WASHINGTON — It is happening all over again. Media excess,
politicians’ bathos, exuberant piety — all are conspiring to
transform a serious matter into a launching pad for horse laughs.
Last week I tendered my judgment regarding the irregularities at
Abu Ghraib prison. Lifting a line from Senator Joe Lieberman, I
called them “immoral.” They are a breach in American military
standards that ought to be punished. The punishment has now begun
with the sentencing of Specialist Jeremy Sivits to the maximum
penalty of the law, one year in the hoosegow. Six more of his moron
accomplices are about to be meted out justice. Yet the press’s
frenzy continues.
American Nick Berg is filmed being beheaded by Islamofascists,
and the story fades to the back pages of the news. A roadside
weapon is found in Iraq containing the ingredients of a weapon of
mass destruction, and it is ephemera. Yet the story of Abu Ghraib
remains headline news. The politicians are shocked. Hearings are
scheduled. This must never happen again. The military and the pols
go into a mad rush to pass prison reforms insuring that, indeed, it
will never happen again. The burlesque puts me in mind of the
journalistic and political excess of the 1970s, when certain
irregularities practiced by our intelligence services led to an
earlier mad rush to reform. The consequence was the hamstringing of
intelligence that, after 9/11, has been widely lamented by American
elites. Still, no one has taken responsibility.
Truth be known, the elites of the 1970s caused the hobbling of
our intelligence services; and I have no doubt that overreaction to
the Abu Ghraib scandal will hamper intelligence gathering and
prison control in the future. Yet, for now, we have to sit back and
allow the blowhards to feel good about themselves.
I do wish, however, that they would stop lecturing us on the
sanctity of the Arab male body. I have no doubt that among the
Iraqi male population there are many goody-two shoes and possibly
many middle-aged virgins. However, at Abu Ghraib it seems you have
men more expert at roadside ambush, murder, and perhaps rape than
at chastity and good works. It was probably a mistake for our
military to send the horny boys and girls of the fabled 372nd
Military Police Company to that Iraqi hoosegow. They appear to be
lifetime subscribers to Hustler magazine. The reports that
the 372nd’s Sabrina, Lynndie, and Megan collaborated with their
four he-man associates to coerce the Iraqi prisoners to simulate
intercourse and to masturbate are repulsive. Yet I dissent from the
widely held notion that this sort of lasciviousness is all that
alien to the Arab male, especially the Arab male with a hankering
for violence.
MAY I REFER FELLOW skeptics to a first-person report on the
folkways and mores of Arab prisoners at Guantanamo written by Matt
Labash in early 2002? Writing in the Weekly Standard he
reported asking Marine jailers “if they’ve seen anything weird.”
The Marines, continues Labash, “laugh sheepishly, looking at each
other. Finally, Sgt. Josh Westbrook, who sports a forearm tattoo of
flaming baby heads, steps up. ‘They know they’re being watched,’ he
explains, ‘so they’ll stare at you, and while they stare at you,
they’ll, uh, masturbate.’”
The Marines believed that their Islamic fundamentalist
masturbators were particularly avid “to embarrass the female Army
guards.”
“The weirdness doesn’t end there,” reports Labash. “They’ve also
eaten their toiletries and urinated on equipment. ‘The other day,’
says Westbrook, ‘one of the guys tried to do a naked cartwheel.’ In
the most bizarre twist,” writes Labash, “Lance Corporal Devin
Klebaur says a few have also been known to ‘put toothpaste in their
ass.’”
It sounds to me as though we sent the 372nd to the wrong prison.
Yet perhaps we have here another news story that, like the news
story of Berg’s death and of sarin gas being discovered in Iraq, is
underreported. Women soldiers in Arab prisons bring unnecessary
difficulties. One of the reforms that ought to be contemplated
after the news of recent weeks is that women soldiers should be
kept out of men’s prisons. Another reform that might be
contemplated after the fate of women soldiers during the invasion
of Iraq is that women should be kept out of front-line combat. For
now we shall have to content ourselves with the prudish patter
about the Arab male body that rarely sees the light of day and
never knows the onanist’s pastime — unless a Weekly
Standard reporter is around.
