The Rites of Pawn Sacrifice
Press Action
Monday, May 10, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/hand05102004/
In an attempt to calm the furor over the much-publicized incidents of torture at U.S.-controlled prisons in Iraq, government leaders in Washington have set a date for the sacrifice of one of the empire’s lowly pawns. Next week’s court martial of Jeremy Sivits, followed by the military trials of some of the other accused torturers, will assume top-billing in the Iraqi saga, even though the real star performers remain the rest of the U.S. military and its ancillaries who continue their plundering of a nation.
The court martial will take place at the Baghdad Convention Center, the perfect arena for an event designed to showcase the U.S. military’s noble belief in punishing its own when the world learns through vivid photographs that its ranks are disproportionately filled with sadists trained to follow orders. As U.S. colonial administrators orchestrate the spectacle of throwing Sivits to the lions, the Pentagon will seek to ensure that the soldier’s 130,000 colleagues occupying Iraq are not distracted from their mission to pacify the natives in order to create a stable American military and free-trade zone in the middle of an otherwise hostile region of the world.
As Justin Raimondo of AntiWar.com explained in a May 10, 2004 article, the U.S. government is “going after the smallest cogs in their own terror machine in the hope that attention and anger will be diverted away from the real perpetrators of these monstrous crimes.”
Chances are the torture scandal will remain front-page news for a few more weeks — through the first couple of court martial proceedings and initial round of congressional hearings — but then will fade from the media radar by mid-summer as more important events such as Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant’s legal troubles return to center court.
By this time, Congress and the U.S. press will have reached the conclusion that their oversight of Iraq’s prisons is no longer needed because Pentagon officials will have learned a valuable lesson from the Abu Ghraib episode. Never again will the military make the mistake of permitting its interrogators and hapless foot soldiers carry cameras and other visual recording devices as they perform their masters’ dirty work inside the empire’s torture chambers. -- Mark Hand