Faces of Innocents

What is left to say? The smiling girl holding the leash, the naked man on the concrete floor with the collar around his neck. This is the face of War. You thought it was just clean videos of vehicles blowing up and no one visibly hurt, like on the A-Team?

You think torture is an aberration in War? I have spoken to those who know about this in my travels: The plain truth is that things get very surreal (not their word) in a war zone. On the sidewalk outside the prison a man with a gun in his hand is fair game. More than that: So are you. He is a threat to be removed as summarily as possible by any soldier. And maybe just this morning he killed or tortured one of your own, too. In the prison you have to treat him like he was cherished. No hurting, no yelling, better food and clothing than you and yours will be getting, somewhere out on the line.

Surreal is something you say to the other café philosophers to describe how conflicted you are feeling from the cognitive dissonance of having to earn money to pay for the wine, sitting there at the Deux Maggots. Paranoid schizophrenic break with normal reality is more like what a War is about.

For those who’ve really been there, plainer words, if any. Sometimes a funny look as they remember . A guy blown into vapor an instant after he was there next to you saying something. Physically real, nothing theoretical or abstract. No way to make sense of it, either, ever.

The army, after doing careful studies, determined that in our Civil War, only about 25 percent of the troops in battle actually pulled the trigger. The rest just tried to survive. This led the modern theoreticians of war to develop training regimens that would overcome the woeful lack of interest the 75 percent had in trying to kill.

They have been quite successful. The modern U.S. Army has a firing rate in combat of about 70 percent.

To look at the smiling American faces in the photographs, you would think it was just some fraternity prank. A hazing. OK, a hazing that had gotten a little weird and out of hand.

Problem is, dozens have died in the process of being interrogated at American hands and that is causing me to feel somewhat “surreal” about the smiling faces in the photos. The guards’ expressions suggest they think they are doing nothing wrong. How could they think that?

How could they? Well, did they? All I see is some demeaning and degrading tableaux vivants when I look at the photos. They all look posed, at least the ones I’ve seen. And maybe they were.

The guileless look on those American guards’ faces makes me wonder, “For whom are they posing?” For their bosses, I wager, who, we’ve been told, were contractors, or maybe spooks. The guards’ smiling faces send them a clear message: “I’m glad to be part of the team! See what a good job I am doing! Please give me your approval!”

And, of course, the interrogators knew all along that they needed to get these troops to cross that line. As troops, they had already been trained to get beyond the fact that they were killing people. In the Baghdad prison, they were gently guided across that next line, where it is OK to degrade, even torture, those who are not fighting anymore.

I see that innocent naïveté in the Guards’ faces. They think they are in control of the prisoners, just like their friends, the interrogators. But they are not.

The interrogators are controlling them as much as the prisoners are under their control. In the madness hothouse of that intentionally isolated cellblock, away from other influences, the interrogators, trained professionals who’d been taken across that line by their bosses long ago, groom their naïve helpmates in torture.

Yes, torture. It’s one of the war things no one talks about. And considering how awful the stuff they show on TV and talk about day and night already is, do you really think, as the bosses of those interrogators would have us believe, that somehow this is the first “clean” war in history?

What sensible person would think that torture, rape … all the standard fare of Warfare… somehow won’t be trailing our army’s camp, like it has trailed all the others? ¶ 2:52 AM