The question is: Who led Lynndie by the leash?
May 07, 2004 Edition -1
Robert Fisk
First, our enemies created the suicide bomber. Now we have our own digital suicide bomber - the camera.
Just look at the way Lynndie England holds the leash of the naked, bearded Iraqi. Take a close look at the leather strap, the pain on the prisoner's face. No sadistic movie could outdo the damage of this image.
In 2001, the planes smashed into the buildings; today, Lynndie smashes to pieces our entire morality with just one tug on the leash.
The Muslim suicide bomber cries Allahu akbar (God is greater). And what does Lynndie's partner-in-crime do? Why, his home garden is plastered with a legend from the Book of Hosea, about sowing and righteousness and ploughing.
Could Islam ever have come so intimately into contact with the sexuality of the Old Testament? Could neo-conservative Christianity - Lynndie is also a churchgoer - have collided so violently, so revoltingly or so obscenely with Islam?
And who were the innocent in these vile photographs? The American torturers and humiliators? Or the Iraqi victims?
President George Bush is fearful of Arab reaction to these pictures. Why?
For a year now, Iraqis have been trying to tell journalists of the brutal treatment they are receiving at the hands of their occupiers. They don't need these incriminating photographs to prove to them what they already know to be true.
But in the history of the Middle East, these pictures already have the status of those most damaging snapshots of the Vietnam War: the police chief in Saigon executing his Vietcong prisoner, the naked girl burned by napalm, the pile of bodies at My Lai.
For Arabs read Deir Yassin and the corpses piled in the Palestinian refugee camp of Sabra and Chatila in 1982.
Not long after the occupation of Baghdad by US troops in April last year, we got our hands on a videotape of the brutal whipping of Iraqi prisoners by Saddam's security police. I'm not sure which circle of hell the victims were enduring in the 45 minutes of sadism. They are whipped, sticks are broken in their throats, they are kicked into sewers and they cower like dogs.
And why were these war crimes filmed? I thought at first that it was intended for the enjoyment of Saddam or his disgusting son Uday.
But now I realise the videos were taken so that the prisoners could be humiliated. Their suffering, their pathetic pleas for mercy, their animal-like behaviour was to be recorded - to add the final layer of degradation to their fate.
And now I realise, too, that the pictures of the Iraqis so cruelly treated - so tortured - by the Americans were taken for precisely the same reason.
Someone decided that the photos would be the final straw, the breaking point, the moment of capitulation for these young men. Make them simulate oral sex. Make them look at the penis of their best friend. Get a girl to admire their attempted erection. This was truly Saddamite in its perversity.
So let's, as the Americans say, get real. Who taught Lynndie and her boyfriend and the other American sadists of Abu Ghraib prison to do this? Who taught the Syrian and Iraqi secret police to do this?
The answer to the latter question is simple: the East German secret police. But the answer to the first question? Well, we have been told that there were "contracted" interrogators at Abu Ghraib.
I have reason to believe that US General Janis Karpinski, the luckless prison commander who is going to be dumped out of the army for interrogations over which she had no control, knew that "outsiders" were questioning her inmates. She was never allowed into the interrogation room. And I can see why. So, no doubt, can she.
So who were these mysterious "interrogators" if they were not CIA or FBI staff? Several names are already going the rounds - so far, journalists claim they have no final proof of them - and a number, so I understand, hold more than one passport. Why were they brought into Abu Ghraib? Who brought them in? How much were they paid? And who trained them?
Who taught them that it was a good idea to get a girl to point at an Arab who was being forced to masturbate, to humiliate
an Iraqi into submission by hooding him with a girl's lingerie?
We are not just talking "sick" here. We're talking professionals.
Bush finally apologised last night for this filth but the constant, insistent, unending refrain from US officers that the soldiers involved were just a tiny group of unrepresentative Americans makes me suspicious.
Lynndie and her boyfriend were not part of a "rogue" unit. They were told to do these despicable things. They were encouraged to do them. This was an order from someone else.
Who? When can we see their pictures, their identity, their passports, their orders?
Yes, it's part of a culture, a long tradition that goes back to the Crusades; that the Muslim is dirty, lascivious, unChristian, unworthy of humanity - which is pretty much what Osama bin Laden (now forgotten by Bush, I notice) believes about us Westerners.
And our illegal, immoral, meretricious war has now brought forth the images that betray our racism.
The hooded man with the wires attached to his hands has now become an iconic portrait every bit as memorable as the picture of the second aircraft flying into the World Trade Center.
No, of course, we haven't killed 3 000 Iraqis. We've killed many more. And the same goes for Afghanistan. - Independent Foreign Service
