DANGEROUS BEAUTY:
These photos made you famous the world over.
Even the Rolling Stones wrote a song about you.
You have become a symbol, the face of this war.
That's how I read about it in the papers. People stare at me a lot. When we talk about the negative things that happened in the war, then Abu Ghraib is one of the first things to come up, and they usually name me by name. Although I was only in five or six pictures, I am the most famous. So I suppose I am a symbol of this war. Unfortunately.
Let's talk about the photos, especially the one with Gus, the man on the dog-leash...
Streck, Wiechmann/Spiegel -
Okay, let's do. Let's talk about those photos. Then, after we've contemplated that for a while, let's turn our thoughts to the men in those images. Men whose lives are just as real as hers, or yours.
But first the photos of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.
Framing's vital in imagery, and in this case it's everything.
Lots of people can see through the lies and noise far enough that when England says
"...when you show the people from the CIA, the FBI and the MI the pictures and they say, 'Hey, this is a great job. Keep it up', you think it must be right. They were all there and they didn't say a word. They didn't wear uniforms, and if they did they had their nametags covered."
it's believable. Even the
Washington Post would appear to believe her, though there's some hinky positioning in the names named and left unnamed in that article.
The cult of personal responsibility is thrilled to have Lynndie England broken in front of them, and the bigotry that came to the surface when the whole Abu Ghraib shitstorm broke was so charged with that gratification it was easy to see. That and the misogyny and racism and confused sadistic lust that saturates the whole ugly nightmare.
It fixates on the woman in the pictures as responsible for being there, and for doing what she's doing.
She's a
hillbilly.
White trash. One more expendable subhuman from the bottom of the pile. This thing has eaten her life, such as it was.
She says she's paranoid that some freak will try to hurt or kill her or kidnap her son. No doubt based on the
many wonderful
things people have written about and at her regarding this matter.
The karmic puzzle of those who wanted to punish her because punishing her would feel good. Considering what she's being punished for, well, that's a ponder. Taking pleasure in punishing bad people. Nasty, but legal, and fun!
Deeper in though it starts to smell pretty strange.
Some there are who see the whole Iraq enterprise as highly managed, so that the failing state and its constant churning bloodshed isn't a bungle, it was the goal all along. Though even at this late hour the only polarity on offer is:
Operation Iraqi Freedom, democracy to Iraq
v.
Blundering greedheads ride toward Babylon and its oil.
Choose one.
Babylon's an interesting signpost here.
The less comforting analysis is it's been a war by proxy for Israel all along, with the oil boys bought in, or extorted in in some cases, possibly some high profile cases, all supported heavily by the fans of the Apocalypse on the Christian fundamentalist right. Democracy, like freedom, being just something you have to tell the dummies to get them to back you.
That frame makes the release of the images a lot more than just a newsworthy scandalous revelation.
Keeping in mind the same media that kicked those images into the world
zeitgeist had been backing the whole idea from the get, reporting the lies of the Administration as fact, hiding everything and anything that threatened to expose what lay behind the cheap tawdry rah-rah. Suddenly there's all those pictures of humiliated Arabs.
Imagine how that played in the settlements on the Golan Heights. Imagine how Richard Perle and Douglas Feith and Eliot Abrams and their more rabid brethren reacted to them.
To get that frame up and fit to the image, you'd need a sense of what Babylon means to the Jewish diaspora. Why Babylon figures so prominently in reggae. This is a much older story than the news lets on.
There was all that talk back in 2003 about the looting of the museums, mystified commenters wondering - why? A picture I never tire of hauling out:
from AFP back when they still had
couilles.
It's J. Paul Bremer, American pro-consul in Iraq. He's looking at a piece of the treasure of Nimrod.
The symbolism of that moment was and is immense, but it went pretty much unrecognized. Mostly because people
a. don't know Bremer's Jewish
b. don't know who Nimrod was.
But through the frame of war by proxy for Israel, the placing of a Jew as military-backed governing presence over a country that's just been successfully invaded and occupied fits very tightly. Keeping in mind that same country, in Gulf War 1, lobbed 80 some missiles into Israel.
And through that same frame broadcasting around the world images of your millenia-old enemies covered in shit and led naked like dogs on a short leash by a leering woman in combat boots fits very tightly indeed.
Keeping in mind the outrage those pictures caused in decent-minded folks all over the US not to mention the rest of the world. Keeping in mind that it went some good way toward parting the sea of unquestioning patriotic fever the country was deep in the midst of at the time. Keeping in mind by 2006 the elections were a signal message that those decent-minded folks had had enough b.s. and wanted real change, and the hell out of Iraq.
Keeping in mind a fat lot of good that did anyone.
The God-like narrative voice of the Speigel article with its smarmy mix of talk-show therapeutic guile and guiltless cold regard seems to almost promise her a place, if not at the table with the elect and pure, at least among the rest of the lepers and beggars at the city's gate.
There's no righteousness more undeniable than that possessed by those blind to their own complicity. What Jesus called "
whited sepulchres".
This, for some of us, is the deathless message of Christian mercy. None of us are above any of the rest. The best among us get right down there with the worst. By choice. Out of humility. For love.
Lynndie England's anxious and medicated and scarred for life. Not because she made wrong personal choices, though that's in it, but because she got caught up in a sick machine. Her way back isn't through remorse and shame, though the audience of the unstained and self-proclaimed innocent want to see and hear that, and won't release her from the cathartic circus until she bows to the false god they've made of themselves.
She's wounded enough she won't heal until we all do, won't start to heal until we all do, until she gets hit with enough true and accurate mercy and compassion she has no choice in it but to rise.
