Viraj's Weblog

I attended a talk by Seymour Hersh tonight at Stanford and it was very good, but also very depressing. He is a Pulitzer winner who reported on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and its coverup, and then did much of the reporting on Abu Ghraib. He was given firsthand pictures and videos of what went on in the prison by soldiers who came back from Iraq, many of which the news media he worked for refused to print. He described the video of one of the pictures that was released, where an Iraqi was naked with his hands behind his head outside of his cell, blindfolded, and a dog barking. He goes on to say that during the video the man was refused to cover his genitalia, and the dog ordered to bite him there. There was blood everywhere the whole thing was on video.

He described that the things that we have been shown don't even begin to give a glimpse of what truly happened, that we have not even "begun to see the evil" of what went on there and still goes on in secret prisons. He described women being raped, and small children (boys) being sodomized by Iraqi guards on video. These are the things that the American media hides. He said that many women in prison send out letters to their families to kill them once they get out, because the shame is too great. It could even be simply fondling by the guards or seeing them naked. Their culture is just so different. Our American culture clashes so much with what Iraqi culture holds sacred, and this is why alot of the prison torture has to do with sexuality and humiliation.

Alot of what he said brought tears to my eyes because I just couldn't bear some of it. How can anyone do these things to other human beings? One thing he mentioned is that what's coming out now is many American soldiers are coming back mentally ill, schizophrenic, or severely depressed. I think it is natural to be affected if you are forced to treat other people in such demeaning ways. Hell, that even gives some hope that these soldiers deeply feel they've done wrong.

I don't understand the goal. It's like we as people crave violence. My mom used to say the bad things you do become part of your karma and you will have to repay the debt eventually, perhaps even in another lifetime. Hersh was saying that the Iraqis have no trouble postponing revenge until many, many generations later. When I think about these things, it's only common sense that this will come back to us. They won't simply be forgotten. And when it happens, can we really blame them? Imagine if these things were done to Americans instead, how would America react?

I feel very bad that no one was there to stand up for the people being tortured. It's like when someone describes it I imagine I'm there in the cell with them, and guilty for not stopping it. They are people just like you and me, not animals. I think that until we can see all other human beings as if they were our own family, we'll always have violence. Evolution basically says we are all one family descended from a common ancestor, so it's not even religion that should bring people together. I wish that people could move beyond all of this and learn to live without violence someday.