I have to wonder when Americans claim they didn’t know that rape was occurring at Abu Ghraib. We knew. From a 2004 transcript of a talk by journalist Seymour Hersh:
Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.
By the way, this information came out before the election of 2004.
If you didn’t know, you should have. This is absolutely a case of mass guilt. Over a million people have died. There was horrific torture of civilians, including children. In our names. We knew. If we didn’t know, our ignorance was willful, and it had everything to do with the race, nationality, and religion of the victims. We are responsible.
Now, as was inevitable (and perhaps intentional–after all, totalitarian regimes ultimately want people to know about the torture they inflict–that’s how they control dissent), photographs of some of the rapes that occurred at Abu Ghraib have surfaced, and there’s a debate about their release that I find bizarrely lacking. On one side, we have people who say the release of the photographs would lead to greater anti-American sentiment (you know what else leads to anti-American sentiment? Torturing children.) On the other, we have “progressives” calling for the release of the photos in the name of transparency. No one appears to be discussing what the rape victims might think about photographs of their rapes being distributed to the international news media. As is virtually always the case in our culture, when someone is raped we pay attention to the needs of everyone except the rape victim. The actual victims of rape are reduced to objects to be used for our own political ends. Their needs, their emotions, their desires, don’t count.
What the Obama Administration should do is contact these victims, and ask them what they would like us to do with the photos, and what restorative justice might look like. Incidentally, if reducing anti-American sentiment (rather than, for example, not raping people) is what we’ve decided we’re most concerned with, restorative justice would do a hell of a lot more to alleviate anti-American sentiment than refusing to release the photos, which, as far as I can see, does precisely nothing toward that end.
H/T Shakesville
