A lot has been said about the prisoner abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib and the impact of the war crimes apparently committed by American soldiers. As I've written before, the abuses disgusted me, but they didn't totally surprise me. To be surprised is to think that you can put American soldiers in unreasonable situations for long periods of time and expect that they won't crack under the extreme stress. To be surprised is to think that all American soldiers are superhumans immune to the laws of nature.
Maybe this is the danger of mass canonization of the troops: it makes us expect that they are all Superman and there is public shock when this is shown to be untrue. We must remember that soldiers are involved in war, not ballet performances.
But there's one thing that really did shock me. And it demonstrates how absolute power really does corrupt absolutely. What shocks me is not the abuses, which are disgusting enough, but all the photos and videos that soldiers took of the abuses. They took the photos because of a massive power trip. They either thought they'd never get caught or truly believed what they were doing was justified, because they were torturing defenders of the Axis of Evil. The Iraqi soldiers weren't with us so they must have been against us and so anything went.
What really got to me was the poses in some of the photos. They weren't merely content to take photos of the tortured prisoners. Soldiers in many of the photos had shit-eating grins on their faces and were posing next to tortured, humiliated prisoners in the same way a smiling family might pose next to the Grand Canyon. To them, it looked like the same kind of fun another person might have on a summer vacation trip.
Some contend that the torture was "necessary" to extract relevant information. But the joyful sadism exhibited by soldiers in those photos makes you seriously wonder if the torture was nothing more than perverse entertainment for bored, stressed out troops.
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