Fellow Kossacks, please help me iron out my thoughts. I've got lots of ideas bouncing around in my noggin but I can't seem to put them together in an articulate way. Please respond:
1. Looking at the grinning soldiers striking poses next to the prisoners, I'm reminded of frat-boys hazing their pledges. Clearly the power structure is different and this goes beyond simple hazing, but somehow I see the same impulse at work. Part of our system of indoctrination (especially in military-style organizations) involves breaking the spirit of individuality, often through physical and psychological humiliation. The military has experience with hazing scandals, and I think it's likely that those soldiers in the pictures may have been through it themselves. Hazing is dehumanization lite, torture is dehumanization heavy. Isn't there some connection here?
- Who stands to benefit from the torture of people who are mostly innocent detainees and likely have no military or intelligence value? The wrongness is easy to see, but it's easy to be blinded by the images and see only evil there. The administration would like to paint a picture of a few bad apples cutting up without permission, but all accounts suggest that's not the case; this was a systematic thing, and systematic practices don't come into being without someone's direction. OK, simply put, who ordered this done and why?
- It seems to me that Kerry should (when he finally finds the right moment and I don't fault him for being silent so far) take this opportunity to draw a distinction with a policy statement. Namely, that if he's elected, he'll end the practice of hiring mercenaries. Seems like an easy winner here, and yet I don't see it happening. Why isn't Kerry coming down harder on Rumsfeld's corporatization of the military?
- Back to dehumanization. We haven't seen much anti-Iraqi propaganda or other efforts to make the Iraqi people into monsters (other than Baathists). How, then, is the dehumanization of these people rationalized? Surely the soldiers heard the message that we're in Iraq to save the people and bring them to freedom. Were the soldiers told that these prisoners were insurgents? My impression has been that most of the prisoners were guilty of no crime and were just awaiting "processing". So, how did they come to be viewed as chattel by their protectors? And who gains from this?