Directed this morning to new (to me) blog Whiskey Bar. Found this recent post on human rights abuses by U.S. military and civilian wardens at Abu Ghraib. 319 comments to the post. That photo at the top looked oddly like a drawing, specifically like a courtroom drawing, when I saw it broadcast on TV this week. (update: more images here.)

The media on this is in reproductive mode but as of yesterday The Agonist had the best collection of links on Abu Ghraib that I’ve found online, including this on the likely uranium poisoning of the area. (regretting I didn’t get to finish reading Elena Zabolotnogo’s photojournal site of her motorcycle tours through Chernobyl before she took it down. Her note says it was mirrored and copied somewhere online, anybody know where?)

The stories coming from Abu Ghraib are along the same continuum as those told by Bush & Co. about Saddam Hussein’s cruelty in the very same location, narratives and images which were used as a segment of the pitch for an invasion of Iraq. It was a segment in horror with universal appeal, even to u.s. citizens who didn’t follow the complicated resoluations and maneuvering on the presence of WOMD. This wasn’t dissimilar to the 15 seconds of interest the administration lavished on the fate of women in Afghanistan when that invasion was in beta. As Whiskey Bar points out, perhaps the ritual degradation, humiliation, torture rapes, beatings and death at the hands of U.S. military (and civilians who are not subject to military law) at Abu Ghraib are not equivalent to the prior use of the facility but we’ve only been there a year.

“We’ve.’ The recoil of military leadership, their insistence on this abuse of power as an isolated set of events having nothing to do with the U.S. occupying military force as a whole, that these are the actions of an I and not a we, that THEY ARE NOT US: there is the bone of u.s. citizenship. At least one soldier under investigation has pointed towards gaps in the chain of command along with a total lack of policies or standards in the prison. The missing exoskeleton of an ethical framework, particularly necessary in a context that formalizes the occupation in a bodily, fleshy, sadean way.

I am we. I contradict myself. The solider’s point sounds right in one way, that his actions occurred in a framework. I am we. What about my actions, or, a lack of action: thought. Sense. Do I exist in the context of my government’s not missing, rather judeo-chrstian framework? Does my lack of action indicate a mistake on their part? If the military is we how do our social or civic structures mimic those of the army.

The danger of identifying the self in the group. I’m totally stuck on the role of the individual. Inside or outside. And stuck inside my own sense of horror these last few weeks.

Is it possible to end the war with the same set of images that helped to sell it?

There’s some kind of rhetorical parallel that I feel but can’t work out, in the recent switch-out of a THERE flag that’s been flying above Sears Tower lofts on Telegraph in Oakland for a U.S. flag. There is a there there. There is everywhere.

April 30, 2004 * 12:04 pm

April 29, 2004 * 12:32 pm

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April 29, 2004 * 12:26 pm

April 27, 2004 * 4:31 pm

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April 26, 2004 * 3:32 pm

April 26, 2004 * 3:28 pm

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