Different perspective from the Irish Times - apologies for the length but it's a subscription site
We can guess the response in the US if the heaps of naked, captured Iraqis, their legs akimbo exposing their anuses and their genitals to jeering American soldiers, had been women; and we can be equally sure of the consequence if the abusers of these female captives had been men, writes Kevin Myers.
The outcry would have been deafening, and the US military would have been convulsed from top to bottom. The male commanding officer on whose watch these crimes occurred would have been sacked and sent home in irons, and the men responsible for the sexual abuse would have been court-martialled, with long terms in the brig awaiting them.
But of course, the victims were men, and their visible tormenters were mostly women, and so the story has largely vanished in the US. CBS news over the weekend never even referred to the sex of the abusers, most American newspapers didn't carry the photographs of the naked young men being sexually humiliated by American women, and the New York Times effectively buried the story on an inside page. Brig Gen Janis Karpinski, the senior officer at the Abu Ghraib prison, has been suspended "pending an investigation", and six soldiers responsible for the flagrant violations of the Geneva Convention have been merely reprimanded.
From which we might conclude that nothing very important happened. But something very important indeed happened. Arab males were photographed while being grossly sexually humiliated by American women. Sexual degradation of one sex by the other strikes at most people's vulnerability, in all cultures. But within Arab societies, with their universal reverence for personal modesty, cleanliness and bodily self-respect, for white Christian women to be leering and jeering at the exposed genitals and anuses of Muslim males is to violate profound social, cultural and personal taboos.
The US commanders should therefore have exposed the wrong-doers to the full rigour of the martial code, thereby sending out a signal to the Arab world that the invasion of Iraq was not an exercise in imperialism in which the strong would routinely humiliate the weak. Instead, the US military chose to do otherwise. It opted to maintain the morale of its forces by treating the offenders leniently. This is a disgrace. Worse, it is short-sighted folly: other soldiers have seen the price to be paid for violating prisoners, and it is not very high.
Many other issues arise from this. Women in armies can't fight - we know that. But they can apparently humiliate prisoners in the safety of a jail. Is that what the equality agenda is all about - that women soldiers get the safe billets in logistics, administration and prisoner-guarding, with the resultant opportunities for medals and promotion, while in the front-line men fight and die, and the US military maintains the fiction that it fully subscribes to the principles of sexual equality? Moreover, was it the sex of so many of the accused which prompted the inaction to date? The allegations about the soldiers under the command of Brig Gen Karpinksi first surfaced last January. Yet she was suspended only after Sixty Minutes broadcast edited versions of the pictures last week. She declares that the abuses occurred in a wing not under her control. Maybe so; but I'm sure that if the prison's commanding officer and the abusive guards had been male, and the victims female, by this time the White House would be in rubble.
There are other questions of course. Was Sixty Minutes even right to show the pictures, knowing they would be circulated endlessly by Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel, and subsequently exploited by al-Qaeda? Does the world have an absolute right to see such pictures and learn such truths in a time of war? Or are such freedoms an obsolete luxury when the media are on the right of the line in the new order of battle? Because whereas the pictures from Iraq would have appalled most viewers around the world, from a cave near Peshawar, there came a triumphant laugh, and the crack of a hand slapping a thigh.
And what about the direct effects of such pictures? Did the producers of Sixty Minutes give any consideration to the consequences for US and other captives in the hands of Iraqi insurgents and terrorists? Or are such concerns beneath their lofty, preppy contempt as, safe and sound in the US, they heroically uphold the freedom of the media? Meanwhile back in Iraq, blindfolded, manacled hostages wonder whether the metal click they just heard is the shutter on the door, or the Kalashnikov finally being cocked.
We in the media seldom discuss our duty - on occasion - to withhold certain material, yet it clearly exists. When An Garda SÃochána asks for a news blackout on a hostage situation, we normally oblige. How far should we practise self-censorship out of a regard for the lives of others when we have material which we know to be authentic, as the pictures from Abu Ghraib clearly are? And what if they are suspect, as the pictures of British soldiers allegedly urinating on Iraqis seem to be? It's not that I don't think British soldiers capable of such things. We know from the North, and from previous conflicts, that they are capable of much, much worse. It is almost irrelevant: doctored or authentic, should the Western media be providing propaganda photographs to a sworn and common enemy? In other words, had I been editor of Sixty Minutes, would I have broadcast those pictures from Abu Ghraib as they were? Answer: no.
