As your humble editor has avoided making any serious (or even semi-serious) comments about real-world events for a couple of weeks now, it may seem puzzling that -- long after the breaking of the story, the circulation of universal shock and horror, the revelations of the second and third layers of the scandal, news cycle upon news cycle -- now I'm actually going to go ahead and write about it.

As serious political thought probably isn't what you come here for (in the sense that there's no convoluted puzzle about the invention of shopping carts involved), I will try to respect the fact that I am at best trying the collective patience of my two or three readers. So, just a couple of thoughts, followed by a rundown of links that may prove useful to anyone not already tired of this subject.

Firstly: Is it just me, or is it beginning to dawn on folk in general that the recent display of horror at Abu Ghraib is deeply and essentially connected to the way this whole farce of a war/occupation/liberation has been run? In Seymour Hersch's latest , he quotes a "Pentagon official" going over some ideas that should be familiar to everyone with a television, if only by inference: the war planners have consistently, insistently opted to look only at sunny-side-up estimates of everything from troop strength to the amount of business Iraqi florists would do selling rose petals to teenage boys looking to welcome a Humvee.

This habit -- insist that the job can be done quickly and on the cheap if we just, y'know, get in there and do it -- looks to be a big part of what turned a bunch of reservists into torturers. First, there was the use of at least one discredited former corrections official in a key role. And then there was the dissemination of "interrogation techniques" to civilian contractors and barely-trained reservists. And -- maybe most tellingly -- there was the pressure to get intelligence. This strikes me as important even beyond the issues of missing safeguards, inadequately trained soldiers, confused command within the prison. Important even beyond the question of the false equivalences (between Iraqis and the Al Quaeda murderers) routinely offered to military personnel.

It's a simple fact: by fucking the occupation up so completely, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their staffs set the stage for the insurgency, our increasingly flailing response, and the predictable toxic results that happen to communities when panic sets in -- including the propensity to say "the gloves are off." By all means, let's see those directly responsible for the conditions that led to the -- for gods' sake, it's come to this -- SYSTEMATIC COMISSION OF WAR CRIMES BY AMERICAN TROOPS get court-martialed. Indeed, generals ought to pay the same as PFCs, and it looks like a lot of people agree. But let's not take our eyes off of the prime movers here. Even the welcome possibility of a Rumsfeld resignation looks to be beside the point: this atrocity is the fruit of this administration's feckless antics, and if the understanding of that doesn't spur a smacking defeat of the incumbent in November, whatever disgust the world chooses to express toward America and Americans will have been justified.

Secondly (yes, that was only point one)...

Sunday, Theresa and I watched Spike Lee's 2002 film of David Benioff's novel The 25th Hour, in which Edward Norton plays a convicted drug dealer about to head off to prison for a seven-year stretch. I don't really have much to say about the film here (although I enjoyed it). But one motif within the story seemed immediately resonant with what I had just spent the day reading and hearing about.

The film makes much of a perception about the world of U.S. prisons that has become a truism for anyone who watches television or movies: in the world of the prison, the weak are largely at the mercy of the strong and cruel. This includes the notion the guards and the system not only do little to protect human rights there, but that it's understood that this is part of one's punishment, whether one has been sentenced for selling drugs or robbing liquor stores or killing someone. Norton's character dreads going to serve his sentence -- not because he rejects the idea of punishment -- because he is frightened that he will be so brutalized there that he won't be able to survive. Indeed, the police who arrest him gleefully remind him of this, and he agonizes over what little he can do to mitigate his impending existence as a human punching bag and worse.

The film leaves open the question of whether such consequences are merely the harvest which Norton's character has sown. My interest is in the extent to which the film's story about what will happen to Norton is a familiar one -- a very familiar one. Now, I don't come to this armed with a set of facts about prison conditions (although casual reading suggests that the conditions Norton worries over do indeed exist in many U.S. prisons.) Nor am I suggesting that I know how much or little comfort and security ought to typify an imprisoned criminal's daily life.

My point is that our popular culture is literally saturated with references to the hell of prison life -- how many times a week do cops in cops shows slyly allude to what might happen to the uncooperative perp with the pretty face? How many films have you seen where an ex-con implies that he had to compromise his humanity in order to hold it together while serving his sentence? And I'm not even talking about that one on HBO that's about what happens when you throw together fifty Hannibal Lecters or whatever. In almost every case, the spectre of serial rape is either explicitly or implicitly what's at stake.

The prison -- as a kind of Hobbesian zoo, in which the war of all against all properly rages within, because, hey, what can you do about people like this? -- is part of our cultural mythology now, not as a place of reform or control, but merely as a sanctioned hell in which we see elements of torture -- rape, beating, humiliation -- as inevitably present components. We think of it as normal -- and indeed we hear about it an awful lot in our popular forms of entertainment. And at least one famous study suggested that we're all ready to play the part of the sadistic C.O.

Where do you think those grinning thumbs-up morons in the photos got their ideas about what to do with prisoners? Why do you think Americans stood by while Iraqi guards raped other prisoners? Part of it goes to the appalling conditions of the commands, part of it goes back up the chain to the "Vulcans." And part of it goes to all of us, to the way we consume fevered dreams of prisons and prisoners. Maybe the script that was followed in Abu Ghraib comes as much from Hollywood as it does from the Pentagon.

Enough. Some links if you're interested:

Metafilter's y2karl put together an impressive compendium of references here. One particularly interesting article documents some accounts from enlisted personnel of how their commanders ignored warnings that the systems in place for detaining Iraqis were unstable.

Talking Points Memo has run down some facets of the story I hadn't noticed elsewhere, like this one and especially this one.

Finally, Torrid takes the domestic political measure of the scandal --you'll have to scroll down to his May 9th and May 8th entries.

(And now that I'm done wasting your time with slightly stale outrage, I'd like to remind you that Friday's quiz remains an unsolved mystery...)