Art Contest at Abu Ghraib!

Gosh they're being so nice to the kids this month. When Ramadan is over, will they go back to business as usual, raping, torturing and murdering them?

“We are always trying to think of new activities for them.”
What a challenge that must be for you, yes.

"First-place winners received a large edition of the Qur’an (the holy book of Islam) and seven nights of comedy movies."
Fucking hell, I can't believe I'm reading this. Yeah, there it is on the US army website. Who needs satire when you've got the fucking US army.

I wonder if this Niceness Campaign has anything to do with the suppressed photos and videos that a judge has just ordered the Pentagon to hand over:
 http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001218842

Well, the Nazis had bands playing HAPPY MUSIC at THEIR Death Camps, didn't they???A little bit of culture lets the genocide go down, the genocide go down, the genocide go down...(with apologies to Mary Poppins).

In the end, the game tends to be played in the same way. Rape, torture, murder, and the instruction to us to look the other way. When the Dutch held all those poor Bosnians prisoner for months (after removing their weapons), and then allowed the Serbs to have their way with them, and execute all the males, we got a TRUE taste of what Western Civilisation is really about. Sometimes the mask slips, but we are too cowardly to remember the face that is revealed!

.15.2005
Abu Ghraib and Guernica
Christopher Hitchens demolishes the latest Lefty analogy:


Abu Ghraib was by no means celebrated as an ancestral civic and cultural center before the year 2004. To the Iraqis, it was a name to be mentioned in whispers, if at all, as "the house of the end." It was a Dachau. Numberless people were consigned there and were never heard of again. Its execution shed worked overtime, as did its torturers, and we are still trying to discover how many Iraqis and Kurds died in its precincts. At one point, when it suffered even more than usual from chronic overcrowding, Saddam and his sons decided to execute a proportion of the inmates at random, just to cull the population. The warders then fanned out at night to visit the families of the prisoners, asking how much it would be worth to keep their son or brother or father off the list. The hands of prisoners were cut off, and the proceedings recorded on video for the delight of others. I myself became certain that Saddam had reached his fin de régime, or his Ceauşescu moment, when he celebrated his 100-percent win in the "referendum" of 2003 by releasing all the nonpolitical prisoners (the rapists and thieves and murderers who were his natural constituency) from Abu Ghraib. This sudden flood of ex-cons was a large factor in the horrific looting and mayhem that accompanied the fall of Baghdad.

I visited the jail a few months later, and I can tell you about everything but the stench, which you would have to smell for yourself. Layers of excrement and filth were being shoveled out; cells obviously designed for the vilest treatment of human beings made one recoil. In the huge, dank, cement gallery where the executions took place, a series of hooks and rings hung over a gruesome pit. Efforts were being made to repaint and disinfect the joint, and many of the new inmates were being held in encampments in the yard while this was being done, but I distinctly remember thinking that there was really no salvaging such a place and that it should either be torn down and ploughed over or turned into a museum.

Instead, it became an improvised center for anyone caught in the dragnet of the "insurgency" and was filled up with suspects as well as armed supporters of Baathism and Bin Ladenism. There's no need to restate what everyone now knows about what happened as a consequence. But I am not an apologist if I point out that there are no more hangings, random or systematic. The outrages committed by Pvt. England and her delightful boyfriend were first uncovered by their superiors. And seven of Saddam's amputees—those whose mutilations were filmed and distributed as a warning—have been flown to Houston, Texas—Texas, capital of redneck barbarism!—to be fitted with new prosthetic hands. A film about this latter episode, titled A Show of Hands, has been made by Don North and was, I believe, shown on the Al Hurra network. But I don't think that 1-in-100,000,000 people has seen it; certainly nobody in comparison with the universal dissemination of photographs of recreational sadism. Sr. Botero, who usually works with flab, has done some leaner and meaner paintings in this case. But they resemble less the metaphors of Picasso than the starkly literal efforts of Goya to represent the crumpled and twisted bodies of the second of May. And that is somehow appropriate, since Goya was divided in his own mind between Spanish patriotism and a covert sympathy for the Napoleonic forces, which, even at second hand, were bringing the principles of 1789 to his own benighted state.

The superficially clever thing to say today is that Lynddie England represents all of us, or at any rate all her superiors, and that the liberation of Iraq is thereby discredited. One odd effect of this smug view is to find her and her scummy friends—the actual inflicters of pain and humiliation—somehow innocent, while those senior officers who arrested them and put them on trial are somehow guilty. There is something faintly masochistic and indecent about that conclusion.

There's also something indecent about any comparison of this with the struggle of the Spanish Republic. If Fallujah is "Guernica," then the U.S. Marines are Herman Goering's Condor Legion. If Abu Ghraib is "Guernica," then the U.S. Army is a part of the original "Axis" between Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. I wonder if any sympathizer of this view would accept its apparent corollary: that the executions and tortures inflicted by the Spanish Communists—crimes now denied by nobody, though Picasso excused them at the time—axiomatically discredit the anti-fascist cause? And this distortion of the record is all the more extraordinary, since a much more natural analogy is close at hand. Gen. Franco's assault on the Spanish Republic—an assault that claimed to be, and was, a rebel "insurgency" against the elected government—consisted of an alliance of fascist parties, religious extremists, and Muslim fighters. It was led by the frightened former oligarchy, and its cause was preached from the pulpit, and its foot-soldiers were Moorish levies from North Africa and "volunteers" from Germany and Italy. How shady it is that our modern leftists and peaceniks can detect fascism absolutely everywhere except when it is actually staring them in the face. The next thing, of course, if we complete the historic analogy, would be for them to sign a pact with it. And this, some of them have already done.

As expected, an erudite and articulate sketch by Christopher Hitchens . Hitchens is a writer whose radar is tuned to any orthodoxy that crystallises. Then the knives are out and the mythologies debunked with an élan and an attention to detail that is often delightful to behold.

The various anti-war arguments - that the war on Iraq was illegal, immoral, or a smokescreen for corporate interests – are now being augmented each day by the pragmatic realisation that it was deeply flawed from a military and logistic point of view. An orthodoxy is crystallising which will encompass ‘lefties’, ‘righties’, ‘centrists’ and anyone too elusive to be compartmentalised in such a banal way.

The argument for the Iraq war is unravelling to the point that even its architects are beginning to see the light. “There is no justification for Iran or any other country interfering in Iraq” says Blair. Which, of course, logically requires the immediate withdrawal of British troops.

In fact the logical flaw of Blair’s observation is very telling. It shows that there is an insidious colonial mentality still at work, that between the civilised and the barbarian. Iran cannot have a moralising mission whereas Britain can. The old images of the Other die hard.

Never mind the willingness of the civilised to shake hands with barbarian elites in covert arms deals. Never mind the vision Orwell saw: our friend Saddam against Iran is now our enemy Saddam, the butcher of Baghdad. First the Mad Ayatollah is the object of the Two Minutes Hate, next Puff Baghdaddy. This has been commented on over and over again. For me, the clearest image of it is the notorious photograph of Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein shaking hands. It makes me sick to my stomach every time – in that photograph I see layers of excrement and filth, hooks, rings, pits and I see corporate lunches over profits for vast military corporations: I see them facing each other. Yes, that makes me sick to my stomach without ever having visited either.

I have not been to Abu Ghraib, either before 2004 or since. I doubt I would be overjoyed by it either stinking with the fetid corpses of a regime once deemed palatable to an imperialist ‘West’, or now garlanded with the trite juvenile delinquent art therapy shown above. Abu Ghraib is a museum – a museum of the colony of Iraq. The latest layer of freedom imposed by violence may have better public relations. It is still built upon the last layer of freedom imposed by violence.

Once again we have to watch the old formula: violence will bring peace, or democracy, or whatever else. It does nothing of the sort. It runs in cycles. It does bring profits, but at the cost of human life. You can lionise it all you like but freedom will never be achieved with shock and awe or any other form of lightning war.

To quote famous lines from that great man of civilisation, democracy, and rectitude, Winston Churchill, in a memo in February 1920 to Sir Hugh Trenchard, the pioneer of the air warfare that was unveiled to the world at Guernica – “I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.” For uncivilised why not read Basques as well as Kurds? For Winston why not read Hussein? Would Adolf Hitler had disagreed with the Churchill of 1944 who wanted to drench “the cities of the Ruhr and others in such a way that most of the population would be requiring medical attention”?

Churchill carved up Eastern Europe with Uncle Joe at the end of the Second World War with a ‘naughty list’ of spheres of influence (just as Hitler and Stalin had done over Poland in 1939) only to stand up at Fulton, Missouri one year later and blubber about an Iron Curtain and the need for the UK to develop nuclear weapons.

In the nuclear era, we choose non-violence or we choose annihilation. Martin Luther King said that. You will struggle to find a memo where he encourages the use of poison gas against anyone. You will find it easy to find statements by him which question the notion of a democracy that tolerates a behemoth military-industrial complex on the one hand and beggars on the other.

When fascism is staring you in the face you’re probably looking in the mirror. The dark-hearted nationalist leaders that emerge from empire are the heart of darkness of empire reflected back at itself.

Joseph Conrad was right in seeing the blood of the Belgain Congo (sorry, ‘Congo Free State’!) in the whited sepulchre of Brussels.

In the whited sepulchre of Abu Ghraib, before or after 2004, one sees the violence of an imperialist system going back centuries. Our moralising, P.R. Christian leaders have failed to absorb the lesson of turning the other cheek: what you dish out comes back to you. Perhaps our ‘leaders’ could do us a nice little painting. We could give them a Bible and seven nights of valium comedies to take their minds off the bombs they have dropped.

Not a single one of which was, or ever will, be dropped in my name.

Some people like you will always complaint whatever the Americans do. For your information art competitions are held every year in British prisons too since many years ago.

In case you're wondering where the Guernica reference came from, the anonymous Christopher Hitchens fan above only copied & pasted part of the original article:
 http://slate.msn.com/id/2118306/

"But I am not an apologist if I point out that there are no more hangings, random or systematic."

No, no hangings. Just drownings, beatings to death with truncheons and torches, slow and painful suffocation by prisoners bound inside sleeping bags, "accidental" deaths during torture from hypothermia and shock, and the videoed rape and sodomy of detained women and children.
But no hangings, thank goodness.

Boston Herald article:
 http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Rueful_Rumsfeld_050704.htm
quote:
"Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the scandal is 'going to get worse' and warned that the most 'disturbing' revelations haven't yet been made public.
'The American public needs to understand, we're talking about rape and murder here,' he said. 'We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience; we're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges.' "

Yet even with these revelations about to come out, the Bush White House still intends to veto the bill his own party just passed in Congress, *limiting* (not banning) the use of torture:
 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/10/07/wus207.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/10/07/ixworld.html
 http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/22/225123/485

You don't have to use so many words to discredit Hitchens, but I'm still going to write a few paragraphs for the sake of completeness. Hitchens knows everything that he needs to know to reach the right conclusions. He's a stellar researcher. Therefore, it is obvious that he deliberately ignores Bush's motivations for the war in Iraq, as described by The Project For the New American Century and other Republican-affiliated think tanks and pressure groups (provided that they are marketing their material to educated people, and not rednecks).

The war in Iraq was fought not for Democracy (although Bush claimed such a policy publicly, ignoring the rhetoric of his entire inner circle), but for energy security. The whole U.S. economy runs on oil, particularly since there isn't adequate public transport, and what public transport which exists is often diesel-powered. If the supply of oil were suddenly and severely curtailed, or if the price jumped to a much higher level than it is at now, the U.S. economy could collapse. Modernising U.S. transport (and other) infrastructure would be out of the question, though, at least from the standpoint of an oil family like the Bushes, who could easily lose their family fortune. Therefore, the only options discussed are drilling for more oil, conquering countries that have substantial oil reserves, and allying with regimes, repressive or otherwise, that are willing to be completely subservient to U.S. energy needs.

Even if American troops are pulled out of Iraq, the Bushes will desire a puppet regime who are friendly to them, and willing to pump plenty of cheap oil their way. Bush never, to give another illustration of this mentality, criticises the flagrant human rights violations going on daily in Saudi Arabia, because that country exports large quantities of cheap oil to the U.S. with little complaint. Saddam Hussein, by comparison, first invaded Kuwait in 1991, and then refused to become a puppet after his defeat in the war, even though the Bushes made it clear to him that they would leave him alone if he disarmed and just pumped oil. Therefore, he had outlived his usefulness as a counterweight to the Islamic regime in Iran (who also control substantial oil reserves that they can blackmail the U.S. with), so he had to be eliminated.

To top it off, the U.S. military secured the oil infrastructure of Iraq without securing anything else, and now, over two years later, the country is still in flames. This illustrates more clearly than anything that Bush had no social goals in Iraq, and little or no specific political goal other than the securing of Iraqi oil reserves, ensuring U.S. control over them. Given these factors, all well known to educated Republicans, Democrats, and independents, Christoper Hitchens, just like Bush's best spin doctors, uses excellent research to discuss many intricate details of the Iraq War, while completely ignoring the most important facts, and with them, the big picture.

-B.Z.

Wills wrote "Some people like you will always complaint whatever the Americans do. For your information art competitions are held every year in British prisons too since many years ago. "

Are you stupid? I mean you must be since you compare Iraqi detainees in US run prisons in Iraq to British prisons and its prisoners. Almost all Iraqis in occupation prisons in Iraq have no idea what they are charged with; they have no access to lawyers and have had no trial.

Before you make a comment to “protect Americans” think for a while so you don’t make a fool out of yourself.

I have to say, I think Blue Zappa has hit the nail right on the head.