The Abu Ghraib prison: Making the horrifying amusing

By Larry Womack
RAW STORY COLUMNIST

Not only did her superiors order her to pose playfully for the camera while holding a hooded Iraqi prisoner on a leash, they also must have ordered Pfc. Lynndie England to have sex with one American soldier after another, and called the whole thing a Kodak moment. The bastards! She explained earlier that the pictures of Iraqis were for the purpose of humiliating and blackmailing them into giving up vital information later. (Apparently, there was no need to expose their faces for these pictures, as friends and family easily could identify their genitalia.) And the all-American gang-bang? Well, that was just creative scrapbooking.

Hoods, handcuffs, glow sticks inserted in places that I’m certain the warning label discourages … it was if the boys at Tau Gam took over the Army. That was, until pictures of a soldier giving a “thumbs up” to the rotting corpse of a prisoner surfaced. And the words “rape” and “homicide” entered the discussion. Until then, it all just sounded like the actions of a bunch of wacky kids who simply lacked compassion or empathy, getting their kicks without realizing the horrifying implications those kicks had on other human beings. In other words, it all fit right into Bush’s America, but suddenly wasn’t funny anymore. Who could make the news funny again?

Rush Limbaugh got a good start when, days after the murder investigations became front page news, he ranted on his show that the left was “ruining lives” over “frat boy stuff … no different than what goes on at Skull and Bones.” The soldiers — whose alleged actions included rape, murder, and other violations of the Geneva Convention — are victims in his eyes of these left-wing loonies that just can’t handle a little homoerotic (his word, not mine) ass-play (that one was mine) in the name of liberating a country from Saddam Hussein. “Ever heard of blowin’ off a little steam?” he shouted, seemingly unaware of the double entendre. While I can’t for certain argue that rape and murder are not your average Friday night at Skull & Bones, I will say that even if they are, they’re still wrong.

Limbaugh was quick to point out the real culprit: porn — gay porn, specifically. Apparently the soldiers involved (who were photographed many times having heterosexual sex with one another) got these ideas from gay Web sites, which you can access “if you have a password.” What Limbaugh was doing with the password to gay porn sites, he’ll never tell.

Not to be outdone in the what-the-hell department, American Digest takes this connection even further, claiming that porn of the Internet age must include “orgiastic bisexual hanky-panky.” Well, no. But it’s a plus. In the very next sentence, things get even more bizarre, as the author claims, “The most sought-after sexual fantasy partner in the realms of porn today is the transsexual.” The connection is obvious: Chicks with dicks apparently are torturing prisoners in Iraq. Who knew? But, then, I didn’t even know that transsexuals were the backbone of the $17 billion-a-year American porn industry.

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe is horrified at this kind of pornographic imagery. In his view, the left is to blame. They’ve censored the beheading of Nicholas Berg, but apparently are playing the many videos of Iraqi prisoner abuse around the clock, in an effort to undermine the war effort.

Really, Jeff? Where? I had thought that only a small number of the hundreds of existing Abu Ghraib still photos had been released, that none of the videos had seen the light of day, and that a proportionally equal number of stills taken from the Berg video had been widely shown. I must be imagining this, but I clearly remember seeing him kneeling, dressed in orange, with a piece of paper in his hand, in front of a line of scary-lookin’ terrorists, right there on the evening news. I also recall seeing an excerpt of the video posted on Yahoo! News, just moments ago. I guess I was just dreaming. Wow, then, I must have dreamt up those fake Abu Ghraib rape pictures that I so clearly recall the Globe itself running just days earlier.

Right-thoughts.us, a right-wing Web site, on which the content all seems to come from a single poster named JohnK (a music lover/gun nut with five cats who says he believes “we _never_ landed on the moon, but JFK *might* have been shot by a single shooter”), is also outraged that the media didn’t spend enough time covering the beheading. He also seems to see it as a justification to escalate things further, suggesting a response that we should, “Blow the whole fucking country up for all I care.”

Here’s a tip for the right wing: You can’t expect this story to go away if it is constantly unfolding. Each new revelation will be front-page news until Republicans agree to make all of the pictures and video public. Unless everything comes out at once, or there are a lot more beheadings, it will continue to dominate the nightly news.

Ann Coulter, who usually reaches her idiotic conclusions by actually researching a subject but then applying ludicrous reasoning, stepped out of form in her efforts to blame women for the ordeal. Suddenly, she sees no need to research at all. Three women are clearly involved, which apparently is a disproportionate number, which makes women “too vicious” to serve in the military. Of course, only a few pictures have been seen, and in retrospect it seems that that was apparently because the boys couldn’t keep their pants on long enough for the autofocus to kick on, but … Ann’s very presence is still an argument for keeping women away from firearms.

Still, I believe that I speak for the majority of Americans when I say that the most ridiculous placement of blame comes from James Taranto’s ridiculous online journal (http://www.opinionjournal.com/). After first asserting that gays were to blame (this theory was quietly forgotten when all the hetero sex came out), he changed his theory. Now, higher education is to blame.

It seems that colleges discourage military service because the academic world leans to the left. So, the best and brightest are discouraged from military service because recruiters are barred from campus. This all started as a protest of Vietnam, he explains, apparently unaware that military recruiting switched from “best and brightest” to “most expendable” immediately after America saw what happened to Europe in World War I. So his line of reasoning is this: Academics are liberal, so they’re not soldiers, so soldiers are dumb, so they stick glow sticks up people’s asses and murder them. Sound reasoning if I’ve ever heard it. He is right about one thing: Study after study has shown that the most educated Americans vote heavily Democratic.

Taranto also has another point: America does need to be more selective about who we allow to represent us to the world (and more importantly, who we give guns to). This became clear to me in the 1990s, when the debate of women and gays in the military seemed to hinge on “morale.” If you can’t handle fighting next to a woman or showering with a gay guy, your maturity level should forbid you from military service. It’s that simple. But, then, who needs gay guys when straight ones can engage in as many homoerotic acts as they want, as long as it’s in the name of patriotism?

Contrary to these strong and highly entertaining efforts of politicos, one cannot cast blame for what happened at Abu Ghraib on any outside source. The people involved did so because of a very dark facet of human nature: We get off, sexually and generally, on having power over others — humiliating them. Power is achieved through sex acts all the time: People sleep their way to the top; people use sex to manipulate. Street rape isn’t committed because people are sexually excited, it happens because people are violent. And none of that would be funny if it weren’t for Rush Limbaugh.

Those who blame pornography for the incidents aren’t thinking the whole thing through. There is a link, yes, but it’s not a causal one. Pornography depicts fantasy, and as a business, it has to be a fantasy that sells; one that a lot of people have. Of course, that’s a very casual way of saying that humanity gets off on torture, but there are facts to back that up.

Take the famous Zimbardo Prison Experiment. Also called the Stanford Prison Experiment, it cast volunteers in the roles of jailer and inmate. The jailers quickly became so sadistic and bizarre that the project had to close early. This isn’t exactly an obscure bit of social history, and each of these commentators, quick to blame women, porn or even their local university, should be familiar with it. But that’s just science. Who needs that when innuendo is so much easier to traffic?

And, how would that have helped them place the blame on transsexual porn? Admitting that the jailers just wanted to do what they did; did so without regard to the impact on other human beings; and were responsible for their own actions wouldn’t help boot Bush from office, keep women out of the military or help Ashcroft end fun as we know it. And isn’t that really what’s in the public interest?

How do you write irreverently about something that just isn’t funny? You let idiots make it funny for you. Thank you Rush, Ann, James and Jeff, and everyone else with the ability to make even the most horrifying news funny.