AMERICA'S SHAME

From CounterPunch courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

Racism & Torture as Entertainment

The present-day equivalent of Tom Graham VC is Hollywood, with its poisonous, racist portrayal of Arabs and Muslims. True to form, our enemies turned out, on 11 September 2001, to be as terrible as our movies made them out to be. One day, some serious research might be conducted into how far the pilot killers modelled themselves on Hollywood's version of their ruthlessness.

But it's not difficult to see how the American thugs at the Abu Ghraib prison acquired their cruelty. Born-again Christians who no doubt publicly wished to be seen upholding a "pure, clean and upright life" treated the Iraqis as if they were "fiends in human form", as "fanatics", as "flies". Hadn't the US proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer, described America's enemies as "dead-enders", "die-hards", "terrorists"? When the young woman involved in this torture expressed her surprise at all the fuss, I immediately understood why. Not because what she did was routine--though it clearly was--but because that is how she was told to treat these Iraqi prisoners. Hadn't they been killing American soldiers, setting off car bombs, murdering schoolchildren? Hollywood turned into reality.

Click here.

And from WorkingForChange:

Our beacon of freedom

From the conservative Islamic eye, at one level, the torture at Abu Ghraib -- let's call it what it was intended to be, Mr. Rumsfeld, torture -- is further evidence of the morals of the libertine West run amok, a combination of unlimited power and the dehumanization of others for one's own fulfillment (also a key element of most pornography, incidentally). But at another, it's a perfect capsule shot of what the U.S. is trying to do to Iraq, and the West to Islam -- impose our own morality, using power and humiliation to bend others to our will and our entirely recent notion of what is right and good. That's the entire Arab world down there, hooded and being forced to produce for the pleasure of the West. Produce oil, produce markets, produce their souls on a platter. And they hate it. They're supposed to.

And that scratching sound you hear is thousands upon more thousands of outraged people signing up for the jihad against America.

Click here.

And finally, the Houston Chronicle runs the pictures that sparked the world's outrage. If you haven't seen them yet, I must warn you that they are quite unsettling.

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