Hi Joe,
I am going to tell you my story, but I am going to do so in context of one of your essays -- the one on Lynndie England, "The Girl with the Leash". I grew up in Cumberland, Maryland, home of the Military Police unit at Abu Ghraib. My first job 30 years ago was as a civilian clerk at the Air Force recruiter signing up our young men and women.
Going in the Armed Forces was a way for the boys to have a safe transition from childhood to adulthood all under the watchful eyes of their sergeant. The military was very much seen as in loco parentis -- the father figure -- stern but, someone who still watched out for you. A way to get out and see the world. A way to better yourself, if not college, at least, getting a trade under your belt -- worth something back in the days when this country actually made stuff. I don't know what transferable skill the military is gonna teach now that the big employer is Wal-Mart. Somehow, friendly greeting and marksmanship don't have a ready connection.
Yup, I know some of the low down mean behavior that you write about -- girls like Lynndie England are very familiar to me. But there's a basic level of decency and true moral values that our young men and women grew up with. There's a kindness and general concern with each others that's often lacking in the cities. A man's word is his bond. This coexists with the tough, slutty, low down trash. We call these folks "iggernent" (do you have this word in Winchester?) -- people who just don't know what common decency is.
Soldiers from Cumberland are no stranger to Muslims. During the Bosnian War, we took in a number of folks from that war-torn region to be fitted with prosthetics at our hospital. Our local Red Cross visited these folks, gave them gifts and help them keep in contact with their families and worked through channels with other hospitals in Bosnia. That MP unit was deployed to Bosnia at a town that was the focal point of ethnic cleansing. So our boys know what horrible and perverted sexual torments the two sides inflicted on each other. Their job was to stop it. The MP unit's particular job in Bosnia was manning checkpoints and searching people as they crossed. They managed to do this without offending men or women. In fact, if you look in one of the military magazines that covered the unit, there are quotes stating how important showing respect to the civilians was and that included respect for Muslims. The MPs deployed to Baghdad six months after their tour in Bosnia.
The largest employer in Cumberland is the state prison. Many of the MPs worked at the state prison. They knew how to run a jail decently.
There is no excuse for what happened. What I think happened is this: Someone told them to treat the prisoners harshly because it would "Save American Lives". So some of the troops believed what they were told. They were protecting the rest of us. This administration preyed on the patriotism of our young people and made them forget who they were and what they stood for.
Although it cannot compare with the pain and suffering of the Iraqis who were tortured and their families, what happened at Abu Ghraib impacts my home town. These boys and girls are coming home some day and will be someone's son/daughter, mother/father, husband/wife. What kind of people do you think they have turned into? Can you really go from doing all these horrible things and then be a normal member of society? I don't think so. The rates of mental illness, family breakdown, abuse, alcoholism and drug addiction will go up. Unfortunately, it is not just the ex-soldiers who will suffer, but their families, friends, coworkers and employers. The problems of the nearest and dearest of these soldiers will spill onto other innocents as well. There is a certain percentage of Cumberland that is closing ranks around our soldiers excusing their actions. Where evil is not acknowledged and truths are not spoken or rationalized, there evil will continue.
This cycle of evil will spiral and will touch more and more people as the evil of Abu Ghraib spreads through my home town.
Given the cuts in spending by the Veterans Administration, there will be no one to pick up the pieces. This is not a wealthy area so a lot of the working people have no health insurance. We just dont have the resources to deal with the fall out from Abu Ghraib.
Let me change the subject slightly. I've had a very unusual life. My mother was very determined that I get a good education, so she got me out of Cumberland and sent me to Andover and then I went to Penn. I know darned well your quote about Ft. Ashby High School -- they were our competition in football and basketball. These high schools are truly the "places where the academic bar is set so damned low it is buried in the ground in hopes that any student who bothers to even attend school will meander across it." I lost a year of education when we moved down there from New England. What the hell happens down here that sucks the brains out of folks?
At Andover, American history is a required course everyone had to take. They did and still do a wonderful job giving everyone an in-depth study of our nation's history. We had to read the most important passages of the Consitution, the Bill of Rights, every major bill, court decision, treat, and government order. This class was taught on the college level and is an excellent preparation for Havard Law School. My senior thesis was on the consitutionality of the death penalty. One of the arguments against the death penalty was that it was "cruel and unusual" and thus forbidden by the Bill of Rights. The author of some of the seminal legal arguments in that case was Allan Dershowitz.
My next-door-neighbor's boyfriend was Jonathan Alter, who is now one of the major correspondents in our country. He worked on the school newspaper shortly after Watergate. We were all concerned with the values of the free investigatory press.
I remember shortly after 9/11 that suddenly there seemed to be an upsurge in some rather titillating debates about torture. Various talking heads were dancing around some of the fine points of the law. I thought some of this chatter was titillation pumped by the media to boost their ratings. But then, I thought maybe not. Maybe someone was trying to get us ready to accept torture as an acceptable technique. How could people like Alter and Dershowitz who had every advantage this society can offer stoop so low as to participate in this kind of charade? Or is it just the lure of money?
These gentlemen know the power of the press. As seasoned professionals, they must have had some inkling that they were part of a PR campaign. Why couldn't they have had the common decency of a simple soldier who saw all this behavior for what it was: perverse, bizarre, and contrary to every moral value that his parents, church and society held dear? Neither of them has apologized for their role in preparing us to accept torture.
Finally, my first boyfriend in college. The guy I almost married. After 20 years, he found me. Three weeks before I was to get married. He was a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and had retired from the Corps. Spent a couple years as a stock broker and did some consulting for the military on small arms. He told me he was going to Baghdad as an assistant program officer for Blackwater, the security company. I just didn't know what to say. I told him it wasn't a good company and he shouldn't go. Blackwater has hired ex-military from Chile, South Africa, Israel, and a number of other countries. It is under investigation in Chile because it seems that the Chilean government does not want some of the men who were involved in Pinochet's torture and murders to become highly paid "security contractors". The South African military doesn't have such a good repuation either.
My question about their men who were killed in Fallujah, is "Did they provoke such a terrible response?" I don't know, but I do know that we wasted a city because a few men were shot. We killed a lot of folks. We moved 300,000 people out of that city and put them in tents where many of them still are today.
As for my friend, I don't know. I got a photo in the email of him standing in civilian clothes with a rifle guarding something. He says he was guarding State Department people. Is that true, or is it a cover story? He said, he wants to "Save American Lives". I don't know, and I guess I never will. I have not spoken to him since he left. I don't know what to say to him. I have a huge hole inside of me that cannot be mended, and a doubt that can not be eased. He holds a secret clearance that Blackwater carries after he ended his military career and so whatever information whoever is contracting Blackwater deems classified will remain unsaid. So, I suppose that I will never know.
I never worried about him losing his life. I just prayed he wasn't losing his soul. If he's alive, I don't know that I will speak to him again because I have no idea what I can say to him. Do you have any ideas?
Yet another turn in my meandering thoughts. I wonder how much of these insights come because we have noodled in and out of the layers of American society. I wrote a letter to Dr. McCray who wrote the book "A Question of Torture" and we've traded some thoughts. Like you and me, his family has folks who have not always navigated the class currents of American society. The argument of his book resonates with some of my thoughts. He argues that the events at Abu Ghraib were most definitely not the work of soldiers whom William Safire called "creeps" and another called "recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland." McCray's view is that these soldiers were acting on orders that started in the White House and worked their way down the chain of command. Moreover, if one reads those prison photos carefully one can readily discern signs, not of individual deviance, but of the perfection of the CIA's psychological torture paradigm which was developed in the 1950s and propagated widely within the US intelligence community in the decades since.
McCray's view of Jonathan Alter is that he is also one of the liberal commentators who fostered a climate conducive to systematic torture by this administration since 9/11. This view is part of a larger argument that McCray makes is that the torture issue is deeply imbedded in this society, making what happened at Abu Ghraib and what is happening at Guantanamo even today much more than the work of a few aberrant soldiers or even an entire administration.
I think that the two of you should talk. He's an academic and you have the best finger on the pulse of rural America that I have read. I think the meanness that you document comes from this culture and this meanness somehow explodes. Now I know you have written what some might read as an exculpation of Lynndie England. I'm not sure you will exculpate Bush and Cheney -- that might be the wrong verb beginning with "e" -- maybe exorcise is a better choice. I'm not sure what the answer is, but maybe it has something to do with firecrackers up a frog's butt, lack of education and the lack of desire to be educated, the meanness of the Southern patriarchy (always willing to stomp on someone lower down the totem pole), distorting the ties to the land that define patriotism, the perversion of heroism that makes "saving American lives" into a justification for perversion and the degradation of women in Southern culture. Something that makes people forget about their basic human decency. Some unholy mass that congeals and turns into a Bush. (A mixed metaphor, I know).
Class and access to justice is a very important factor in all of this. Lynndie England would not be our poster girl if she had a better lawyer. She'd have copped a plea and managed to rat out some of her fellow soldiers. Johnnie Walker Lindh managed to get off -- his dad was an attorney at the Department of Justice. Lawyered up and started to rat on the torture at Gitmo. The folks running the place couldn't have that one get out. So they plea bargained and swore Johnnie to secrecy. Just shows you what pickin' a good daddie can do for you. Just ask George W.
I have worked in the financial district in New Jersey and New York City. At times of high alert, we are infested with cops, firetrucks and ambulances. Most of us up here are opposed to the war. Yet, we are the prime targets. We don't want our lives saved like this. Other people are taking actions to "Save American Lives" like mine, but in ways I can't condone. Why won't the rest of America listen to us? No one is going to hit Cumberland, Maryland. Osama does love NYC and he tends to come back and finish the job no matter how long it takes. Maybe it would be good to give my life in defense of our values: that we don't torture, that we hold true to certain lodestones that were taught to me in American history. Maybe some things are worth dying for. Maybe the front lines are not in Baghdad, but rather they are here in this country.
Regards,
Carol
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Carol:
As happens so many times when I read the letters, I am left speechless and with much to think about. Your powers of observation are staggering. I will definitely get Dr. McCray's book and think some more on the issue of cruelty. My next essay is approximately about that.
Thanks you so much for sharing your eloquence with me and the visitors to my humble corner of cyberspace.
In friendship,
Joe Bageant
