Everybody except Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush knows that our troop levels in Iraq are insufficient to even pretend we can secure the country we say we've liberated. This shortage of manpower goes for our local torture factories detention facilities as well. One government report about Abu Ghraib revealed that staffing at the prison stood at only about 35 percent of the needed number. For instance, there were 92 military police guards for an inmate population that had grown to 7,000 in Abu Ghraib alone.
The common wisdom seems to have become, "No wonder abuse occurred, considering the lack of personnel and the absence of proper oversight." Well, maybe. But I wonder why, given that the staff was supposedly so overtaxed, plenty of grunts and officers seemed to have time for fun and games. You know: forcing naked prisoners to form a human pile; putting some of the detainees on a leash and making fun of them in front of a photo camera; slapping hoods on others and pretending to wire them for electrocution — yeah folks, that's entertainment. How these vigilantes in uniform found the time for their power-mad bouts of whoopin' and hollerin' and torturin', I'll probably never get.
In recent days, it's become evident that Abu Ghraib was only the tip of the iceberg. Torture of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of Americans was — and perhaps is — more widespread than anyone had previously dared believe. Here are two out of at least nine cases whose details are beginning to surface.
• In April of this year, two Marines in a Mahmudiya holding area used an electric transformer to shock a detainee so that they could watch him "dance."
• At the same facility, eight months earlier, another Marine squirted a flammable substance on a prisoner's hands, then set them ablaze with a match.
The military kept these abuses out of the limelight, far from journalistic and congressional scrutiny. The three Marines in question were court-martialed under hush-hush conditions and sentenced to twelve, eight, and three months, respectively. (That's right: just three months' confinement for setting a man's hands on fire. You and I could get more than that for bouncing a check.) The only reason we are now learning about these incidents is that the ACLU has successfully fought for the release of the documents revealing them.
The thing that probably shocked me most about the new scandals is not that a bunch of uniformed fratboys got in touch with their inner Mengele, besmirching America's legacy of liberty and justice just as surely as if they'd taken a collective dump on the Stars and Stripes. Rather, what shocked me most powerfully is this: that the news report of these war crimes didn't even make the front page anymore. The New York Times put it at the bottom of page A18, as if to signify the new ho-hum nature of the abuse: Torture as usual.
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