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Thursday, May 13, 2004
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SOME QUICK THOUGHTS ON ABU GHRAIB
During my hiatus from blogging, I followed with some interest developments coming out of the Abu Gharaib prison outside of Baghdad. Most news reports and a number of blogs that I've read suggest that this was the sole work of seven criminally misguided U.S forces. I have some thoughts on that.
The views of Arab dominant sexuality and their doctrine of personal modesty are deep rooted and centuries old. They are largely dictated from the Holy Koran itself and are taught from childhood to Arab youth and have been for nearly 1,500 years. To tamper with these beliefs in a setting in which the Arab has no control is to shake the very psychological foundations of that Arab male.
Does anyone seriously intend to argue that your average 22 year old enlistee fom Nebraska knows that? Americans are, generally speaking, famously ignorant of foreign cultures and it stands to reason that they younger they are, they more ignorant of a culture they can be expected to be. This is not to insult Americans, but to make a point. If your average enlisted personell or non-comissioned officer can't be expected to understand the psychological foundations of the societal mores of an alien culture, who can be?
Military intelligence? Not likely. They are more accustomed to figuring out who's been syphoning gasoline from the motor pool. As their functions pertain to actual combact operations, they are more tactical than strategic. Knowing the cultural pressure points of an in-theatre enemy is a little subtle for military intel. If this was straightforward, hot-iron-up-the-ass- torture, I might buy Army personell being behind it.
On the other hand, the CIA was created to learn this kind of thing. They have entire divisions in Langely devoted to the study of foreign cultures and several of the "private contractors" they employ are university professors who aid in this study. This would also make Rumsfeld's protestations of ignorance plausible. This leads to another, far more disturbing point. Following the Church committee hearings of the 1970's, the Agencey has been loathe to operate solo in such a sensitive area. In large part, this is why the Iran/Contra scandal was run of the National Security Council in the White House basement. The CIA was bitten mightily for its conduct in the fifties and sixties and aren't really enthusiastic to get bitten again. Its noteworthy to remember that the DCI in the Johnson and Nixon administrations, Richard Helms, very nearly went to prison to lying to Congress about operations in Chile in the early 1970's. They've grown very careful since then. They do noting, and I mean nothing at all without the at least tacit approval from someone in the White House. It is this culture of caution that I believe, in part, lead to 9/11.
So why would they go off the reservation now? I don't think they did. Using Abu Ghraib, one of Saddam's most notorious prisons and using culturally based humilliation tactics is almost certainly CIA inspired, most likely with White House approval. But, wishing to keep their fingerprints off of it, they let the grunts actually do it. The grunts, and to a lesser extent, Military Intelligence, are amateurs and did something stupid. They took pictures. Those pictures then leaked, as pictures often do.
If I'm right, and at this point it's an awfully big if, this story is going to get a whole lot more serious. And its not going away anytime soon either.
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