Saturday, September 23, 2006

The Facts on the Ground:Mini-Gulags, Hired Guns, Lobbyists, and a Reality Built on Fear

By Tom Engelhardt

"Of course, its prisoners who remained generally uncharged and without access to Iraqi courts, weren't just released to the winds. Quite the opposite, over 3,000 of them were redistributed to two other U.S. prisons, Camp Bucca in Iraq's south and Camp Cropper at the huge U.S. base adjoining Baghdad International Airport, once dedicated to the holding of "high-value" detainees like Saddam Hussein and top officials of his regime.

Had anyone paid the slightest attention – other than the Pentagon, the Bush administration, and whatever company or companies had the contract to construct the facility – it would still have been taken for granted that Camp Cropper wasn't the business of ordinary Americans (or even their representatives in Congress). Despite the fact that the $60 million dollars, which made the camp "state of the art," was surely ours, no one in the United States debated or discussed the upgrade and there was no serious consideration of it in Congress before the money was anted up – any more than Congress or the American people are in any way involved in the constant upgrading of our military bases in Iraq.

Camp Bucca is a story you can't read anywhere – and yet it may, in a sense, be the most important American story in Iraq right now. While arguments spin endlessly here at home about the nature of withdrawal "timetables," and who's cutting and running from what, and how many troops we will or won't have in-country in 2007, 2008, or 2009, on the ground a process continues that makes mockery of the debate in Washington and in the country. While the "reconstruction" of Iraq has come to look ever more like the deconstruction of Iraq, the construction of an ever more permanent-looking American landscape in that country has proceeded apace and with reasonable efficiency.

First, we had those huge military bases that officials were careful never to label "permanent." (For a while, they were given the charming name of "enduring camps" by the Pentagon.) Just about no one in the mainstream bothered to write about them for a couple of years as quite literally billions of dollars were poured into them and they morphed into the size of American towns with their own bus routes, sports facilities, Pizza Huts, Subways, Burger Kings, and mini-golf courses. Huge as they now are, elaborate as they now are, they are still continually being upgraded. Now, it seems that on one of them we have $60 million worth of the first "permanent U.S. prison" in Iraq. Meanwhile, in the heart of Baghdad, the Bush administration is building what's probably the largest, best fortified "embassy" in the solar system with its own elaborate apartment complexes and entertainment facilities, meant for a staff of 3,500.

These are increasingly the crucial realities of our world – and it's not the world of a republic. It's not a world of checks and balances. It's not a world where even a change of ownership in one or both houses of Congress in November would prove a determining factor. It's not a world where people out there are just "starting to question whether we're following our own high standards." It's distinctly not the world as we Americans like to imagine it, but it is the world we are, regrettably enough, lost in. It's the world created not just by a commander-in-chief presidency, but by a Pentagon-in-chief-dominated government, and by a corporation-in-chief style of imperial rule.

It is a world striving for permanence, which doesn't faintly mean that it's permanent – not in Iraq and not here. But it might be helpful if we began to register more fully not just the latest flurry of whatever passes for news, but the facts-on-the-ground that are, every minute, every hour, every day, transforming our lives and our planet."

No comments: