June 2004

• Making sense of the Iraqi prisoner abuse! - by Ben Blankenship
  
  The Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal, and our revulsion over seeing the pictures, will take time to subside, and appropriately so.
  
  But subside it will. For we well know that the revealed bizarre behavior cannot be tolerated. Our good works will far outweigh the bad. Although more difficult now, U.S goals for Iraq will succeed. They must, and hopefully not long after the guilty parties and their military commanders are punished sufficiently.
  
  Certainly the abuses were sensational, but sophomoric. What could have given rise to them, if not directed or encouraged for intelligence-gathering reasons, or as a renegade retaliation for the insurgents' own vile murdering of our people they captured?
  
  Indications may be found in some parts of our own culture that we'd rather not think about:
  
  --The thriving pornographic film industry, and virtual smut on cable TV,
  --The commonly acknowledged practice of homosexual rape in our own prisons,
  --Humiliating hazing rituals in high school and college social clubs,
  --Virtual public nudity and widespread sexual misbehavior at strip clubs, rock concerts, and auto race tracks.
  
  Close to home, we wish we could forget (don't we?) that a former Harbour resident once ran a dominatrix sex dungeon here commercially, as described in an Internet Website ad. At the time of disclosure, we snickered. Maybe we should have been outraged.
  
  Back to our war on terror, the numerous negatives surrounding the Iraqi prisoner mess may have had one positive effect, that of instilling greater fear in our enemies of getting caught. And for all we know, the abuses may have yielded intelligence that has gone on to save many American lives.
  
  Regardless, in a larger societal sense, we need to look again at the things many Americans have come to tolerate in our own communities to assure that those prison abuse incidents don't become a foretaste of more serious national shame and dishonor in the future.