I can't help but think that she is the unfortunate bottom of the chain in a weird psy-ops program gone awry. I suspected this for a while, but I was reading Peter Maass' article in the New York Times Magazine this weekend and a few paragraphs clicked for me. I kept on thinking of something that Seymour Hersh wrote in "Chain of Command" (pg 38-39) -
One of the quotations that will be explored at any trial is why a group of Army Reserve military policemen, most of them from small towns, tormented their prisoners as they did, in a manner that was especially humiliating for Iraqi men. (Gary Myers, the attorney for Sgt. Frederick, asked me, "Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own?...)
More past the break.
More from "Chain of Command", pg 38-39 -
Thye notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation had become a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the...invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was The Arab Mind....first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai...The book includes a 25 page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression....The Patai book, an academic told me, was 'the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.' In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged - 'one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.'
The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the posed photographs...'I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back into the population.' The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action...
So, the possibility exists that this whole episode was an intelligence operation gone amuck. Which would explain Charles Graner's testimony that the photos were taken for "training". After all, in order to implement any policy, people need to be properly trained in its execution and training materials are needed, right?
Now, how does that jibe with this - a few paragraphs from Peter Maass' excellent SUnday NYTimes piece "The Way of the Commandos" inside the Magazine, which was headlined "The Savadorization of Iraq?" BTW.
A couple of hours after Adnan issued his AK-47 threat, I sat with him watching TV. This was business, not pleasure. The program we were watching was Adnan's brainchild, and in just a few months it had proved to be one of the most effective psychological operations of the war. It is reality TV of sorts, a show called ''Terrorism in the Grip of Justice.'' It features detainees confessing to various crimes. The show was first broadcast earlier this year and has quickly become a nationwide hit. It is on every day in prime time on Al Iraqiya, the American-financed national TV station, and when it is on, people across the country can be found gathered around their television sets.
Those being interrogated on the program do not look fearsome; these are not the faces to be found in the propaganda videos that turn up on Web sites or on Al Jazeera. The insurgents, or suspected insurgents, on ''Terrorism in the Grip of Justice'' come off as cowardly lowlifes who kill for money rather than patriotism or Allah. They tremble on camera, stumble over their words and look at the ground as they confess to everything from contract murders to sodomy. The program's clear message is that there is now a force more powerful than the insurgency: the Iraqi government, and in particular the commandos, whose regimental flag, which shows a lion's head on a camouflage background, is frequently displayed on a banner behind the captives. ...
So, as you can see, there IS some sort of public humiliation program in effect in Iraq. Who thought of this program? Notice that in the video, they confess to sodomy. Are these confessions backed up with Lynndie England like photos? Yours to discuss...