This article appeared in War Times/Tiempo de Guerras No. 18, Summer 2004.

http://www.war-times.org/issues/18art2.html

After Abu Ghraib

A Time to Search Our Souls

By Max Elbaum

It is a terrible, inexorable law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own. — James Baldwin

Truly the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib shook the whole country. Millions are still trying to understand painful truths that a few months ago would have been dismissed as enemy propaganda.

There are results: A new aggressiveness on the part of the media to expose government lies and cover-ups. More soldiers and military families are speaking bluntly of the horrors of war. Disapproval of Bush’s approach to Iraq is up to 60 percent in the latest poll.

But all that is not enough. Nor will simply tracing the blame up the chain of command fully explain what happened.

It is time to search our souls. Just what about the U.S. today bred soldiers who acted so cruelly and illegally; who doled out sexually exploitative and physically abusive treatment while smiling for the camera--and then installed one of the most horrifying photos as the screen-saver on the interrogation room computer?

Whether or not there were orders given or winks of approval from higher-ups, why didn't we hear a whole chorus of whistle-blowers?

Prize-winning essayist Susan Sontag, writing in The New York Times on May 23, summed it up with just four words: “The photographs are us.”

She explained: “That is, they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation together with the Bush administration's distinctive policies. The Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, practiced torture and sexual humiliation on despised recalcitrant natives....How the protection of ‘our freedom’ came to require having American soldiers 'across the globe' is hardly debated by our elected officials.”

FACING PAINFUL TRUTHS

Yet isn't this exactly the debate we need to have? Isn't there an underlying connection between this country's posture toward the rest of the world and the Abu Ghraib tortures? And, painful as it is to say, aren't the horrors of Abu Ghraib directly linked to a particular type of violence that has scarred this country since its origins?

As Sontag notes, the Abu Ghraib pictures are all too much like the photos of Black victims of lynchings taken between the 1880s and 1930s, with white Americans grinning beneath the black bodies hanging from a tree. Sold as souvenir postcards, the images said: nothing wrong here.

There are drawings of U.S. troops scalping Mexicans in the 1846-48 war and photos of Mexicans lynched in California that even include smiling children. Who knows what amusement might have been derived from mementos of massacred Chinese mineworkers in Wyoming?

Thankfully, not everyone went along with the horrors of Abu Ghraib. Spc. Joseph Darby--at great personal risk--blew the whistle. "I thought it was just wrong," he said.

Sgt. Camilo Mejia has extended Darby's critique to the whole Iraq war. Mejia was court-martialed and sentenced to a year in jail May 21 for refusing to return to his unit after spending a year in Iraq .

He declared himself a conscientious objector, testifying that George Bush's war was "oil-driven and immoral" and that while serving in Iraq he had seen prison brutality and senseless killing.

We all are confronted with the same moral choice as Sgt. Mejia. Do we acquiesce in a brutal, unjust war or do we protest and resist? Are we satisfied with condemning the immediate perpetrators at Abu Ghraib, or are we willing to face the painful truth that a military occupation combined with our society's entrenched patterns of racism and sexism produces the torturers' mindset?

Five billion people now inhabit this small, interconnected planet. Is it either just or possible for humanity to be dominated by one imperial power that claims rights, privileges and riches for its citizens that are denied to all others?

Dr. Martin Luther King provided his answer 30 years ago: “We will all live together as brothers and sisters, or we will perish together as fools.”

Max Elbaum is author of Revolution in the Air and an editor of War Times. Author/activist Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez contributed to this article.