Abu Ghraib to Sde Teiman

Abu Ghraib to Sde Teiman

The U.S. And Israel’s Shared Love Affair With Torture

There are crimes so grotesque that even empire can’t quite sweep them under the rug.

Abu Ghraib was one of them.

Photos surfaced of U.S. soldiers grinning with thumbs up next to piles of naked Iraqis, prisoners hooded with wires strapped to their fingers, terrified men on leashes like dogs, and even pictures of soldiers with huge ear to ear smiles posing with a corpse, a man they had literally tortured to death.

We were told these were “a few bad apples.”

Just some sadistic guards who went rogue. The reality is that Abu Ghraib wasn’t a prison gone wrong, it was the logical result of a system built on dehumanization, on the idea that Arabs aren’t fully human, that they’re clay to be broken and reshaped by Western “civilizing” force.

Americans really don’t want to hear that many of the people we locked up in that hellhole were completely innocent.

Swept up in raids, rounded up because they were in the wrong place, sold out by rivals or neighbors for bounty money. Some were literally taxi drivers or farmers who just got unlucky.

But once they were behind those concrete walls, innocence didn’t matter. To the guards, to the intelligence officers, to the entire war machine, they weren’t people anymore, they were “terrorists,” “insurgents,” bodies to be experimented on.

Soldiers themselves later admitted they didn’t see Arabs as human.

They saw them as targets, animals, playthings. That’s how you get Americans laughing while forcing prisoners into naked human pyramids.

That’s how you get a soldier dragging a man across the floor with a leash, smiling for the camera.

That’s how you get death by torture turned into a photo op.