Nothing But Politics

[Rick Faurot]

The Imperial Personality
Conceit is their credo
by Justin Raimondo

"I'm not going to go down alone for this." So said Col. Thomas Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, when one of the detainees at Abu Ghraib prison died while being interrogated. The implicit threat – that, if put on trial for staging the Abu Ghraib horror show, he'd point to the real authors and directors in the Pentagon, and perhaps higher – is very real.

... So concerned was the White House about the Abu Ghraib interrogations that the prison merited a visit from an aide to National Security Advisor Condolezza Rice. ...

What can't be postponed, or controlled, is the release of additional photographs and videos out of Abu Ghraib. We have only gotten a glimpse, so far, of a very limited selection: dogs unleashed on naked prisoners, sexual humiliation, the hooded man standing on a box, arms outstretched crucifixion-style. But according to Seymour Hersh, without whom the Abu Ghraib outrages would never have come to light, these indelible images of evil, as bad as they are, pale before what is coming.

... The source of that evil emanates, not only from the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib, but from what Professor Claes Ryn calls the "Jacobin" spirit that animates the War Party. His insight into the psychology of the neoconservatives' "will to dominate" by imposing global democracy at gunpoint is all too applicable here:

"But 9/11 changed everything, the neo-Jacobins cry. Well, not quite everything. The human condition has not changed. Terrible events do not cancel the need for those personal qualities and social and political structures without which the will to power becomes arbitrary and tyrannical. Unfortunately, 9/11 gave the imperialistic personality another pretext for throwing off restraint."

...While the administration frantically spun Abu Ghraib as an "isolated" incident, Hersh dropped another bombshell in the New Yorker: Rumsfeld had approved a "special access" program known as "Copper Green," a secret army "which had been focussed on the hunt for al-Qaeda," and was "expanded to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq." Hersh cites "several" American intelligence officials, past and present, as confirming that "Copper Green" utilized "physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners" as a strategy to stem the rising tide of the insurgency – and fulfill "Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the CIA."

..."Copper Green" was meant to crush the insurgency, and instead wound up fueling it. Rumsfeld's secret army of torturers, instead of routing the rebels, turned Abu Ghraib into a recruiting center for them. A more graphic illustration of the unintended consequences of interventionism would be hard to imagine.

...The Israeli signature – hooded prisoners, psycho-sexual humiliation, "soft" torture – was in evidence since the first photos were released. But now the evidence is in: General Janis Karpinski, former commander of Abu Ghraib, recently told the BBC that when she met an Israeli interrogator at a prison facility in Iraq, she said: "Wow, that's kind of unusual." "No, not really," was his reply. Are Israel's professional sadists tutoring American greenhorns in the fine art of "soft" torture? This is a gift to al-Qaeda.

Full Story: http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3508