Wednesday 12 May 2004 By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Genital Torture For Dummies

Hey, it's a war -- what did you expect, flowers and bunnies and hopscotch
in the Baghdad streets ?

Just in time for your morning breakfast sausage, it's all-American rape
and torture and rampant entirely condoned military sadism. ( 1 )
Mmm, patriotism.

The pictures are worth a thousand disgusted moans. It's all flag-draped
coffins and dog chains and forced masturbation and pistol whippings and
miserable bloody hooded Iraqi men -- not terrorists, just men -- with
wires attached to their fingers and genitals and made to stand up for
hours and days on end until their feet swell and their lungs collapse and
their livers fail, and you can hear our stunned death-drunk nation cry :
Hey, whatever happened to our nice, clean little war ? How did it get
so ugly and out of hand ? And isn't the "Frasier" finale on soon ? Sigh.

Isn't the nation just so very outraged -- outraged ! ( 2 ) -- over the
nasty rogue's gallery of photos gushing forth from the stunned media of
late (with frightening promises that the worst is yet to come) ( 3 ),
all those snickering US Army guards and sickeningly abused Iraqi POWs
and dead US soldiers and scowling generals.

And there's BushCo blaming Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld blaming the military
and the military blaming miserable 21-year-old female trailer-park
scapegoats
( 4 ) and once again there stands Dubya, looking angry and baffled, like
a kid who just got grounded for getting another D on a spelling test.

Did you really think war would be all light spankings and fur-lined
handcuffs and afternoon tea, George ?

All happy giggling soldiers blasting each other with squirt guns and
playing jacks in the streets of Fallujah ?

Did you really believe your second war in as many years would be all
neat and tidy and bloodless and gift-wrapped and lacking in gruesomeness
and bile and disfiguring genital mutilation? What are you, a puppet ?
Oh wait.

This is the thing about wars, Dubya. They are worse than a fresh cow pie
on the heel of your shiny Tony Lamas.

They are bloodier and uglier and nastier and more heinous and more
over budget than your worst Texas oil deal (and you had plenty of those),
and that's before you even press the Start button.

As the saying goes, You want to make Satan laugh ?
Tell him you're planning for a polite, orderly little conflict.
Watch him blast oil through his nose.

But let's not be too hard on the least articulate, least intellectual,
least accountable president in US history.

After all, Dubya's just like much of America. He is the prefect
embodiment of our world-famous myopia, a selective type of
dangerous tunnel vision whereby if we don't see it and don't really
feel it and the media doesn't splash it all over us, it must not be true.

And, really, what Bush-votin' flag-wavin' God-numbed patriot
wants to hear that the US is a world-class hypocrite, committing
many of the same crimes and tortures, rapes and humiliations that
Saddam himself did, in the very same prison ?

Who wants to hear that, in many ways, we've done no better by the
Iraqi (or Afghan) people than their former leadership, and in some
ways have made things far worse ?

And who wants to know that we have become the violent, unwanted
clown on the global stage, justifiably ridiculed and thoroughly
unsympathetic, as the world boos and hurls rotten foreign policies ?

Who wants to know that we are, in short, losing the war ?

Look there, isn't that ***** Cheney, hiding behind an American
coffin, fondling his Halliburton portfolio and snickering quietly ?
Why yes, yes it is.

The Powers That Be know one thing : This lack of perspective, of the
gruesome details of war, keeps the nation stupid. It makes us compliant.

It makes us all go, well sure, I know war is heck and all, but we're the
good guys therefore any bloodshed is in the name of democracy and any
rapes are necessary evils and all those dead Iraqi women and babies are
unfortunate casualties in the quest to protect our president's corporate
interests and life goes on and hey "American Idol" is down to three
finalists ! Woo !

Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is also Bush. This is a man who goes on
Saudi television to claim rape and torture and sadism is not the American
way of conducting a war (but not, actually, to apologize -- never that),
that such behavior is contrary to our God and our principles and our
morals and our happily imbecilic black-and-white, good-versus-evil
worldview.

Good one, George. Here's some words to stick in your craw, Dubya :
Vietnam. Guantanamo Bay. Somalia. El Salvador. World War II.

Show me a US-led battle, Shrub, and I'll show you some nifty n' horrific
American-made abuses of prisoners and detainess and innocent civilians
that would makes your skin peel.

Hey, it's war. You asked for it. You don't invite the Devil to the table
and not expect him to spit in the mashed potatoes, you know ?

By the way, Dubya, why have you never attended a single funeral service
( 5 ) honoring any US soldier who died in Iraq or Afghanistan ? Why have
you distanced yourself from the war dead like a snake avoids roadkill ?
Sorry, is that an inappropriate question right now ?

Look. Everyone knows the Abu Ghraib nightmare isn't an isolated incident.
These pictures merely stir that sickening, deep-down feeling that the
atrocities are far worse than you can imagine ( 6 ) and far more

than anyone wants to admit and they happen during every single war and
Rummy and his crew not only knew it was happening but they also condoned
it, promoted it, never made a move to stop it. So ?

Standard operating procedure, baby. It says so all over Rummy's pinched,
sour face: It's an ugly, savage world, people. Now please just shut up
and let us devour it in peace.

Even the Red Cross is coming forth and saying, oh man, you think those
Abu Ghraib pictures are bad ? You think it's just that hideous little
nightmare prison where American soldiers and American-funded commandos
and mercenaries are torturing and abusing and grinning for the camera ?
You have no idea. ( 7 )

Cut to a close-up of Jack Nicholson's beady eyes, boring straight into
the smirking simpleton that is Bush, and then scanning over the pro-Bush
American voting public, so inured and sheltered and flag waving and
sucking down SUVs like baby seals.

You want the truth ? You can't handle the truth !

And what is that truth now ?

What have these photos, these glorious wartime atrocities, accomplished ?

Why, nothing short of guaranteeing that the United States has never been
so violently hated among Middle Eastern nations as it is right now.

Nothing short of massacring any last vestige of remaining 9/11
..............
More :

ix


( 1 ) Rape Rooms : A Chronology
What Bush said as the Iraq prison scandal unfolded.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2100014

( 2 ) Timeline

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2004/05/06/iraqabusepix.DTL

( 3 ) US Military Confirms Existence of Horrific Pictures and Video
When did British ministers know of prison torture ?
http://truthout.org/docs_04/051004D.shtml

( 4 ) Lynndie England, from West Virginia, is now officially on the list
of great female evildoers of all time.

35

( 5 ) Bush Ignores Soldiers' Burials. While en route, the coffins will
be deliberately shielded from view
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17079

( 6 ) How the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster at Abu

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040517fa_fact2

( 7 ) Red Cross report describes systematic US abuse. A Red Cross report
disclosed Monday said coalition intelligence officers estimated
that 70-90 percent of Iraqi detainees were arrested by mistake

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