Team Bush Sacrifices a Pawn

The trial of Charles Graner began yesterday.

I'd bet that Graner and Lynndie England are 1 and 1A when it comes to putting a face to the dark side of the United States. This is unfortunate: without justifying or defending the kinds of actions they engaged in, I find it dubious at best that their chosen tactics were the result of personal initiative--despite Graner's civilian job as a prison guard in Pennsylvania.

No, the faces that should be associated with this particular policy should include, but not be limited to, Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Dick Cheney--and George W. Bush. Folks like Graner and England are small potatoes--street-level dealers in a world dominated by big-time lords of torture.

At the same time, it's pretty incredible that defense attorney Guy Womack is likening some of the tactics used at Abu Ghraib to cheerleader routines--most cheerleaders don't smack folks in the temple hard enough to knock them out, nor do they pull people out of the stands and force them to masturbate, nor are attack dogs part of the squad--and their human pyramids don't tend to involve coerced, naked human beings. As for children on "leashes" (Womak's other "defense" of tactics)--well, to be honest, many years ago (in the 1970's) I DID see a kid on a tether at a mall, but it most certainly wasn't strapped to his neck in choke-chain fashion.

But hey, I could be wrong about some of the cheerleader stuff. I suppose we could ask the cheerleader in chief if he recalls anything like Abu Ghraib while at Andover and/or Yale.

Oh, and as to the supposed REASON for this kind of behavior--well, believe it or not, old, fat, drug addled Rush Limbaugh might have been onto something when he likened it to fraternity pranks, because it sure hasn't resulted in any kind of useful intelligence.

Hullaballoo has an excellent post, with numerous links, detailing the height of the absurdity: that, for all the end-arounds of the Geneva Conventions, we've succeeded in exactly one thing: pissing the shit out of otherwise insignificant people who now have a damn good reason to hate our guts. The corollary is that we've also managed to piss off folks, both in the Middle East and elsewhere, who weren't directly affected by these practices, but who are rightly appalled that we'd do such things. In the battle over hearts and minds, the actions at Abu Ghraib--and Guantanamo (there's no need to separate the two)--are the equivalent of getting rip roaring drunk on a crowded airplane and proceeding to take a giant dump on the beverage cart.

So, Graner will likely be found guilty--c'mon, the photos are pretty damn compelling, AND it's not like he DIDN'T do it--but something tells me that, while he might have had some leeway when it came to the specifics, the strategic planning, i.e., the idea that we need to hurt, to humiliate, to shame, to DEGRADE any who, either by their actions or just plain bad luck, came into US custody, certainly was passed along from up the chain--probably implied, as opposed to being ordered, but it doesn't take too much imagination to conceive of how it was done. My own guess is that various higher ups let low-level folks like Spc. Graner know that it'd be ok to "teach the ragheads a lesson."

Also, I believe one of the central tenets to the neocon mindset is the assumption that "the Arab mind" will only respond to force, or strength. Hence, the use of tactics designed to make prisoners feel weak...

Unfortunately, this blew up in their face. AND we've got an additional problem--apparently while the orders went out from on-high that the prisoners were to be humiliated, the insurgency was gaining strength. These days, it might not be possible to put on a "display of strength" for "the Arab mind." Sure, we can pound Fallujah into the paleolithic age, but whenever we mass forces in one area, the insurgency pops up somewhere else (like in Mosul). IF (and that's a big if)--IF "the Arab mind" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) is only impressed by "strength," then we're not doing a particularly good job of displaying strength.