Do They Have A Conscience?
by Ken Bell

On the second of June, a bipartisan group of Senators—Rick Santorum (R-PA), Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL)—held a press conference in which they introduced seven torture victims of Saddam Hussein’s regime and released a brief video, less than four minutes in length, which displayed a few of the tens of thousands of acts of torture which characterized the Iraqi dictatorship’s standard operating procedure.

The seven victims, all businessmen, had each had their right hands severed and an x carved into their foreheads as punishment for conducting currency exchange operations—an activity which Saddam Hussein sought to reserve as the exclusive domain of one of his sons.

The short video (one version of which can be found on the American Enterprise Institute’s website at www.aei.org) graphically illustrates a handful of tortures conducted by the Hussein regime, and filmed for the viewing pleasure of the dictator and his entourage, at Abu Ghraib prison—where more than 30,000 political murders were also carried out by the dictatorship. Watching the methodical surgical removal of a living human being’s right hand, slice by slice, the severing of fingers and hands with swords, the slashing out of tongues with razors, beatings with truncheons and beheadings puts dog leashes in perspective.

Yet not a single major American network or major newspaper was willing to show these very graphic images. The New York Times, after running more than 60 front-page articles on Abu Ghraib in the last two months, couldn’t see fit to report it, nor could the Washington Post be bothered, except for a single brief article buried on page 21. The CBS show 60 Minutes, which first broadcast the images of mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, ignores Hussein’s mass graves and refuses to show the real torture video from Abu Ghraib.

The media wallow endlessly in the slough of a relatively trivial crime perpetrated by a handful of errant miscreants, yet maintain a rigorous silence when it comes to genocide, mass murder, beheadings, and a massive organized campaign of torture. Silence is consent. It is a moral crime.

Senator Ted Kennedy’s obscene proclamation that Saddam’s torture chambers had “reopened under new management—US management” is execrable, and prima facie evidence of the utter absence of any moral conscience whatsoever. Yet the senior senator from Massachusetts goes unchallenged in the court of public opinion, because the media refuse to report the simple truth.

–From the June 2004 Austin Review