July 07, 2007

By Seth Sandronsky

[The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American media By Lila Rajiva (New York, Monthly Review Press, 2005), 224 pp. Paper, $14.95.]

When the Iraq war began in 2003, Lila Rajiva quit her job teaching school. Based in Baltimore, the author tracked press coverage as a web activist and sent out anti-war petitions. In late April 2004, the U.S. TV news magazine “60 Minutes II” ran photos of naked Iraqi men, sexually disgraced, in detention at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Rajiva penned a series of web articles on publications such as Dissident Voice and Counterpunch. They considered the absence of imprisoned Iraqi women in the torture photos, and how the media had covered – and covered up – Abu Ghraib and other reports of torture in the war on terror since the attacks of September 11 generally. Web journalism surfaced as a popular press during the lively 1999 street protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization.

In The Language of Empire, Rajiva studies the factors and forces behind Iraqi detainees’ torture, shining a light on corporate journalism and its role as a service provider to the second Bush administration, which claimed, falsely and in violation of international law, that the U.S. had to go to war with Iraq, on the grounds of its involvement in the September 11 attacks and possession of weapons of mass destruction.

With a keen eye, Rajiva clarifies and demystifies the official narrative of the U.S. forces (including private contractors), to show how, corporeally, psychologically and sexually, they tortured Iraqi detainees. For the record, a partial list of such torture included asphyxiation, actual and simulated drowning and execution, rape and sodomy, prolonged incarceration in putrid, tiny metal cages in extreme weather and desecration of the Qur’an. She begins by analyzing circumstantial evidence from the scandal at Abu Ghraib, where Iraqis had also been tortured during the regime of Saddam Hussein. And she casts a critical eye on U.S. civilian and military policy-makers, broadly defined as the neo-conservative faction in the second Bush administration. Questions of what they knew and when they knew it remain unanswered, as the US occupation of Iraq officially ended in June 2004.

One of the convicted, photographed torturers of racially brutalized Iraqis at Abu Ghraib was Charles Graner, a former prison guard in Pennsylvania’s maximum-security penitentiary where black author and journalist Mumia Abu Jamal has also been held for years on death row. Crucially, Rajiva untangles the class-based media attacks on Graner as a kind of rogue redneck, cast as the proverbial bad apple in an otherwise pristine barrel and sentenced to eight years for his crimes. This framing of the scandal, according to Rajiva, had the partial effect of absolving U.S. policy-makers of legal and moral accountability – though one high-level official involved in authorizing the torture of Iraqi detainees was Michael Chertoff, head of the criminal division of the U.S. Justice Department. He was later promoted to head of Homeland Security…..

[First published in Race & Class in January 2007]

More here at Znet.

My Comment:

Seth Sandronksy, hat tip to him, was one of the first and very few journalists (besides Jeff St. Clair, Alexander Cockburn, Ward Churchill, and Vijay Prashad) to take notice of the book in 2005, when it came out. I wrote about how the torture fit into the general scheme of things – the first to do so, I believe. I don’t recall any other magazine even deigning to give the book a review. Seth was so kind as to write this in 2007 when he noticed the lack of reviews.

Another friend, Suhayl Saadi, the gifted Pakistani-born Scottish novelist (whose novel Psychoraag is reckoned one of the 100 top Scottish novels) , attempted to get a review in the UK, but there were no takers because – this was the reason they gave — the book was not stocked on regular book shelves. But it was available and selling quite reasonably even without reviewer notice, on Amazon. In fact. it was at the top of the political best sellers in a couple of countries abroad. And nearly 300 universities in the US and abroad have it on their shelves, including Princeton, Yale Law School, Harvard, Columbia, Heidelberg, Monash, and many others. (See WorldCat for a list that is almost, but not quite, complete) and it has been on the reading list of St. Andrew’s University and Amherst in political science undergraduate courses. So you have a book which is:

1. The first book about the media coverage of the torture scandal

2. The first book to state that the absence of the women in the photos was deliberate and critical
3. The first to analyze the hearings and document the discrepancies in the testimony of Rumsfeld and Cambone

4. The first to address the use of the Nick Berg beheading in covering up the scandal (the first book dealing with Berg, as well)

A book

5. Published almost TWO years before the recent (March 2007) Taguba inteview, which reveals that the women’s photos are in fact out there

6. Written and previewed THREE years before it (see my article in Counterpunch on Christian Zionism, excerpted from the last chapter book in January 2005 when I completed and submitted the manuscript).

Now we have the confirmation from Taguba that, yes, there are hundreds of photos, including many pictures of rapes of women and worse. as Iraqi reports have claimed all along.

7. Published by a well known socialist press

8. Written quite accessibly, but in a measured way. I tried to keep it thoughtful rather than sensational to minimize the offensiveness, since I am a non-native. Nor is it arcane, although it is pretty analytical.

9. I write regularly for websites, work with a well known financial writer, and have been interviewed on dozens of progressive radio stations; I graduated from a respected international relations department, am a Christian, not a Muslim, and a 15 year immigrant There is nothing in that resume or background that would suggest any ulterior motive.

And everything I state in the book is sourced and carefully researched.

The book was also

8. Blurbed by some well-known names.

9. Submitted to dozens of progressive outlets and writers to review.

And besides a few activists and smaller magazines, not one of them wrote a review. Good or bad.
Nothing really unusual there. I am just pointing out to people how these things work.

So why the sudden printing of this piece? Maybe, the Taguba interview with Hersh earlier this year and sounds from establishment figures threatening more revelations (the CIA disclosures might be one rumble); maybe, some other establishment pundits now turning up the heat – prompted this. Who knows?

Notice how all of these things happen in tandem — the alarm goes off and mainstream and fringe, government and critics, all rush out of their opposing corners of the field and get into a public scrimmage..

Actually, I should say that several people asked me to send the MS in, and then never reviewed it. Or even answered my email inquiries. That might just be standard DC treatment of small fry by big fry. Only now I find that couple of them have gone on to use some of the material in their own work without citing their source.

News these days is a commodity — of which there is only so much in circulation. Too much can send down prices… The establishment would not be able to make their own roles in the business central and keep the thread of the story firmly in their hands.

So that, friends, is how kinder, gentler censorship works. No gulags for writers here. Only tenure denials and years of low-paid untenured work (ala Norman Finkelstein), or isolation and the intellectual cold shoulder (Chomsky, until he got too famous to be ignored), or aspersions of antisemitism.

So what is my theory about all of this?

A combination of several things.

(And here I am not talking about the commercial issue – the fact that it’s really hard to get anything published at all, let alone sell it or review it.

Or that authors are pretty much on their own with publicity…

Putting that aside – it boils down to this:
I am not the right person to say what I said. And I am not saying it in the only way it would be acceptable.

For one thing, because I wasn’t born in this country.

Fair enough.

Atrocity stories – especially dealing with intelligence – are delicate ones to negotiate, even for natives. In some countries, you would be hauled off to jail or shot, I’m sure, for venturing into that territory. But those are dictatorships or outright police states, like North Korea. I hope that that’s not now the standard for constitutional republics.

That is why I didn’t try to write an investigative book. I doubt if anyone would have told me anything news worthy, or if they had, it would have been vetted so much it wouldn’t have been any use.

I wrote an analysis instead that might have some merit even when the mainstream investigative reports came out. One that wouldn’t become dated.

Meanwhile, Anglophone journalists who know NOTHING about the history of a country, don’t speak its language, have never lived in it for any length of time, or know its conventions, get to go in with camera crews to depict anything that goes on there, analyze sensitive events of all kinds, in any way they want, with the whole force of network TV behind them and with US laws and armed forces to back up any thing they do ,if necessary.

Night after night, they can pound those images onto screens all over the world. However wrong their stories are. And the same goes for Anglophone scholars. They can hold forth on just about anything, and no one questions any of it.

[ I don’t deny that people are probably doing that in other languages too. But the difference is, those countries aren’t hyperpowers with nuclear weapons].

No matter how contrary to what’s in front of their eyes, people bow and scrape and suck it all in. Not just here, but abroad. No one holds a gun to anyone’s head to make them do it either. But they all still fall in line. Even people who know what’s going on. Why?

It’s not that people are silenced — it’s that they only speak in turn. They moderate their views and tune them to the orchestra. Why? Because funding depends on it. It doesn’t negate the good they do. It doesn’t mean they aren’t well-meaning, thoughtful, sincere people who know what’s going on. But it means they have to toe a line that they didn’t get to draw. They could lose their jobs, otherwise. They speak — but they are also spoken through.

Which is why, it’s the citizens – the ordinary folks on the ground – who have to take up the burden of truth in any society.

I’m the wrong person as well, because I am unaffiliated. I don’t write my stories for any reason except they seem important to me.

Sure, I have a boss. But I don’t subscribe to everything he thinks or says and he is nice enough not to make me. No fear of university boards or tenure committees. And while we differ on many economic and financial issues, I’ve actually found him to be a fair-minded and courageous person, given his circumstances. And his antiwar stance is more humane and scrupulous than many more close to my way of thinking.

On the left, businessmen are all supposed to be war-mongering hypocrites. That is a myth. As much a myth that intellectuals are only concerned about the public good rather than about their own careers and vanity.

I’d rather side with people of principle, even if I disagree with half of what they say, than with unscrupulous people who might be in full and complete agreement with everything I say. If we stopped listening only to what we want to hear and responded instead to the quality of person we were dealing with, we would hear things and learn things we did not know. Otherwise, we become prisoners of our own logic and victims of our own limitations. Wisdom comes often against either our logic, or our will, or even — at any given moment – our conscience. For, dormant parts of our own being are awakened by contact with what is alive in others…

On some social issues I think I’m quite close to progressive positions. But for the rest, I believe in free enterprise; it’s just that I don’t think you have much of that going on now. That far I agree with a lot of the Marxist diagnosis. But not much of the prognosis.

I always reside quite gingerly wherever I am, since I don’t subscribe to more than half the dogmas that can be found on any given site — and even then I take them – as I take most theories – with a grain of salt.

You don’t get to pick who publishes you always, or why. And I have to respect the people who do, however different their views.

I see no reason to hug in a global kumbaya before we stop slaughtering each other. We can keep a healthy space from each other and still survive.We only need to do our own thinking for ourselves…