Authority Dog Food Article

Pfc. Lynndie England, 21, drags the naked form of a male Iraqi prisoner across the floor of Abu Ghraib prison--as if he were her dog yanked out for his evening walk.

USA Today lined the pictures up for us--from the dogs trained on black students in Birmingham in 1963 to the Los Angeles police pummeling Rodney King in 1991--both to put today's news in historical context and to dramatize the power of photography to change political consciousness. It is a bold step in a month in which the media, which have slumbered while the Bush administration abused its power, moved from lap dog to watchdog status.

How did the story break? In several ways. Soldiers, including one who recently spoke to ABC News, broke silence and exposed the cover-up. A National Guard officer, featured in People magazine, discovered the abuse and informed superiors in September. Another soldier found the pictures on a CD being passed around and informed superiors. The uncle of one who was accused called military muckraker David Hackworth, who called "60 Minutes II." Unnamed persons passed Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's report and CDs to reporter Seymour Hersh, the same man who exposed the Vietnam massacre at My Lai and whose three articles in the New Yorker have transformed the way America looks at the Iraq war.

Naked men, hooded, simulate fellatio, pile up piggyback and collapse in a grotesque embrace. They stretch out, chained to bunks and jail cells. Female soldiers with silly grins point in ridicule at the prisoners' genitals.

The American public enjoys male nudity--when the men are athletes, actors, or models displayed by fashion photographers for our entertainment--to sell underwear, perfume, sex and other basic American values. But these Iraqi men are anonymous, ordinary, dark-skinned, cowering in their disgrace and fear. Theirs is the nakedness of the bombing victim whose clothes have been blasted away, the nakedness of Jesus on the cross.

Their nakedness is part of their torture. As Robert J. Lifton writes in The Nation, interrogators were under pressure to find the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Impatient with the war's progress, writes Hersh, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved a secret group trained to hit suspects hard and sent them to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Arab men, unlike Western men accustomed to the sports locker room, do not appear naked in the presence of one another. Either these men would cooperate with their interrogators, even serve as our spies, or the pictures would be circulated in their home neighborhoods.

Ironically, these scenes appear in the context of the Bush administration and its surrogates' attempts to blot other pictures from public view: flag-draped coffins arriving from Iraq and the faces of the war dead quietly celebrated in a special edition of ABC's "Nightline." Then, when this story began to surface, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff convinced a compliant CBS to postpone "60 Minutes" two weeks until the Army got its act together. Finally, to stifle more disclosures from the 1,800 still-secret scenes, senators and congressmen were allowed a peek at a closed showing.

How could this have happened? As the USA Today collection implied, the violence virus deep in American culture has resurfaced.

Rush Limbaugh inadvertently said something true. These scenes are not that rare: They're fraternity hazing, Yale's Skull and Bones. DePauw professor Jonathan Nichols-Pethich told MSNBC that humiliation is the stuff of "reality" TV. Every night on TV, Howard Stern strips young women bare and ridicules their body parts, and the girls pretend to love it. High school athletes inflict sexual humiliation--sodomy--on their teammates at football camp. It builds team spirit. And how many romanticized Hollywood and TV cops have we watched slap around a suspect as if this is standard behavior? Two of the indicted GIs were prepared for the Abu Ghraib rituals by their experience as hometown prison guards.

In public policy, the torture gate opened when President George W. Bush divided the world between good and evil and gave himself a license to deny human rights to "bad guys." And Rumsfeld, in his first public response to the scandal, employed the distinction between "torture" and "abuse." Abuse, he implied, was not so bad.

Now The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NPR, The New Yorker, Newsweek, Time, (which reports that the accused soldiers will use the photographs to prove they were following orders), the International Red Cross, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch all make one thing clear. Torturegate stems from the violence in our culture--from the American prison system (particularly in Bush's Texas) and reaches to Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, the CIA, the Pentagon and back to the White House.

We strip prisoners naked, hood them, jail them indefinitely without charges or defense, deny them food, a toilet, light, air and exercise, make them stand and squat without rest, blast them with loud noise, shackle and beat them, urinate on them, violate them sexually, attack them with dogs, and half-drown them. Then we cynically turn them over to the torturers in less humane countries than ours--Egypt, Morocco and Jordan--who will treat them worse. The deaths of 37 prisoners in . custody are now being investigated.

What about the morality of what we are doing? In a secular society, the press, more than the church--especially when the church has lost its moral authority--becomes the conscience of the public.

For the most part, the dominant American ethic, shared by politicians and the press, is pragmatic and utilitarian. They ask what works and what appeals to the greatest number of people whereas a Christian or a Kantian would stress integrity, fidelity to principle, and refuse to use a person as a means to an end.

But many journalists are attracted to the profession by their idealism, the power of the pen to set things right.

Press reports, one in USA Today, remind us of the famous Stanley Milgram experiment in the 1960s that demonstrated that subjects, told they were "teachers," willingly administered progressively powerful electric shocks to "learners" in an adjacent room. In a similar experiment in 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo enlisted college students to play the roles of guards and prisoners for two weeks. Left to themselves, the guards stripped the inmates, hooded them, and forced them to simulate sex acts. Today we act surprised.

Nevertheless, a few moral voices have broken through the babble. The Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman debated pro-torture celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz on "Nightline," and, in The Guardian compared our dilemma to that of the saintly younger brother Aloysha debating his atheist brother Ivan in The Brothers Karamozov. Torture, says Ivan, is the price paid by the few to grant happiness to the many.

"No," replies Alyosha, "I do not consent." It would require him to kill his imagination, to not feel the torture victim's pain, to accept responsibility for someone else torturing in his name.

Anthony Lewis, in The New York Times of May 7, ties the scandal in Iraq to the policies denying human and legal rights to the prisoners in Guantanamo. He reminds us of a bone-chilling statement that we all heard in Bush's State of the Union address but could not believe our ears: Bush said that more than 3,000 suspected terrorists "have been arrested in many countries, and many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem for the United States."

How so? Has the president of the United States become Tony Soprano bragging about a mass rubout?

By what authority? In whose name?

[Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth is professor of humanities at St. Peter's College. His e-mail address is .]