UAE Unfettered

Tom Conover was a prison guard who became a writer. He offered his comments in the Gulf News on Sunday May 9th regarding the happenings at the Abu Gharib prison. He says it’s a heady thing to have prisoners at your mercy. He mentions his training in the areas of care, custody, and control of prisoners and that the training he received focussed primarily on the final element – control.

He says the true test of the prison guard, the system, and indeed the nation, is how you will treat those who are helpless before you. He compares the nakedness of POWs depicted at Abu Gharib to the atrocities suffered by POWs in WW2 – ie gassing to death because of ethnicity, dying slowly from starvation, or desease, painful torture of every kind, etc. To go along with the comparison you first must accept Mr. Conover’s attempted coercion that the shame of nakedness of the POWs at Abu Gharib is an atrocity equal in weight and form to the atrocities suffered by the POW’s spurring the writing of the Geneva convention.

I for one don’t accept Mr. Conover’s equivocation. Now I’m going to go off on a bit of a weird tangent just to show the ridiculousness of crying out against these supposed atrocities against the POWs at Abu gharib (Father of the Raven) prison, so bear with me if you will.

Allow me to coerce you for a moment into believing that Mr. Conover is exceedingly gay, engaging regularly in homosexual activities with multiple male partners. Imagine that he is not in the least ashamed of his gayness – what with the liberation the sexual revolution has imbued upon him – suppose too that he is a very vocal and active advocate of gay rights. Seems imminently plausible enough, in this day and age, right?

Would anyone left of enter, any liberal, any democrat these days call his vocal active gayness bent an atrocity? I think not. In reports I've read and pictures I've seen, nothing is mentioned or shown beyond the prisoners nakedness and having to endure being photographed in simulated sexual positions with each other and perhaps being sat upon by a marine guard while subdued between two medic stretchers - pretty normal state of affairs when you're dealing with the captured enemy, in any soldier's estimation.

My point is that when comparing a normal amount of pre-interrogation nakedness for the express purpose of humiliation toawards confession, and "abuse" endured by prisoners of war when compared to the shameless naked acts engaged in by gay men in America, we can see many more similarities than differences. So, at the same time prisoners face these "atrocities" the gay community in America unrelentingly demand legitimacy for very similar nakedness and abuses, through the voice of their extremely vocal advocates in western culture. This sort of behaviour is nothing out of the ordinary - for them.

In that world-view, the things the prisoners are forced to endure don’t seem so bad at all now do they? But of course, to go along with my hypothetical comparison of Mr. Conover to a gay rights activist you first must accept my attempted coercion of your belief that this is actually the case. Getting back to reality, I really don’t see the point of calling these activities atrocities. No, no, not because I’m gay and for some reason, can’t differentiate between what’s considered atrocious and what’s not, no.

My unwillingness to see these activities labelled as atrocities stems from an entirely different slant. That is, a comparative one. Is it really to be considered an atrocity (by a third party mind you) to have to endure nakedness and nude photography in the hands of your captors while at the same time your fellow (still free to terrorize) Iraqi ‘soldiers’ and Al Quaeda faithful are busy:

• Beheading defenceless civilians
• Mutilating the bodies of their freshly killed American POWs
• Shooting civilian hostages in the arm and letting the wound rot
• Buring and kicking apart the bodies of civilian citizens of USA, Canada, and Europe and hanging the body parts from the Fallujah mid-town bridge
• Plotting and carrying out the murder of five civilian expat oil company managers gunned down at a petrochemical plant in Yanbu, K.O.S.A.
• Tying one of the oil company manager’s bodies to a truck by its right leg and whipping through town yelling and screaming victory - a four man mini-anarchist army flaunting militant Islam and murderous Chinese made (Russian-designed of course! Rumor mongers -don't make me look foolish please oh please!) AK-47 automatic weapons. Then turning in to the local high school, body in tow, just after lunch and screaming GOD IS GREAT! GOD IS GREAT! LOOK THIS IS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (kick, kick, kick, the dead oil company manager tied to your truck) GET OUT OF YOUR EXAMS AND COME JOIN YOUR MUSLIM BROTHERS IN FALLUJAH! ATTAIN THE GREATEST RANK POSSIBLE FOR A MUSLIM BY JOINING US IN THIS GLORIOUS HOLY WAR!

Doh! Lost my train of thought - the atrocity of having to remove dog caca from the living room has just been thrust apon me by my lovely wife. Oh the dogmanity! Oh the dogmanity! The smell alone is atrocious enough to cause global warming. There that’s done.

You want to call the shame of POW nakedness and routine interrogation procedures of those not smart enough to get killed by their American enemy instead of caught by them an atrocity, Mr. Conover? What will you then come up with for a term describing the normal day to day terrorist goings on in a Middle East war zone? Light-hearted fun I suppose?

That would be funny if it weren't for the context. I propose a 'counter atrocity' that of surgically, sans anaesthetic, removing the testicles of the four nasty terrorist bastards who caused the meyhem at Yanbu, boiling them, then feeding the testicles as lunch to the castrated individuals to whom they used to belong. Now that’s an atrocity worth writing about, in my opinion.

On the question of atrocity, a level of necessary evil that does not yield an evil person might well be definable in this instance. Look at Private England. Given the context, a military prison, is her routine interrogation procedure called for by her bosses really that evil? On the other hand, is her laughing at the small penises of naked Iraqi captured terrorists necessary? Is her evil for being photographed laughing at detained terrorists - lets call them what they are - being given a bit of their own medicine necessary? Perhaps it very well IS necessary, Mr. Convenor, in the context of terrorism and a Middle East war zone.

Who’s to say? The media? No. Not the media. They are there to give accurate account. According to Al Jazeera, the following have died in Iraq doing so. According to Tom Conover, would these deaths be seen by him as atrocities produced by this war, I wonder?

• Terry Lloyd, 22 March 2003, ITV News correspondent; disappeared in southern Iraq and was declared dead a day later.
• Paul Moran, 22 March 2003, freelance Australian cameraman; killed when an apparent human bomber detonated a car at a military checkpoint in north-eastern Iraq.
• Kaveh Golestan, 2 April 2003, Iranian freelance cameraman on an assignment for the BBC; killed after stepping on a landmine in northern Iraq.
• Michael Kelly, 3 April 2003, US journalist and Washington Post columnist; killed while travelling with the US army's 3rd infantry division in Iraq.
• Julio Anguita Parrado, 7 April 2003, New York correspondent for El Mundo daily Spanish newspaper; killed in a missile attack while accompanying the US army's 3rd infantry division south of Baghdad.
• Christian Liebig, 7 April 2003, reporter of German weekly magazine, Focus; killed in a missile attack while accompanying the US army's 3rd infantry division south of Baghdad.
• Richard Wild, 5 July 2003, British freelance cameraman; gunned down in central Baghdad.
• Jeremy Little, 6 July 2003, Austrian journalist with NBC News and embedded with the US 3rd infantry division; died of post-operative complications, days after being injured in a grenade attack.
• Duraid Isa Muhammad, 27 January 2004, producer and translator for CNN; killed in an ambush carried out by unknown assailants outside Baghdad.

About levels of necessary evil, Lois McMaster Bujold, a raving maniac – I mean - an award winning Science Fiction and Fantasy author whose majority of stories are set in the future and concern the Vorkosigan family and the planet of Barrayar tells us:

Any community's arm of force - military, police, security - needs people in it who can do neccesary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity." "Barrayar", 1991

Even on fantasy planets, it appears the community’s arm of force has to deal with judging levels of necessary evil and considering how to avoid a slide into atrocity. I wonder if the Vorkosigan family or the other residents of Barrayar would deal with shifty definitions of atrocity created and shamlessly published by people who consider themselves expert commentators on a Middle East POW prison just because they used to be a prison guard for a while, in a New York jail, before they decided to write for a living.