From Reason Online, we learn that syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker has found the root cause of atrocities at Abu Ghraib. Get this: it’s all thanks to the geniuses behind There’s Something About Mary. Hit & Run: Revealed: The Root Cause of Abu Ghraib!

The images from Abu Ghraib, now irreversibly tattooed on the Arab brain, were every frat-house cliche magnified. The human pyramid, males mooning, masturbation, bags over heads. What we saw, at least in part, was “The Farrelly Brothers Do Baghdad.”

How else to explain the giddy photographs of young soldiers mugging for cameras and giving the thumbs-up sign beside humiliated prisoners, naked and masturbating?

How else, indeed! Here’s the response I left to the full article at the Woonsocket Call

It would be easy for me to misplace my outrage at this scandal in Iraq onto Ms. Parker’s colossally simple-minded article, yet I find myself appalled at the suggestion that somehow two movie makers could be in any way contributors to these atrocities. Ms. Parker shows a complete lack of understanding of the chain of command or of accountability. Would Ms. Parker stand by her story if she read this headline in the Guardian today: UK forces taught torture methods? According to that article, special forces soldiers are taught the brutal humiliation techniques we’ve seen in these prison pictures. That, it seems, is where our boys and girls picked them up. That our soldiers felt confident enough to use these techniques themselves speaks to either incompetent supervision or outright tolerance – if not encouragement – of the methods in question.

This article is an embarrassment. The responsible parties for this torture are the soldiers themselves and the authorities in the chain of command who trained soldiers in these techniques and encouraged their use. Try as you might to wish the responsibility elsewhere, it just won’t stick. Reasonable people understand the difference between watching abuse onscreen and inflicting it in real life. Reasonable people also understand that the torture that took place at Abu Ghraib was all part of the same package and cannot be compartmentalized into “naked torture” and “other torture.” Ms. Parker should be embarrassed at minimizing and manipulating this atrocity to suit her personal cultural agenda, as should any news organization who reprints it.

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Saturday, May 8th, 2004 @ 9:03 am Uncategorized
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