we can do no wrong
The sexual sadism -- the bobby-sox girl soldier who points at a man's genitals, the mock orgy in Abu Ghraib prison, the British rifle in the prisoner's mouth -- might be a crazed attempt to balance all those lies about the Arab world, about the desert warrior's potency, the harem, polygamy.
Even today, we still show the revolting "Ashanti" on our television stations, a feature film about the kidnapping of the wife of an English doctor by Arab slave-traders, which depicts Arabs as almost exclusively child-molesters, rapists, murderers, liars and thieves. It stars -- heaven spare us -- Michael Caine, Omar Sharif and Peter Ustinov and was made partly in Israel.
Indeed, we now depict Arabs in our films as the Nazis once depicted Jews. But Arabs are fair game. Potential terrorists to a man -- and a woman -- they must be softened up, "prepared," humiliated, beaten, tortured. The Israelis use torture in the Russian Compound in Jerusalem. Now we torture in Saddam's old jail outside Baghdad and -- for this is where British soldiers beat a young Iraqi to death last summer -- in the former office of Saddam's most murderous chemical warfare fascist, the awful "Chemical" Ali.
And the officers? Didn't the British lieutenants and captains and majors in the Queen's Lancashire Regiment know that their lads were kicking to death a young Iraqi hotel worker last summer?
That man's fate -- and the documentary evidence proving that he was murdered -- was first revealed by The Independent on Sunday in January. Didn't the CIA boys at Abu Ghraib know that Ivan "Chip" Frederick and Lynddie England, two of the American soldiers in the photographs published last week, were obscenely humiliating their prisoners?
Of course they did. The last time I saw Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade in Iraq, she told me she had visited Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo and found nothing wrong with it. I should have guessed then that something had gone terribly wrong in Iraq.
