Nothing Is True, Everything is Permitted

We have to rely on the circumstantial, anecdotal evidence. We have no other choice. Aside from the circumstantial evidence, there's no Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Iraqi bandits decapitate an American captive live on worldwide satellite. American MP's commit bizarre acts of cruelty designed ostensibly to subjugate Iraqi prisoners-of-war. We know, because we saw the pictures. We have no reason at this point to suspect that we are being lied to by the world's media. In his film on the aftermath of the first Bush vs. Saddam shooting match, Lessons of Darkness, Werner Herzog documents extensive war-crimes committed by Iraqi troops against large numbers of men, women and children in Kuwait. We know, because we saw the pictures. We have no reason to suspect that Werner Herzog and the documentary's producers are deceiving us.

Tit for tat. So we are - if not so much being lied to - being bullshitted; by the accusers, by the accusee's, by the media circus, et al.

American jailors [possibly in the process of publishing the inaugral issue of new Middle-East edition of Bawdy A5-photocopy grub-'zine] humiliate their charges in an astounding display of finely-tuned depravity. Cue eruption of indignant outrage in the West. Cue anguished brow-beating across America.. "This couldn't happen" etc.

Heard the one about the New Zealand forces in the World War II? Conventional colloquy has it that the most brutal captors, the ones responsible for far more deaths of prisoners-of-wars than any other Allied group, often in a variety of brutish and callous means, were the Kiwi boys. Somewhere up next to the Japanese, supposedly, in their cruel and inhumane ways. But devotees of any religion - soldiers - are always steeped in the mythology of the sufferings of their martyrs. I suspect that Mohammed, in the holy wisdom of his writings, offers his disciples many exhortations on ways to counter the slings and arrows, possibly sticks'n'stones, possibly purty lacy knickers, of the infidel.

It's beside the point. Let's not pretend this is new, or that there's not actually a war being fought. This shit always goes on in the wings while two groups of people are rushing around trying to kill each other. The technology has improved a bit - who knows what delightful snaps Ghenghis Khan would have put up on his website if he had been armed with a digital camera.

If they's going to be fighting, let's let both sides get on with it - and if they're going to do it they might as well do it properly. 'To the victors the spoils' and all that, articles of the Geneva Convention relating to treatment of prisoners-of-war or no; mandate to be there in the first place or not. These liberal displays of liberal angst are boring, and a convenient distraction from the more pertinent point of whether the US and it's mates should be there at all.

And so let's also take bets on how long it will take for that little album of 8x10 colour glossies currently doing the rounds in the Washington old-boys clubs to be 'leaked' onto the web somehow.