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An Army of Scum (Ted Rall on crystal meth?)
By Ted Rall Or, Weâre Looking For a Few Good Homosexual Rapists Now itâs official: American troops occupying Iraq have become virtually indistinguishable from the SS. Like the Germans during World War II, they cordon off and bomb civilian villages to retaliate for guerilla attacks on their convoys. Like the blackshirts who terrorized Europe, Americaâs victims disappear into hellish prisons ruled by sadists and murderers. The U.S. military is short just one item to achieve moral parity with the Nazis: gas chambers. Congratulations, Ted, you are now indistinguishable from Joseph Goebbels. Please follow his example to its conclusion (but leave your kids, if any, out of it this time, OK?) "Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees" by soldiers, freelance mercenaries and professional torturers under the command of CIA intelligence officers at Baghdadâs Abu Ghraib prison, according to an internal government report. The detainees, about 60 percent of them assumed to be innocent by the Americans themselves, were routinely beaten, sodomized "with a chemical light or broomstick," urinated upon, tied to electrified wires and threatened with death, stripped and forced to perform homosexual sex acts on each other and U.S. troops. Donât be fooled by military apologists who insist that these American SS are nothing more than a few bad apples. Seymour Hersh, who has read the armyâs internal report, quotes Major General Antonio Taguba as saying that U.S.-committed atrocities are "systemic, endemic throughout the command structure...[The soldier-torturers] were being told what to do and told it was OK." Note that "atrocities" is added in front of the alleged Taguba quote. Tagubaâs report does not refer to anyone as a "soldier-torturer." As of May 3, the Taguba report was still classified and we only have Hershâs word for its contents. Most of Hershâs claims about it are interpretive rather than expository and are therefore subject to the utmost suspicion. True, most soldiers probably donât condone torture. But all soldiers have been tarnished by it. The free press is tarnished by you, Ted. George W. Bushâs new gulag archipelago, a string of concentration camps, military and INS prisons that span the globe from North Carolina to Iraq to Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay to New York City, has been designed to give torturers the veil of secrecy they require to carry out their hideous acts as well as the tacit understanding that they wonât be held accountable. The Red Cross, defense lawyers and relatives of the victims, few of whom are charged with a crime, are denied access to the detainees or even the simple confirmation that theyâre being held by our government. Some soldiers, like Sergeant Ivan Frederick II, "questioned some of the things I saw," such as "leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door." But when he discussed these abuses with his superiors, he says they brushed him off: "This is how military intelligence wants it done." Ted neglects to mention that Frederick is one of the defendants and is facing a long stay in Leavenworth if he canât convince the court martial that it was someone elseâs fault. As proven by the classic psychological experiments of the â50s, people put in a position of total power over another human being find it hard to resist abusing their charges. Prison guards mistreat inmates for a simple reason: they can. Wherever one controls another, sadism is inevitable. The ability to strike at others without fear of retaliation is a kind of control. In all seriousness, this passage is very revealing, not just about the monster Rall himself, but the authoritarian left in general. The view of power projected here is perhaps the best explanation for why Ted uses his own power (such as it is) to desecrate the dead, incite murder and mutilation, and verbally assault the families of American soldiers. However, this tragic truism can be mitigated by creating mechanisms to ensure transparency behind bars. Granting prisoners access to attorneys, journalists and other members of the outside world, unannounced inspections by human rights agencies, recognizing their rights under the Geneva Conventions and rigorous prosecutions of criminal guards can never entirely eliminate abuse, but theyâre essential to prisons run by democratic societies. Under the Geneva Conventions, many of the detainees could have been shot out of hand as partisans, saboteurs, and spies. Further, the use of human shields (which Rall endorses) is a war crime in and of itself. We know about Abu Ghraib only because the inbred psychos who forced nude Iraqi men to pile up in pyramids were dumb enough to snap photographs as mementos of their time liberating the nation from Saddam. Itâs like the Rodney King video: cops beat up blacks every day, but there usually isnât a camera around. We know about it, Ted, because another of those low-class individuals whom you characterize as "scum" turned them in. Abu Ghraib, you can bet your bottom dollar, is merely the tip of the iceberg. Where are the facts to support this, Herr Propaganda Minister? Our military is structurally corrupt. We have Tedâs word word for that, it must be true. What intelligent, nuanced progressive does not know that generalizing the behavior of a dozen thugs to a group of a million or more will invariably yield the truth? Beginning in Afghanistan during the weeks after 9/11, civilian command yielded to the amoral gangster mentality of the arrogant intelligence officers of Army Special Forces and the CIA, who stand accused of massacring thousands of captured Taliban prisoners yet have never faced a real investigation. Accusations arenât facts, and a lying POS like Ted is not the arbiter of what is or is not a real investigation. The new tone of lawlessness comes all the way from the White House, directed by a commander-in-chief who starts illegal wars without justification, strips captured prisoners of their rights under the Geneva Convention and whose smirky fingers-crossed response to the prisoner abuse scandal--"I shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated...Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people"--sends a wink and a nudge to our uniformed torturers. Keep it up, boys. Keep those broomsticks busy. Like any good authoritarian, Rall is able to read Bushâs mind, and to put words in his mouth. This kind of power-projection is a clinical symptom of alcoholism, btw. Even our coalition partners are getting the message. British soldiers running a coalition gulag in Basra reported smashing the jaw and teeth of an Iraqi accused of stealing, then dumping the broken body of the accused thief off the back of a moving truck. "They did not know whether he survived," writes The New York Times. This is a gross distortion of even the BBCâs credulous version of this hoax. One more Iraqi, it seems, who wonât be tossing roses at his liberators. Rall Receives Death Threats over Tillman Cartoon. Imagine that. The abuse of power and status inevitably provoke a response. Cause and effect. 99.9% of death threats in this country are BS, but if I were Ted I would not bet my life on that pattern holding up in this case. Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2004-05-05 |
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