Read it and Weep

Sy Hersh blows the cover - all of it - off the real story behind Abu Ghraib. And it's about as bad as I had expected - maybe even a little worse.

I'll let you discover the grisly details for yourself. But the thematic essence - the back story to the back story - is right here:

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq.

One book that was frequently cited was \ufffdThe Arab Mind,\ufffd a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996.

The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. \ufffdThe segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,\ufffd Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, \ufffdor any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.\ufffd

The Patai book, an academic told me, was \ufffdthe bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.\ufffd In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged\ufffd\ufffdone, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.\ufffd

We're truly through the looking glass now, and while Sy quotes several intelligence sources who think - and fear - that the scandal will eventually result in a Church Commission-like investigation into the seamy side of the war against terror, I myself doubt it. As nation, as a degenerate republic morphing into empire, I think we're beyond that sort of exercise now.

It will be interesting, though, to see how the system contains and buries the scandal.