"Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud, hatch out."
- Robert Graves, I, Claudius, 1934

AUSTIN, Texas - It is radioactive. It is a PR Pearl Harbor. But most of all, the Abu Ghraib scandal is an American tragedy.

The Bush administration's key talking point - repeated ad infinitum for days by everybody from Condoleezza Rice to a gallery of generals - is that the "abuse" was an aberration by a group of rogue soldiers. It should fall into the Donald Rumsfeld-coined theory of "known knowns, unknown knowns".

General Richard Myers insists life as a scary porno movie in Abu Ghraib "was not a systemic pattern": it was the fault of a few individuals. Not true. Trespassing on the rigid International Committee of the Red Cross code of silence, Pierre Krahenbuhl, its director of operations, confirmed in Geneva the veracity of a leaked Red Cross report characterizing the prison abuse as part of "a model, and a general system". Red Cross spokeswoman Antonella Notari emphasized to Asia Times Online that the report details "serious violations" of the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. In the context of humanitarian international law, "serious violations" mean nothing other than war crimes.

Officially, shame is spread all over the United States, a whole nation humiliated. It may be a little more complicated than that.

Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford University, confesses how he can still be amazed at US innocence and naivete, a whole nation still not able to deal with human nature's darker side, especially as revealed not by insidious foreigners but by fellow Americans.

Asia Times Online was faced with the new American tragedy deep in the heart of Texas. Even the road signs seemed not to believe it: Shall it be Highway 87 south to Eden or Highway 277 south to Eldorado?

In Brady, self-described "in the heart of Texas", a pickup heaven populated with "Don't Mess with Texas" T-shirts and flag-decorated burrito stands remembering September 11, 2001, radio preachers call, in anguish: "Deliver us from evil!" while the rest of the dial is occupied by satanic rock, from Alice Cooper to George Thorogood. From Midland to Austin, from families at the local McDonald's to Harley fanatics kissing the joy of the open road, everybody we talk to converges to a few key points. Rumsfeld is "a champion", "a volcano", "the linchpin in the war on terra". He simply "should not resign". The whole thing is part of a "partisan, crass, politically motivated campaign against Republicans". Some say they "can't wait for the anti-Democratic backlash". There's a justification that "more people were killed in Waco than in this [Abu Ghraib] prison, and nobody made a fuss". Vietnam veterans say that "some things" done by the interrogators were wrong, but the rest was "understandable".

There's a solid esprit de corps: for the brave folks in the heart of Texas, every official in the administration of President George W Bush who volunteers any criticism is considered a Judas itching to get a book contract. Every intervention by a top Bush administration official is lauded as "statesmanlike". The media are basically "out of control, full of communists". None of America's allies - European, Asian, whatever - has the right to criticize US policies. If there was any mistake committed in Iraq, it pales compared to the fact that Saddam Hussein "used weapons of mass destruction against his own people" and kept a close, intimate relationship with Osama bin Laden. There's an almost religious belief on an equation that could be resumed this way: September 11 equals radical Islam equals Patriot Act equals Saddam equals war equals orange alert forever.

This may be as faithful a survey as any of what middle America - not those corrupt Gomorras New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston - think about the whole "war on terra". Compare it to what popular talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said on the air late last week: "It could well be that the whole purpose here, which has been said, was to humiliate these prisoners. And there's no better way of doing it than what was done. These are Arab males - what better way to humiliate them than to have a woman have authority over them? What's the purpose here? What's the objective of this? The objective is to soften them up for interrogation later, later on. As I said, there was no horror, there was no terror, there was no death, there was no injuries, nothing."

The pattern
Democrats and Bush critics say Abu Ghraib is something like the perfect storm: repulsive methods employed in a secret universe run amok by a bunch of amateurs, detainees treated not as human beings, everything fully orchestrated and choreographed, and the whole matter treated with supreme indifference in Washington.

The endless debate by the chattering classes, live and over the media, and full-time network noise may leave the impression that the porcelain may not be broken. But few admit in the talk shows that the whole chain of command is in question - not to mention the whole strategy of neo-con Washington. It's impossible to believe the official White House-Pentagon story, according to which Rumsfeld did not brief Bush on Abu Ghraib while at the same time General Myers, for two long weeks, was frantically stonewalling the release of the S&M material with CBS's Dan Rather. As late as early last week, Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had not read the report he had been trying to censor for more than two weeks. In case the official version was true, this would mean that the president of the United States is kept fully oblivious of crucial matters of his own "war on terra" by the neo-cons' non-stop manipulations.

In terms of the big picture, or big tragedy, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld - the architect of both Bush wars - resigning or not, along with his warrior minion Paul Wolfowitz, is a peripheral issue. Rumsfeld's obsession with secrecy - such as his admission in front of congressmen that "the real issue is that a secret report was given to the press" - would probably be transferred to the next Pentagon head. But the situation is unraveling very fast. Even Major-General Charles Swannack, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, has admitted that the United States is strategically losing the war in Iraq. The Washington Post reports that "a profound anger is building within the army at Rumsfeld and those around him".

Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, from the summit of their ideological infallibility, always worked for "their" Pentagon to run Iraq. The idea of a huge private army of unaccountable commandos engaged in all sorts of operations in Iraq comes from Rumsfeld (there are at least 20,000, many more than British soldiers in the coalition). The patronage of convicted fraud, zero-credibility, Ahmad "our Saddam" Chalabi comes from Rumsfeld. The heavy-handed military approach and the absolute disregard of civilian casualties are trademark Rumsfeld. The Pentagon controlling the US$18 billion in Iraqi reconstruction funds is a Rumsfeld-enforced policy.

Hubris was inevitable. Without any counter-power to refrain the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz machine, once again the logic of war - this creepy, out-of-control monster - has engulfed its practitioners. Finished by the end of February, the report by Major-General Antonio Taguba detailing abuses in Abu Ghraib had not even been opened by Myers by early May. Repeated Red Cross warnings were dismissed. Bush was oblivious of everything. And Congress was kept in the dark.

Help won't be forthcoming. Because of initial overwhelming opposition to the war, the mess in Fallujah and Najaf, and now the Abu Ghraib scandal, European public opinion is now even more against Bush's policies than a year ago. Asia Times Online has confirmed with European diplomats: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) won't go to Iraq after the June 30 "handover". The Europeans will wait until the result of this November's US presidential election. No wonder some are dubbing the whole US operation in Iraq "Dead Men Walking".

The techniques
Specialist Sabrina D Harman, a military police officer already charged with prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and now the world's most infamous dominatrix, was in essence under command of US Army military intelligence officers, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives, and private civilian contractors specializing in conducting Ariel Sharon-sanctioned, Israeli-style interrogations. An average soldier such as Harman is not culturally equipped to assess how degrading nakedness and sexual humiliation may be to a follower of Islam. Rosemary Gartner of the American Sociological Association offers a clue of why that happened: "US rhetoric very effectively dehumanized Saddam Hussein, his regime and what remained of his supporters. This was a powerful subliminal message for all soldiers."

Abu Ghraib is the son of Guantanamo in terms of prison abuse. In April 2003 the Pentagon approved the use of hardcore interrogation techniques in Guantanamo. General Geoffrey Miller, the previous head of Guantanamo, is now the head of Abu Ghraib. In sublimely convoluted military jargon, he had recommended last August and September that US military police in Abu Ghraib should become "actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of internees". Two months later some of the guards began to humiliate prisoners systematically. Army intelligence officers who apparently oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib are now saying that commanders were insatiable for any kind of intelligence. Even Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the top ground commander in Iraq, always wanted more, no matter how.

The system of inducing human degradation generally used by Special Forces in the United States and the United Kingdom has become a routine practice among rank-and-file soldiers and contractors. The British call these techniques R2I - resistance to interrogation. When unsophisticated US troops still thinking that Iraqis were directly connected to September 11 apply it, the result is what happened in Abu Ghraib.

Another crucial example is what happened to Jamal al-Harith, 37, a British citizen from Manchester released from Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo. In an exclusive interview to London's Daily Mirror on March 12, he said he was beaten with fists, feet and batons after refusing a mystery injection. He said detainees were shackled for up to 15 hours straight in hand and leg cuffs with metal links cutting into their skin. He described their "cells" as wire cages with concrete floors with no privacy or protection from rats, snakes and scorpions. The prisoners were regularly beaten by a certain Extreme Reaction Force, always dressed in full riot gear. He revealed how (US) prostitutes were brought to degrade the most religiously devout Muslims, forced to watch as they touched their own naked bodies or smeared menstrual blood across their faces. There was psychological torture aplenty to force prisoners to confess to something they may never have done.

Techniques adopted from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's finest in Palestine include barring access to the Red Cross; not charging the prisoners with any crimes, but keeping them in prison anyway; arresting hundreds of Iraqi women, not allowing them to see their families, always without charges and under appalling sanitary conditions; and keeping prisoners hooded, as in the Abu Ghraib photos, beaten, threatened and sometimes sexually abused.

The cover-up
Transforming Abu Ghraib into a Guantanamo-style intelligence factory was the job of General Miller until these inconvenient S&M photos intervened. The entire system - Guantanamo in Cuba, Bagram and Kandahar prisons in Afghanistan - is part of what the New York Times politely referred to as "the military archipelago" and is in fact a gulag archipelago. As far as Abu Ghraib is concerned, the Pentagon strategy was to let the military investigations run their long, secret course, and meanwhile let the March 9 Taguba report sleep in the deep recesses of military bureaucracy. As late as his performance last Friday, Rumsfeld had not read the Taguba report, which mentions, among other things, "pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape ... sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick". There's ample speculation that an exasperated General Taguba himself may have leaked his report to Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker - the same Hersh who revealed to the world the My Lai massacre in November 1969.

Rumsfeld in the next few days - or hours - may become the new John Mitchell of Watergate infamy, the fall guy if the Abu Ghraib scandal can't be stopped in Baghdad. Anyway, the scandal has already taken Washington by storm. When Rumsfeld says "it will get worse", this may even function as an instigation for some US soldiers with high moral standards to slip to the media more S&M, this time coming from Guantanamo or Bagram.

The gulag
Almost everything one needs to know about America's military archipelago is contained in one of the most devastating books published in recent years, all the most striking when read on the road in Texas in the middle of the Abu Ghraib scandal: Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan Books, New York. More on Johnson and his book later in this series).

Johnson, the author of the best-selling Blowback and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, says that "crime and racism are ubiquitous in the military. Although the military invariably tries to portray all reported criminal or radical incidents as unique events, perpetrated by an infinitesimally small number of 'bad apples' and with officers taking determined remedial action, a different reality is apparent at military bases around the globe." The thrust of Johnson's book is an analysis of the more than 725 military bases that configure the empire, "permanent naval bases, military airfields, army garrisons, espionage listening posts, and strategic enclaves on every continent of the globe". He makes the case that the United States is "a military empire, a consumerist Sparta, a warrior culture that flaunts the air-conditioned housing, movie theaters, supermarkets, golf courses, and swimming pools of its legionnaires".

Johnson could be talking about Abu Ghraib, although he wrote it months if not years in advance, when he says that "the military's extreme fetish for secrecy and disinformation makes a farce of congressional oversight". He also proves how "America's real business is covert activities, not intelligence collecting and analysis".

Why do people join the military? According to Johnson, "they often enlist because of a lack of good jobs in the civilian economy and thus take refuge in the military's long-established system of state socialism - steady paychecks, decent housing, medical and dental benefits, job training, and the promise of a college education". He could be talking about trailer-park trash dominatrix Harman. "The Americans with whom foreigners come into contact most frequently tend to be late adolescents or 20-year-old youths, almost totally ignorant of foreign cultures and languages but indoctrinated to think that they represent a nation that President George W Bush has called 'the greatest force for good in history'." This totally fits the profile of US soldiers this correspondent met in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's extremely painful for average, law-abiding Americans to admit they live in a hyperpower that establishes, owns and operates its own gulag archipelago - instead of hiring contractors (Rumsfeld-style) in the form of good old friendly dictators Suharto, Augusto Pinochet, Manuel Noriega and company, always willing to take care of the dirty work.

The American gulag - from Guantanamo to Bagram and to countless "secret" CIA prisons around the world - includes at least 10,000 prisoners in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan and almost 700 in Guantanamo. Nobody has the exact numbers for the rest of the world. Guantanamo prisoners were defined by the Bush administration as "enemy combatants". Rumsfeld then amplified the designation to everybody else, totally snubbing the Geneva Conventions. Human Rights Watch calls it "a legal black hole".

By a process we might call "arrogance of virtue", to defend the rule of law against terrorism the neo-cons created a system beyond any law. This was justified, in their minds, because the United States by definition - or by a law of nature - is the supreme arbiter of freedom. So the law then only exists against "evildoers". But the Abu Ghraib scandal is now sedimenting an even deeper polarization across the US. This correspondent's travels in the US for the past three weeks have led to the conclusion there is now a tremendous conflict in the soul of many Americans about two conceptions of democracy. Shall we have a democracy that respects and evaluates shades of gray, and recognizes paradox and debate? Or shall we have a democracy ruled by omniscience, a Messiah-donated instrument that requires no checks and balances because it's pure by definition ("you're either with us or without us") and so cannot but treat any accountability with contempt?

Reality is a cruel pill to swallow. But Republicans will have to take it, no matter how. It's not reasonable - but nothing is reasonable in such an emotional case as the whole Iraq tragedy - and it may not even be fair, but anybody who knows the Arab and Islamic world is aware that no apologies, no prosecution, no court martial, no firing at the highest level will appease the anger composed by the perception that the United States somehow approves of the torture and sexual humiliation of Muslims.

Abu Ghraib has elevated the presidential election to a much-larger-than-life proposition. It now concerns nothing less than whether the United States will recover any moral standing or moral authority to lecture the rest of the world on its Higher Manifest Destiny. Some of the brave folks in the heart of Texas and people in daily communion with Fox News may be able to manage the cognitive dissonance between them and the rest of the world, but it's doubtful billions in the rest of the world will.

This dovetails with the devastating conclusions of Johnson's book. They're worth quoting at length:

Roman imperial sorrows mounted up over hundreds of years. Ours are likely to arrive with the speed of FedEx. If present trends continue, four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative impact guarantees that the United States will cease to bear any resemblance to the country once outlined in our constitution. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a growing reliance on weapons of mass destruction among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second, there will be a loss of democracy and constitutional rights as the presidency fully eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from an "executive branch" of government into something more like a Pentagonized presidency. Third, an already well-shredded principle of truthfulness will increasingly be replaced by a system of propaganda, disinformation and glorification of war, power and the military legions. Lastly, there will be bankruptcy, as we pour our economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and short-change the education, health and safety of our fellow citizens.