WAYBACK MACHINE: On the Subject of Abu Ghraib

This ASZ blog post was originally written on 5/27/04, and was selected by the author for the ASZ Wayback Machine project. All text is exactly as originally posted. Formatting has been updated to fit current Blogger templates, and in many cases, original links may no longer work.

'We have daughters, husbands. For god's sake don't tell anyone.'
Look! Over there! Rape Rooms

James Ridgeway at the Village Voice is keeping the "other half" of the human torture fad in view. In the rest of the US media we get to see leering young women (AKA female bad apples we are told) mugging for the camera. We don't hear much other than a whisper of the rape-torture of the women prisoners in Iraq. (Okay, a little, we read a little but not much.) I have a quiet hope that the systematic humiliation and torture of men AND women in Iraq will be part of what brings the Cabal ...ensconced in DC... down. Hope springs eternal.

An aside: Mike at What Really Happened asks the musical question (I paraphrase) : Where are all those '80s feminists' who made so much noise about rape now? And I say: Hey, Mike. Those 80s feminists were a pale shadow of what we were in the late 60s and 70s. The big bad backlash hit when Ronnie Raygun took office, and it was then that it became vogue to say: "I'm not a feminist, but..." Women hid their previous activism in droves. I have a partially begun manuscript on the great sell out, that began then, not just in feminist circles...

Now. Onward. Here is the Ridgeway link: Rape at Abu Ghraib

From the top: "Practically ignored in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal are the Iraqi female prisoners who have told their attorneys they were raped by U.S. soldiers. The Taguba report confirms that some women were indeed raped by American G.I.'s. There is one photo of an American soldier having sex with an Iraqi woman. And there is the by now infamous story of how American soldiers harnessed a 70-year-old woman and rode her around, calling her a donkey."

"No matter how cynical you get, it's impossible to keep up."
Lily Tomlin

Addendum: I'm remembering now reading that the Taguba report had 2000 pages omitted from what was submitted to the US Congress (Regress). Might the rape of Iraqi women be among those pages?

Note from Kate: I thought this May 2004 post was important to "wayback" because Abu Graib has become one of those disappeared subjects for election 2004...