Just how high did authorization go for the Abu Ghraib “abuses,” as the deliberate torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by American troops are demurely called?  Was it really, as President Bush claimed in his flatulent “address to the nation” in May, a mere case of “disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values,” or were the people who really did the dishonoring and disregarding by authorizing and encouraging what happened on a far higher level than the trailer-trash grunts elevated to global celebrity by the dirty pictures in which they leer and smirk at their victims?

And why were the photographs taken in the first place?  Are they simply barracks-room pornography for an Army riddled by the same pathologies that eat through the muscle of American society?  Are enlisted men and women really so dim as to think they can take scores of photos of themselves engaging in conduct both grotesque and illegal and not get caught and punished?  Or was there another purpose behind taking the photographs that few have yet grasped?

Pfc. Lynndie England, the new poster girl of the U.S. occupation of Iraq who has replaced Jessica Lynch as the iconic American Amazon, gave an interview to KCNC-TV in Denver soon after being hauled back to this country to face charges.  Pfc. England has every motive to lie her little behind off to get out of those charges, and what she says by itself may be no more than a lie.  But then again, maybe it’s not, and it is worth considering, especially in conjunction with other information.

“I was instructed by persons in higher rank to ‘stand there, hold this leash, look at the camera,’ and they took pictures for PsyOps,” she told the station.  PsyOps?  Psychological Operations, of course.  Well, wasn’t the purpose of the abuse and the photos to twist information out of the prisoners, in accordance with misguided military-intelligence directions?

In part, no doubt it was, and that is insidious enough, as well as stupid.  Assuming that rank-and-file prisoners have any useful information about Iraqi resistance operations and capacities they are unwilling to spill, there are undoubtedly more efficient ways of getting it out of them.  There are the proverbial rack and thumbscrews, which worked well enough for Catholic and Protestant alike for a couple of centuries.  There are drugs that both the CIA and the KGB deployed in years past.  Finally, there are perfectly harmless and nonintrusive and nonviolent interrogation techniques by which skilled examiners can elicit information and cooperation from most subjects at first unwilling to utter an intelligible sound.  But how effective making the subjects crawl around nude on dog leashes with women’s underwear on their heads might be for getting important inside dope is a question that the humane sciences have yet to resolve adequately.

So what was the real purpose, if military intelligence wasn’t it?  As the scandal began to break last May, the Washington Post carried a lengthy report on what the abuses mean in terms of their cultural and social impact on the world’s Newest Democracy on the Euphrates.

“Not only do the photographs up-end traditional gender roles—homosexuality is a strict taboo in Islam, and women, through practices like veiling, are encouraged to take a demure attitude towards sexual matters—but the casual treatment of nudity itself is offensive to many.  In Saudi Arabia, for example, customers in gymnasium locker rooms are admonished not to let others see them as they change,” the Post commented.

The paper quoted anthropologist Donald Cole, at the American University in Cairo, on what may have been the real purpose of the torture.  “The idea is to humiliate people in ways . . . that really affect their manhood, their identity, their notions of shame.  It is playing with people’s minds.”  PsyOps.  Just so.

By this interpretation, the photographs were neither an orgiastic lark for the grunts nor a desperate effort to collect “intelligence” but part of a campaign of psychological and cultural warfare, aimed not just at the prisoners in Abu Ghraib but at Iraqi—and, more broadly, Arabic—culture itself.

Back in February, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz published an article in the Washington Post about the forthcoming “liberation” of women in Iraq that would be one of the main achievements of the American conquest.  “The United States is giving special emphasis to helping Iraqi women achieve greater equality and has allocated $27 million for women’s programs,” he wrote.

“Liberating” women is certainly what we would expect from the crusade to spread “democracy” and its blessings around the globe at the point of our bayonets, but, in traditional societies such as those of Iraq and the Middle East, “liberating” women means psychologically castrating men—the deliberate destruction of the psychic, moral, and cultural spine of the society.  By putting women—especially American infidel women who fight in battle, wear men’s clothes, and bare their faces—in charge of male Arabs and dishing out sexual sadism, the “abuses” aim at the heart of the patriarchal culture and its symbols of masculinity.

What was going on in Abu Ghraib (and other places) seems to have been more than “abuse” and also more than just “torture.”  It was an inherent part of the global imperial system that the architects of the war have already designed, a tactic by which we are systematically devastating a culture and the people that culture defines whom architects of the war like Mr. Wolfowitz hate and wish to eradicate far more than the “global democracy” they purport to love.  Mr. Wolfowitz’s enthusiasm for “liberating” Iraqi women may give us a clue as to just how high the authorization for the abuses went—and who authorized them.