HOUSTON - It will
get worse. A secrecy-obsessed Pentagon is in total
disarray. Republican Senator John McCain is in favor of
releasing all of Abu Ghraib's S&M stash right now,
photos and videos.
Houston was under "tornado
alert" this Tuesday. This was not merely a
meteorological metaphor. Conservative Texas is getting
sick and tired of it all. Some blame it on "the whole
movement of our culture towards decadence". Others, like
Randy Johnson, a gentleman from Houston, are more ...
proactive: "Just take the camera away from the troops
and replace them with 9mm pistols." Retired generals are
in panic, convinced that Iraq may become,
simultaneously, an ally of Iran and an al-Qaeda
paradise.
The upcoming snuff videos from Abu
Ghraib found their counterpart in the snuff video on the
Islamic website Muntada al-Ansar of five masked men
beheading civilian contractor Nick Berg from
Philadelphia after warning George W Bush he will regret
the day he stepped into Iraq. This snuff video even
comes with a title: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi Shown
Slaughtering an American. Al-Qaeda-linked
al-Zarqawi, with a US$10 million bounty on his head, may
be the only real al-Qaeda commander active in Iraq. The
Pentagon had at least three clear chances to nab him
before the war. It did not - because he was one of the
justifications for the war.
The war of the snuff
videos may have deadly repercussions. This hardcore
jihad propaganda stunt - if it's real - may encourage
different sectors of the Iraqi resistance to join, to
the delight of Washington neo-cons who want an all-out
clash of civilizations-cum-total war. The majority of
Americans don't seem to have the stomach to go primal,
but the impatience already expressed by many people in
Texas may eventually signal the go-ahead for total war
without mercy.
One from the heart The
hyperactive US corporate media salivate at the prospect
of figuring out what Washington neo-cons are up to next.
"Superb Job" Secretary on the Defensive Donald Rumsfeld
insists "the military, not the media, discovered these
abuses", trying to imply that the Pentagon was always on
top of it. It was, but maybe not the way he intended.
Rumsfeld hates the fact that it was a journalist,
Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, who broke the Abu
Ghraib story. And Hersh is sure the buck stops at
Rumsfeld.
Serious questions have not been
answered. Since his Pentagon "told the world" of an
investigation on Abu Ghraib last January, Rumsfeld never
bothered to tell Bush or the Armed Services Committee
about the possibility of Americans practicing torture.
Rumsfeld never ordered one of his countless aides to
read the report by Major-General Antonio Taguba and come
up with some solutions. Rumsfeld himself sanctioned the
use of private contractors who were involved in the Abu
Ghraib abuses, so he should know what they were up to.
Last year in the Sunni triangle, a number of
sheikhs told this correspondent they knew experts from
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's intelligence
apparatus were passing prison interrogation techniques
to the Americans. These consultants were used by the
Pentagon exactly because they were not respecting the
Geneva Conventions or even Iraqi justice - since the
country was occupied anyway. So it was no-holds-barred
territory, with US commanders and soldiers totally
shielded from any intrusion.
Sixty-four percent
of Americans believe that Abu Ghraib was an isolated
case - subscribing to the official Pentagon spin. It
would have to be a Pentagon insider to provide the
killer evidence capable of convincing Americans that
Rumsfeld and the Pentagon civilian leadership have been
acting as if they were one of the rogue regimes they
despise - in total violation of international law.
Rumsfeld's departure as a pugnacious sacrificial
lamb could be prevented by the White House finding the
ultimate tactic for the perfect public relations
strategy, an equation between cost-benefit and the
polls. According to the latest CNN-Gallup poll, 46
percent approve and 51 percent disapprove of Bush on
Iraq. Election-wise, Bush has 48 percent and Democratic
rival John Kerry 47 percent. But CNN does not stress
that among registered voters Kerry has jumped 6 points
ahead of Bush.
Vice President Dick Cheney has
all but ordered Congress to "get off his back"
(Rumsfeld's), a call to arms dutifully followed by the
oil-oiled neo-con propaganda machine. Rumsfeld also said
everybody at the Pentagon is "heartsick". In a hilarious
twist of fate, this happened the same day that Cheney's
own heart was proclaimed by his doctor to be
"functioning properly".
One, two, three,
fire The chattering classes are divided between
the fire-Rumsfeld group and the "loyal" opposition -
Democrats and moderate Republicans who want to see the
neo-cons in the Bush administration back in the
wilderness but who also want the United States to
restore at least a measure of its badly damaged
credibility. What we might call the Revolt of the
Generals was expressed by the now-iconic editorial of
the Army Times: "This was not just a failure of
leadership at the local command level. This was a
failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability
here is essential - even if that means relieving top
leaders from duty in a time of war."
The war of
the snuff videos will keep the Abu Ghraib S&M on
media red alert, with the networks hysterically falling
over themselves to come up with any damage-control
euphemism, such as referring to the S&M as
"inappropriate sexual behavior". The wall-to-wall cover
is very bad news for Bush and potential good news for
the still-in-deep-slumber Kerry campaign.
No
matter what happens next, 32 states have already decided
how to vote next November. Eighteen are swing states.
People like former Democratic pollster Pat Cadell are
stressing that Kerry "has to take the high road", has to
tell everyone in these 18 states what he's actually
planning to do, considering that roughly 50 percent of
Americans in most polls are now saying the country is on
the wrong track. But compare it with another amazing
statistic: no less than 49 percent of Democrats are
still saying that Kerry straddles the issues. Cadell
insists that Kerry must tell voters: Bush was indeed a
good leader after September 11, 2001, but then he
collapsed because of Iraq and his tax cuts for the rich.
Bush keeping Rumsfeld in command, in terms of US
credibility in Iraq, the Middle East and the world of
Islam, would be the 21st-century equivalent of the
medieval black plague. Two in three Americans may
support Rumsfeld at the moment, according to a
University of Pennsylvania poll, but the support is
bound to drop dramatically after the war of the snuff
videos.
And now for the sacrificial
lamb Republican Senator James Inhofe told the Senate
Armed Services Committee, "These prisoners, they're
murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents,
and many of them probably have American blood
on their hands, and here we're concerned about the treatment
of those individuals." The Red Cross, in its February
2004 report, is adamant: Up to 90 percent of the
prisoners in Iraq were arrested by mistake.
General Taguba's comprehensive 53-page report on
prison abuse in Abu Ghraib, "a very good job" in the
words of Senator McCain, stops the buck at the
brigade-commander level. Taguba in essence says this was
an individual, not institutional, failure. He does not
mention that Major-General Geoffrey Miller, former
Guantanamo supremo, wanted to "Gitmoize" Abu Ghraib,
employing hardcore methods widely condemned by the Red
Cross and Amnesty International since early 2002.
Pentagon critics insist it goes all the way up to
Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, the top commander on
the ground in Iraq, and the whole Pentagon leadership.
Even Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, daggers pointed,
wants (high) heads to roll.
But how to make the
Iraq S&M story go away? The Bush administration
would have to ignore it. This is now absolutely
impossible. Abu Ghraib is another round in the classic
case study of the Bush administration vs world public
opinion (the most famous previous round was certainly
February 15, 2003, when more than 10 million people
around the world demonstrated in the streets against the
preemptive war on Iraq). It was world opinion uproar
over Abu Ghraib that forced Bush to go public and in an
extra-mild way denounce the Pentagon. Mainstream US
media were not willing to go all the way with such an
embarrassing story in time of war.
Bush going
public meant the official go-ahead for the porno deluge.
One more historical irony: Bush couldn't care less for
world opinion ("focus groups", in his own words) and
America's image in the world, but it is world opinion
that now has backed him into a very tight corner. The
only strategy left - repeated ad nauseam by White House,
Pentagon and neo-con think-tanks ("we should not abandon
the oppressed throughout the Middle East", etc) is to
proclaim one's shock - and disgusted awe.
But it
all comes back full circle: Who will be offered as the
proverbial sacrificial lamb (or wolf) so corporate media
may declare this scandal officially over? Until then,
it's the war of the snuff videos.
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2004 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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The
war of the snuff videos
