the Shackle Report

The only way most of us could rescue any sense of collective decency from the flood of muck sticking to America’s reputation these past few days was to give blankets to wet people. But no sooner did we give a soggy stranger our blanket, when another instance of national calumny came raining down on our head. Splat. Splat.

We’re bad, it appears. And not in a good way. To stay ahead of the tsunami of moral taint washing over our shores we’ve got to. . .

. . .run faster.

There’s the case of that American camera guy who’s being detained in Iraq for no apparant reason: Arianna feels that unless we write a letter to our Senators telling them things they ought to already know, we’re guilty of injustice, hypocrisy, coddling an unaccountable and secretive government, sanctioning habeus corpus and the shackling of reporters in Iraq. Hey, just smack us silly and get it over with.

Shame us@ The NYT is all too willing. In a thigh-slappingly honest article called 3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine, reporter Eric Schmidt reports

Three former members of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division say soldiers in their battalion in Iraq routinely beat and abused prisoners in 2003 and 2004 to help gather intelligence on the insurgency and to amuse themselves.

Ah, the fun factor is finally on the table: The entertainment value that torture has for our countrypersons hasn't really been given its fair shake in all this brouhaha over “rights” and “liberties.” What about the soldier’s right to have a little fun fucking people up? Boo-yah.

Lynndi P.Englund, that little Pfc. with a smile on her face and an Iraqi prisoner on her leash back at Abu Ghraib, went up for her court martial Wednesday the 21st, and boo hoo, her smile was all gone. Those photos lied, her lawyer said. She had no fun. She experienced no amusement. She was only humiliating the shit out of a bunch of prideful, religiously fanatical naked men, her lawyer said, because she had “an overly compliant personality” that “left her open to the suggestions of others.”

The question is, of course, how many others@

Schmidt’s article suggests that despite Cheney and Rumsfeld’s coy disclaimers, there were quite a few party-lovers pushing the torture option beyond the bounds of any defensible necessity — and there still are.

A Capt. Ian Fishback, along with two sargents who would prefer to remain attractively anonymous, confessed as much to Human Rights Watch this week (scooping, Amnesty International, despite their recently-launched Arrianna-ish letter-writing campaign telling torturers to just stop it! Now! It’s not right! As if. )

Reports the NY Times’s Schmidt:

One of the sergeants told Human Rights Watch that he had seen a soldier break open a chemical light stick and beat the detainees with it. “That made them glow in the dark, which was real funny, but it burned their eyes, and their skin was irritated real bad,” he said.

Oh yes. That glow. What freedom-loving democracy-spreading person doesn’t long to enlighten the skin of his adversary@

A second sergeant, identified as an infantry squad leader and interviewed twice in August by Human Rights Watch, said, “As far as abuse goes, I saw hard hitting.”

Hard-hitting, the way we like our reporting, eh, Eric? . But it’s the recreational hitting you’ve got to look out for. . .

Some soldiers beat prisoners to vent their frustrations, one sergeant said, recalling an instance when an off-duty cook showed up at the detention area and ordered a prisoner to grab a metal pole and bend over. “He told him to bend over and broke the guy’s leg with a mini-Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat.”

Baseball bats! Another great American icon put to good use by Rumsfeld’s high-minded troops. Jesus, God, if you’re up for as much humiliation and degradation as the savior was, this is your week, because, fellow sufferers, we are hanging with miscreants.

Even after the Abu Ghraib scandal became public, one of the sergeants said, the abuses continued. “We still did it, but we were careful,” he told the human rights group.

Careful. Amused. Casually sadistic, but innocent, because so very open to the suggestions of others. And who said America had a dark side to its fun side?

If you don’t like the portrait of our collective spirit emerging from these tales of inane cruelty, you can write a letter that no one will read. Then lie back and savor the exquisite pains of your political impotence.

As Massa-chismo says: “It’s SUPPOSED to hurt; it’s reality!”