Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Justice, Knowledge, and Scheer
Here's LA Times and Nation columnist and professional moral equivocator Robert Scheer writing for Salon:
Our president launched this war with the promise to the Iraqi people of "no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone." What went wrong?
Here's what's wrong: Scheer can't discern a difference between the actions of a few low ranking idiots who are actually being investigated and prosecuted by a nation of laws with the deliberate state policy of a murderous, sadistic butcher.
I'm second to no one in condemning the actions of SSG Frederick and his band of merrymakers, and am already on record. But to attempt to equate what happened in Abu Gharaib with Saddam's torture chambers and rape rooms is, frankly, beyond the pale.
It's been a while since the world has had its noses rubbed in the banality and evil of the Saddam regime and, especially, the actions of his two malevelant spawn, Qusay and Uday.
Our nation is investigating and prosecuting our wrongdoers; Saddam Hussein issued an edict in 1992 guaranteeing immunity to any Ba'ath party member who committed bodily harm in the pursuit of those he considered his enemies.
In 2000, he made disparaging remarks about himself punishable by the cutting out of the tongue.
I can't show you what real torture looks like, Mr. Scheer. But I can show you what it does to people:
The walls of Lahib Nouman's home don't just talk, they howl. They scream in terror, shout with rage, moan in pain and sob with frustration. All the emotions overloading this tiny woman's brutalized mind she projects onto the walls of her living room. She scrawls on them with maroon lipstick, ocher spray paint and gray lumps of charcoal, in Arabic and a sprinkling of French. It's the only way she knows to exorcise her mental demons, to preserve what remains of her sanity.
The whole article is worth a read if you've forgotten where we've come from.
More:
Scheer writes, Recall that a key excuse for the U.S. invasion was to ensure the safety of Iraqi scientists and others in the know so that they might feel free to reveal the location of weapons of mass destruction or evidence of Saddam Hussein's potential ties to al-Qaida. Shockingly, some of those scientists are now in coalition prisons, even though the weapons clearly don't exist.
Ummm, yeah. Right.
I'm sure.
No, really.
Seriously.
More:
Far from the jurisdiction of the U.S. legal system, they apparently felt quite free to approve techniques clearly banned by war crimes statutes.
False. Ever heard of the UCMJ, Mr. Scheer?
So it should have been a clear and high priority to make certain that Iraqi prisoners incarcerated in Saddam's most infamous prison did not receive the same brand of "justice" the dictator had been doling out for decades. That they did is now a deep and dirty stain on the reputation of this nation.
No, they did not. You have no idea what Saddam's brand of "justice" was, Mr. Scheer. You haven't a clue.
In nearly a year in Iraq, I've spoken with people who had their ribs broken, who've shown me their forearms, zigzagging from compound fractures received in Saddam's torture chambers.
I met a man who'd had one of his knees smashed backwards with a sledgehammer so that they dangle like the limps on a marionette.
I met another man who's brother was shot dead on the spot by one of Saddam's bodyguards for fishing too close to one of Saddam's palaces in Ramadi.
I met people who witnessed Qusay Hussein rolling into an Iraqi wedding in a fleet of black SUVs, taking his pick out of the bridesmades and the bride, and rolling them away for a sporting weekend of rape.
I talked to all these people, Mr. Scheer, and I still have no idea what Saddam's brand of justice was like. Because few people who really know really survived to tell the tale.
Some of their stories are scrawled in blood and feces inside Saddam's prisons all over the country. Many more of their stories could be read only in the appearance of a corpse on the family's front porch steps. Their "story" is written entirely in punctuation--the flowery period of a bullet through the skull.
I believe it was Primo Levi who noted that we would never know what the typical holocaust victim's story was, because the typical holocaust victim was killed.
So even Levi didn't know.
But Levi knew enough that he chose to kill himself rather than live with its memory.
Scheer's inability to discern Saddam's deliberate horror from the bungling ineptitude of Americans at Abu Ghraib is a deep and dirty stain on his credibility.
Yes, at the end of the article, Scheer does make a wan attempt to distance himself from the rhetorical cesspool from which he has just emerged.
One can still condemn the actions of those soldiers without trivializing the deaths of hundreds of thousands at the hands of Saddam Hussein.
I say this because to attempt to equate what happened under U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib with what happened there and places like it to Lahib Nouman and people like her is to commit the 21st century equivalent of the Holocaust denier.
Splash, out
Jason
Our president launched this war with the promise to the Iraqi people of "no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone." What went wrong?
Here's what's wrong: Scheer can't discern a difference between the actions of a few low ranking idiots who are actually being investigated and prosecuted by a nation of laws with the deliberate state policy of a murderous, sadistic butcher.
I'm second to no one in condemning the actions of SSG Frederick and his band of merrymakers, and am already on record. But to attempt to equate what happened in Abu Gharaib with Saddam's torture chambers and rape rooms is, frankly, beyond the pale.
It's been a while since the world has had its noses rubbed in the banality and evil of the Saddam regime and, especially, the actions of his two malevelant spawn, Qusay and Uday.
Our nation is investigating and prosecuting our wrongdoers; Saddam Hussein issued an edict in 1992 guaranteeing immunity to any Ba'ath party member who committed bodily harm in the pursuit of those he considered his enemies.
In 2000, he made disparaging remarks about himself punishable by the cutting out of the tongue.
I can't show you what real torture looks like, Mr. Scheer. But I can show you what it does to people:
The walls of Lahib Nouman's home don't just talk, they howl. They scream in terror, shout with rage, moan in pain and sob with frustration. All the emotions overloading this tiny woman's brutalized mind she projects onto the walls of her living room. She scrawls on them with maroon lipstick, ocher spray paint and gray lumps of charcoal, in Arabic and a sprinkling of French. It's the only way she knows to exorcise her mental demons, to preserve what remains of her sanity.
The whole article is worth a read if you've forgotten where we've come from.
More:
Scheer writes, Recall that a key excuse for the U.S. invasion was to ensure the safety of Iraqi scientists and others in the know so that they might feel free to reveal the location of weapons of mass destruction or evidence of Saddam Hussein's potential ties to al-Qaida. Shockingly, some of those scientists are now in coalition prisons, even though the weapons clearly don't exist.
Ummm, yeah. Right.
I'm sure.
No, really.
Seriously.
More:
Far from the jurisdiction of the U.S. legal system, they apparently felt quite free to approve techniques clearly banned by war crimes statutes.
False. Ever heard of the UCMJ, Mr. Scheer?
So it should have been a clear and high priority to make certain that Iraqi prisoners incarcerated in Saddam's most infamous prison did not receive the same brand of "justice" the dictator had been doling out for decades. That they did is now a deep and dirty stain on the reputation of this nation.
No, they did not. You have no idea what Saddam's brand of "justice" was, Mr. Scheer. You haven't a clue.
In nearly a year in Iraq, I've spoken with people who had their ribs broken, who've shown me their forearms, zigzagging from compound fractures received in Saddam's torture chambers.
I met a man who'd had one of his knees smashed backwards with a sledgehammer so that they dangle like the limps on a marionette.
I met another man who's brother was shot dead on the spot by one of Saddam's bodyguards for fishing too close to one of Saddam's palaces in Ramadi.
I met people who witnessed Qusay Hussein rolling into an Iraqi wedding in a fleet of black SUVs, taking his pick out of the bridesmades and the bride, and rolling them away for a sporting weekend of rape.
I talked to all these people, Mr. Scheer, and I still have no idea what Saddam's brand of justice was like. Because few people who really know really survived to tell the tale.
Some of their stories are scrawled in blood and feces inside Saddam's prisons all over the country. Many more of their stories could be read only in the appearance of a corpse on the family's front porch steps. Their "story" is written entirely in punctuation--the flowery period of a bullet through the skull.
I believe it was Primo Levi who noted that we would never know what the typical holocaust victim's story was, because the typical holocaust victim was killed.
So even Levi didn't know.
But Levi knew enough that he chose to kill himself rather than live with its memory.
Scheer's inability to discern Saddam's deliberate horror from the bungling ineptitude of Americans at Abu Ghraib is a deep and dirty stain on his credibility.
Yes, at the end of the article, Scheer does make a wan attempt to distance himself from the rhetorical cesspool from which he has just emerged.
One can still condemn the actions of those soldiers without trivializing the deaths of hundreds of thousands at the hands of Saddam Hussein.
I say this because to attempt to equate what happened under U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib with what happened there and places like it to Lahib Nouman and people like her is to commit the 21st century equivalent of the Holocaust denier.
Splash, out
Jason
Comments:
Post a Comment
