bunch of little straws like kicking proficient Arabic linguists out of the intelligence services for being gay, rising gas prices while we’ve invaded its source, diagnosing a brain-dead woman by videotape and flying in like the cavalry to force feed her, Martha Stewart, Enron, John Bolton, John Negroponte, John Ashcroft, John Roberts, John Ya-Ya’s, John Smallberries****, Jesus, there’s more Johns here than a party at Jeff Gannon’s place. And the people’s back gets ever so weary.
And the Abu Ghraib thing? That one buckled our knees. It hurt us so deeply that like a rape victim we just had to retreat inside ourselves and keep repeating “it can’t be happening, it can’t be happening”, but coldly realizing that it was right before us in living photographic color. The bitter irony was the dual nature of our victimhood, our belief that we were not like the brutal regimes of the past and present who would torture and degrade and dehumanize — that illusion was shattered; yet we were also imposing, by proxy, our aggression on some real victims, shackling them, drowning them, electrifying them, beating them, sodomizing them, leashing them, piling them, shaming them, people who, if they should live, will never forget that American flag on the shoulder of their captors.
“No, no, that’s not what we’re doing,” they soothingly told us. “It was a few bad apples. Just a few specialists and privates from West Virginia who came up with these wild frathouse pranks and it got a little out of hand. Just because we wrote up memos describing that we really didn’t think most torture was torture, well, heck, that don’t mean we wanted them kids to actually do it!” We’ve been abused so long that we clinged to that twisted logic, we reacted like a battered spouse who’s been promised that it will never happen again, mostly because believing that our leaders endorse, encourage, and direct torture in our name is too much to bear.
So now there are photos and videos. According to Editor & Publisher:
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress last year, after viewing a large cache of unreleased images: “I mean, I looked at them last night, and they’re hard to believe.” They show acts “that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhumane,” he added. “If these are released to the public, obviously it’s going to make matters worse.” [Matters? Which “matters” are those, Muslim hatred of us in the world igniting into terrorism domestically, or your corrupt administration coming to a sudden and incarcerating halt?]
A military report about that abuse describes detainees being threatened, sodomized with a chemical light and forced into sexually humiliating poses.
“The American public needs to understand we’re talking about rape and murder here. We’re not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told reporters after Rumsfeld testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We’re talking about rape and murder — and some very serious charges.”
A report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba on the abuse at the prison outside Baghdad says videotapes and photographs show naked detainees, and that groups of men were forced to masturbate while being photographed and videotaped. Taguba also found evidence of a “male MP guard having sex with a female detainee.”
The military later screened some of the images for lawmakers, who said they showed, among other things, attack dogs snarling at cowed prisoners, Iraqi women forced to expose their breasts, and naked prisoners forced to have sex with each other.
In the same period, reporter Seymour Hersh, who helped uncover the scandal, said in a speech before an ACLU convention: “Some of the worse that happened that you don’t know about, ok? Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men….The women were passing messages saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened.’
“Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it’s going to come out.”
It’s about time the criminal Bush maladministration is the one being terrorized for once. Terrorized by the people who demand the truth, terrorized that this might just be that final big straw, terrorized not that they might lose their jobs, or resign in ignominy, or be impeached, but maybe even be tried for war crimes and imprisoned.
So what else could the Pentagon say but no? What are you gonna do, call the Army on them? Complain to their boss? Those photos and videos aren’t coming out anytime soon, at least not until after November 7th, 2006, if ever. Even if they do come out, there’s always that golden Get Out Of Jail Free card called a presidential pardon that you’ll see handed out by the dozens on January 19th, 2009. (It’s not as if Poppa Bush’s buddies had to any time for Iran/Contra, either.)
What are you gonna do about it? Huh?
* Fuck it. If they’re going to invoke 9/11 for partisan gain, so am I.
** I’m sure somebody’s got to make an ointment for Turd Blossom leak… “new, from the makers of Preparation H… Resignation H, perfect for the treatment of painful, inflamed Turd Blossom leak.”
*** I don’t know why the Bush Administration voice in my head suddenly turned into 50 Cent. I’m going to blame the research I did unlocking the hidden sex scene in Grand Theft Auto.
**** Triple bonus points if you didn’t have read down here to get the reference to the cult classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
