Spectacular Cruelty. posted by Richard Seymour

The image of the enemy is that of dirt in its most repulsive forms; the unclean jungle is his natural habitat, disembowelment and beheading are his natural ways of action. Consequently, the burning of his refuge, defoliation, and the poisoning of his foodstuff are not only strategic but also moral operations: removing of contagious dirt, clearing the way for the order of political hygiene and righteousness. And the mass purging of the good conscience from all rational inhibitions leads to the atrophy of the last rebellion of sanity against the madhouse: no satire, no ridicule attends the moralists who organize and defend the crime. Thus one of them can, without becoming a laughingstock, publicly praise as the "greatest performance in our nation's history," the indeed historical achievement of the richest, most powerful, and most advanced country of the world unleashing the destructive force of its technical superiority on one of the poorest, weakest, and most helpless countries of the world.

The equivalency is given in this way: instead of an advantage making up directly for the harm (hence, instead of compensation in gold, land, possessions of some sort or another), the creditor is given a kind of pleasure as repayment and compensation—the pleasure of being allowed to discharge his power on a powerless person without having to think about it, the delight in "de fair le mal pour le plaisir de le faire" [doing wrong for the pleasure of doing it], the enjoyment of violation. This enjoyment is more highly prized the lower and baser the debtor stands in the social order, and it can easily seem to the creditor a delicious mouthful, even a foretaste of a higher rank. By means of the "punishment" of the debtor, the creditor participates in a right belonging to the masters. Finally he himself for once comes to the lofty feeling of despising a being as someone "below himself," as someone he is entitled to mistreat—or at least, in the event that the real force of punishment, of inflicting punishment, has already been transferred to the "authorities," the feeling of seeing the debtor despised and mistreated. The compensation thus consist of a permission for and right to cruelty.

Previously unpublished images of abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were screened on SBS television's Dateline program. The footage shows still and video images of the wounds it says were inflicted on the Iraqis by their American captors. SBS alleges that the photos were taken at the same time as those of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners inside Abu Ghraib, which sparked international outrage after they were leaked in 2004.

While some of the photographs are similar to the images made public two years ago, the latest photographs apparently reveal further abuse including new incidents of killing, torture and sexual humiliation. The program reports that some prisoners at Abu Ghraib were killed when U.S. soldiers ran out of rubber bullets trying to quell a riot at the jail and resorted to using live rounds.

On the tape, the youths' pleas for mercy are ignored. The beatings include what appears to be a British soldier kicking one of the youths, shown pinned to the ground by other soldiers, in the genitals.

In another case, a soldier puts a boy in a headlock, then releases him only to butt his head against the boy's, then strike his fist on the boy's head.

The youth's cries can be heard on the tape, which shows a minute's worth of the attack -- with 42 blows counted, according to the newspaper.

The tape includes what sounds like a running commentary of approval from the cameraman. "Oh yes! Oh yes! You're gonna get it. Yes, naughty little boys!" the narrator can be heard saying as the blows land. "Die! Ha, ha!"

When the oppressed, the downtrodden, the conquered say to each other, with the vengeful cunning of the powerless, "Let us be different from evil people, namely, good! And that man is good who does not overpower, who hurts no one, who does not attack, who does not retaliate, who hands revenge over to God, who keeps himself hidden, as we do, who avoids all evil and demands little from life in general—like us, the patient, humble, and upright"—what that amounts to, coolly expressed and without bias, is essentially nothing more than "We weak people are merely weak. It's good if we do nothing, because we are not strong enough."