Donald Rumsfield may have yet survived this shock and awe attack on his character for today, as Bush has come out publicly and applauded Rumsfield for his hard work. With further photos and videotape forthcoming, one wonders if Bush is digging his own grave by sticking by him.
Over the weekend, as a warning about these forthcoming photos and video, Terrance Hunt of the AP reported that Rumsfield admitted to Congress that these images show "acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman."
The impact of these images is nearly calculable and negative possibly beyond measure. Hunt’s AP report "More Bad News May Be on the Way for Bush" offers an analysis from a political scientist of the American University, James Thurber.
Thurber likens "the Iraq images to the infamous Vietnam pictures of a naked young girl fleeing a napalm attack and a Viet Cong prisoner being executed on a Saigon street."
"That's what we're going to remember about Iraq," Thruber surmises. "It's just not going to go away. That may have a lasting and negative effect on his campaign. It certainly does right now and I think you'll see it in the polls immediately."
Another negative aspect regarding these abuses is the revelation that the majority of these Iraqi’s being detained are innocent civilians. A contract interrogator from the Utah National Guard, Torin Nelson, recently revealed to the Guardian in London that if they could not find and retrieve the subject they were sent out into the field to locate, they would pick up anyone they could find:
"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Nelson said.
"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, 'the target was not at home. The neighbor came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him,'" he said, according to the newspaper.
Philip Robertson, in his article "Sometimes they pretended to kill me," found evidence of this as he walked the edges of Abu Ghraib--
One old man, Hardan Soud, had a slip of paper with seven numbers written on it, and he wanted to know when the Americans would release his sons. "They came to my house in Thuluaya at 2 a.m., pushing down the door to enter my house. They didn't speak or ask any questions, and they took away my sons. I still don't know why."
And though the Army, Pentagon, Bush, and other Administration officials are saying that these abuses are not widespread or systematic to the occupation, revelations to the contrary are seeing the light of day.
Salon printed a story by Philip Robertson about Suhaib Badr al Baz, a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, who came forth to reveal that he was moved around from one detention center to another starting November 17 of last year-Sammarra, the Baghdad airport, and Abu Ghraib. Al Baz was not charged with any crime nor given an opportunity to defend himself before a court.
"At the base I first saw a tall heavy man who put a black hood over my head," he recalls. "Then he forced me to stand in front of a wall for three or four hours. I was treated very roughly, then taken to a room and interrogated. When the tall man was not satisfied with my answers, he hit me in the face. They asked questions in a way that showed they were not interested in the truth." Al Baz says at first he was not given food or water, or allowed to pray. On the second day, he was given foul-smelling food. Immediately after his arrest, colleagues from the network and friends began to pressure the coalition for information but were told by Gen. Kimmit's staff that there was no information available. This is a common reply for people seeking information about recently detained people. Al Baz said it took a week for the military to issue him a prison I.D. number.
"I asked them if I could contact my family because they would be worried about me. The tall man told me to forget it, that my destiny was in Guantánamo Bay." Al Baz said that during his time at the base, soldiers came into his cell spitting on him and screaming in his ear to keep him awake. "I didn't know if it was day or night. They tied my hands so tightly my wrists started bleeding, but at this stage I was still allowed to keep my clothes...."
Al Baz says that he was taken from the base in Samarra to the airport in Baghdad, where his treatment took a sharp turn for the worse. "In there I heard some horrible noises, many people screaming. They told me to sit on the floor and I went numb from the cold. If I moved my head even a little bit, a soldier would grab my hood and slam my head into the wall. Sometimes they pretended to kill me by pulling the trigger of their rifles. I found out later that they were punishing other people there." Al Baz says that he heard screams, men shouting "Good Bush, bad Saddam!" and crying out to God for help. "But it didn't do anything to decrease the punishment they were going through." [snip]
When al Baz moved to Abu Ghraib in late November, he said he was asked to strip naked at one point but was never forced to take part in staged scenes like the others. "It didn't happen like that to me," he said. But he did say that he witnessed a disturbing episode involving a father and son. From his cell, al Baz said he watched through the small window and saw two men stripped naked. "The boy was only about 16 years old, and then a soldier poured cold water over them. Their cell was directly across from mine." Al Baz says that the father and son were made to stand naked in front of other prisoners for days.[snip]
"I first knew that they were taking pictures when I saw that one of the computers had a picture of some prisoners as its desktop background. One of the prisoners had a black hood over his head and he was covered in cold water. I personally witnessed this event take place. The man was screaming, "I'm innocent!" until he got sick and his body got swollen from all the punishment," al Baz said. Cold water, solitary confinement, swollen bodies and constant psychological abuse are recurring images for the Al-Jazeera cameraman, who also credits his tormentors with ingenuity. "They had all different kinds of punishments and they changed them all the time. I begged them to interrogate me again so they would know that I was innocent, but they said no, that's it. All we know is that you're staying here."
Hunt closed his article with very poignant analysis from a growing and varied chorus of US lawmakers who fear these images will harm American credibility for years. Consider his closing lines:
While the United States champions freedom and democracy in Iraq, the pictures show vivid scenes of cruelty and insensitivity.
Splashed across front pages across the Middle East and around the world, the pictures may undermine "the substantial gains toward the goal of peace and freedom in various operation areas of the world, most particularly Iraq," said Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the committee's top Democrat, said the abuses "dishonored our military and our nation and they made the prospects for success in Iraq even more difficult than they already are."
Added Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla.: "This was a political and public relations Pearl Harbor."
Last Friday, I had the opportunity to see the award-winning documentary Fog of War. Robert Macnamera made a most prescient comment. What constitutes a war criminal, Macnamera explained, was simply based on whether or not you win the war. If you are the winner of the war, you are not a war criminal. With stories of further abuses coming to light that paint our US prisons as a replica of concentration camps, maybe Bush knows this very fact. That is why he is spinning the rhetoric about how in control they are rather than the truth about how badly Rumsfield mismanaged the planning of all aspects of this war--intelligence, invasion, reconstruction, and exit strategy.
Oddly enough, though, it is the sight of these abuses that linger in your mind and leave your soul sick and troubled. And this will come to ultimately define the war for not only Americans but for people around the world. And unfortunately, I wonder who will believe Bush did anything to resolve it or make anyone accountable. With Bush's second-hand man screaming on the sidelines, "Get off his back," I know I don't believe.
