- "Iraq is free of rape rooms and torture chambers."
-President George W. Bush, October, 2003
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- If only there had been no pictures.
-
- Nobody up the chain of command had any idea of the impact
they would have. Nobody warned Donald Rumsfeld how disgusting they were,
or that there were hundreds of them, and that's why Mr. Rumsfeld didn't
warn the President. He didn't even see them in their raw, unexpurgated
version, until Thursday night at 7:30.
-
- This war did not contemplate the impact of the digital
age.
-
- In this war, the troops are packing their own digital
cameras and portable videocams. Soldiers have their own army-issue personal
computers. And so they took their souvenir shots at Abu Ghraib - hundreds
and hundreds of them, because that's what you do with digital - and passed
them around to one another on computer discs. The photos may also have
been used to intimidate other prisoners into co-operating. There are more
images we haven't seen that may be even worse, waiting to be leaked like
toxic waste.
-
- It was the images that turned the torture and humiliation
at Abu Ghraib into the tipping point for the Bush administration. And it
was a digital camera that turned a 21-year-old named Lynndie England into
the anti-Jessica Lynch.
-
- Like Jessica, Lynndie joined the U.S. Army (in her case,
it was the Reserves) to get herself a ticket out of nowhere. She was 19.
She never thought she'd wind up in a war zone. And now she's the star of
the Abu Ghraib horror picture show, perhaps the greatest propaganda victory
ever handed to America's enemies.
-
- Here's Lynndie, holding a leash tied around the neck
of a naked, prostrate man. And here she is again, jauntily aiming her forefinger,
like a pretend gun, at the genitals of another naked prisoner. A cigarette
dangles from her lips. And here she is again, thumbs up, smirking, behind
an entire stack of naked men.
-
- Not so long ago, the U.S. military's poster girl was
Jessica - a plucky, courageous kid even the Iraqis were fond of. But now,
the poster girl is a playful sadist. So much for hearts and minds.
-
- She wasn't even a prison guard. She was a paper-pusher,
processing prisoners. After hours, she would drop in to visit her boyfriend,
Charles Graner, who was one of the night guards. It was the night guards'
job, according to a damning internal report, to "set the conditions"
for military interrogations by softening the prisoners up. Lynndie was
happy to help her boyfriend out.
-
- The greatest damage done by the images from Abu Ghraib
is not to America's reputation in the Arab world. To many Arabs, the pictures
simply prove what they've been saying all along: George Bush is no better
than Saddam.
-
- The greatest damage is back home. Lynndie's souvenir
shots have undermined the resolve of an already doubting public in a way
that 100 extra body bags could not have done. It's no good to say that's
not how Americans really are. The pictures tell another story. Americans
know it will be impossible to regain the moral high ground.
-
- "They may be just a few soldiers, it may be an isolated
case, but what's the difference?" writes a formerly sympathetic Iraqi
weblogger named Zeyad. "The effect has been done, and the 'hearts
and minds' campaign is a joke that isn't funny any more."
-
- The photos also prove once more how desperately chaotic
things are in Iraq. Prisoner abuse in wartime is a huge and entirely foreseeable
risk. Some of it is probably inevitable, even with troops who are well-trained
and closely supervised. But the 800th MP Brigade, which was in charge of
Abu Ghraib, was in disarray. Under Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, discipline
was poor and morale was poorer. The CIA and private contractors were in
on the act. The prison overflowed.
-
- Ms. England, intercepted back in January, is now cooling
her heels back at Fort Bragg, where she's five months pregnant. Six other
soldiers (including other women) are awaiting court-martial. The problem
was being addressed in the appropriate way. Or so the brass believed, until
somebody leaked the pictures to the media.
-
- The Americans can't win this game. Their every misstep
and accident - and atrocity - is played over and over on primetime TV throughout
the Arab world, complete with weeping victims and howling mobs. The war
for hearts and minds was utterly unready for Al-Jazeera and the digital
age.
-
- I spent some time with American soldiers in Iraq, and
I can tell you that nobody is more furious and heartbroken than they are
about this debacle. Most of them are deeply idealistic about their mission
there. "Your stupidity, ignorance, and cruelty have stained all of
us, because of that uniform we all wear," writes one Air Force officer.
"That uniform is stained with the noble blood of those who've fallen
in battle for their country, but you have smeared that uniform - my uniform!
- with the excrement of malevolent barbarism."
-
- Among the prisoners in Abu Ghraib was a man named Hayder
Sabbar Abd, who was picked up last summer at a checkpoint. He doesn't know
Lynndie's name, but he knows her face, because he's in the pictures. "We
were not insurgents," he told The New York Times this week. "We
were just ordinary people."
-
- For what consolation it may be worth, his account confirms
that abuse of prisoners was not widespread in Iraq. In his first three
months in prisons run by American soldiers, he said he was treated well.
"There was no problem. The American guards were nice and good people."
Then he was sent to Abu Ghraib.
-
- There, he was beaten and stripped naked after he got
into a prisoner fight. He was forced against a wall and ordered by the
Arabic translator to masturbate as he looked at one of the American women.
"She was laughing, and she put her hands on her breasts," he
recalled. "Of course, I couldn't do it. I told them that I couldn't,
so they beat me in the stomach, and I fell to the ground. The translator
said, 'Do it! Do it! It's better than being beaten.' I said, 'How can I
do it?' So I put my hand on my penis, just pretending." He was sure
he would be executed.
-
- In one photo, Lynndie England, a cigarette in her mouth,
is pointing to a naked man with his hand on his genitals. The image is
of utter humiliation. That man is Hayder Abd.
-
- Mr. Abd, a Shiite with five children, says he can't go
back to live in Nasiriya, because he'd feel too ashamed. He says he needs
to move out of Iraq, and, if anybody offered him the option, would consider
moving to America.
-
- Contrary to what you've heard, not all Iraqis have turned
on the Americans. "Here we have the President of the greatest nation
on Earth apologizes for what a small group of pervert soldiers did,"
one man wrote in a message to the BBC's Arabic website. "And here,
the American press proves that it's free to show the truth."
-
- But those voices are growing faint. As the investigations
of Abu Ghraib's horrors grind on, it's inevitable that more and worse abuses,
including murder, will come to light. People will keep calling for Rummy's
head, but the fate of the belligerent Secretary of Defence - who looked
almost shaken yesterday - is just a sideshow. Private Lynndie England may
be destined to go down in history as the nasty little girl whose antics
marked the turning point of American will in Iraq, and brought down a President.
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