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"Where is our Mapplethorpe?" queried John Stewart on the "Daily Show," noting the poor composition of the now famous Abu Ghraib prison photos and the amateurish lighting. Stewart's irreverence points to the hypocrisy of the Iraqi prisoner abuse "crisis" that lurks behind the veil of outrage mustered by everyone from Amnesty International to George W. Bush.

The thousands of Iraqis killed by US bombs, long-range guns, and by "accident" when their homes are raided or their cars stopped at checkpoints have bothered few consciences. But snapshots depicting homosexual humiliation provoked abject public apologies from the President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

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The Abu Ghraib sex scandal guarantees America's failure at turning military conquest into a victory over Iraqi hearts and minds. As the accused rush to cover ass, controversy swirls over whether or not members of the 372nd Military Police Company of Cresaptown, Maryland, got instructions from superiors to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation.

But the reservists who staged and snapped the photos during their night-shift guard duties didn't need orders to feel license to act nasty. The Bush regime has insisted that those targeted in the war on terror have no rights-- not just no right not to be humiliated, but to live. Bush has pursued an explicit policy of extrajudicial assassination-- from suspects to disliked heads of state-- and has claimed the power to lock up anyone, US citizen or no, it designates an enemy combatant, beyond any oversight. In the wake of the scandal, Abu Ghraib's prisoners must take small consolation that the commander of Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray-- itself condemned by human rights groups-- has been tapped to clean house.

Anyway, stripping and humiliating inmates is standard practice in American prisons, where the Senators now ostentatiously effusing disgust vie to lock up ever more people on ever longer sentences. Cruelty begins at home. Two of the seven reservists charged so far worked as prison guards in civilian life, and one of them, Charles A. Graner Jr., was taken to court accused of using excessive force and planting a razor blade in an prisoner's potatoes. (The case was thrown out.)

Gay subtexts

As with the Catholic abuse scandal-- which it has now temporarily eclipsed-- the scandal over the Abu Ghrabi photos owes its impact to homosexuality. The earliest photo so far released is time-stamped October 13, 2003, showing a naked man spread-eagled, handcuffed, and hooded with a sandbag. The next was taken four days later, and shows a hooded but otherwise naked Iraqi cuffed to an upper bunk bed with his arms spread so that he is forced to arch his back painfully. His head is covered with women's plain white panties. The last photo for which there's a date was taken October 25, 2003, showing Private First Class Lynndie England-- aged 21, 5 foot 2 and weighing around 100 pounds-- holding one end of a leash leading to a collar around the neck of (surprise) a naked detainee, who appears to be rolling around on the floor in pain.

Other photos show standing, naked, hooded men sort-of jerking off, one with another bound naked Iraqi kneeling with his mouth open, suggesting oral sex. The most elaborate showed maybe ten naked hooded men arranged in a pyramid. A civilian contractor described the organizing principle: "handcuffed their hands together and their legs with shackles and started to stack on top of each by insuring that the bottom guy's penis would touch the top's butt." In another picture, a guard wrote "rappist" [sic] on a detainee's leg, referring to the man's allegedly having had sex with a 15-year-old-fellow inmate.

Outraged street

The public nudity, homosexuality, and presence of women is key to why the Abu Ghraib images have been so outrageous to Muslims. "The image Muslims will have seared on their psyche is the photo of the female American soldier, because it depicts an interaction brazenly crossing spiritual, societal, and cultural boundaries," anthropologist Akbar Ahmed told Newhouse News Service. Activists say, and American officials echo, that this insensitivity raised what happened beyond the routine humiliations that prisoners inevitably face and took it to the level of a serious human rights violation.

And yet it's odd the way images of sexual humiliation at Abu Ghraib have trumped the matter of the 25 Iraqi and Afghan prisoners killed under the US military's watch. The activists who emphasize how the photos show serious human rights violations because of how they offend local sensibilities would be loathe to agree that, say, a black man who hits a racist white woman, in addition to the violence, is guilty of violating her human rights-- even if she felt the contact violated her racial purity.

And anyway, this sudden respect for protocols of Arab propriety is odd coming from America and from Western human-rights groups. Many strands of Muslim culture were ruffled at the Abu Ghraib photos-- a sense that the sexes have fundamentally different roles, a rejection of any public manifestation homosexuality, a requirement of veiling especially women's bodies, rejection individually chosen identities (such as being gay) in place of an individual's inviolable connection to family or clan, a preservation of a closely-guarded private sphere (where, sub rosa, homoerotic bonds flourish). But these are just the strands of Islamic life that the West vows to unwind in its effort to impose-- from Kabul to Baghdad-- transparency, free markets, rule of law, and Western codes of right and wrong.

Inevitable or special?

Maybe the humiliations doled out to Iraqis at Abu Ghabi simply illustrate what happens when people get charge of others. In a famous 1971 study, Stanford students arbitrarily assigned to "prisoner" and "guard" functions in a mock jail quickly assumed their roles with a vengeance. (The German movie Das Experiment nicely dramatizes what happened). But in the recent history of wartime prisoner-taking, while there's plenty of brutality and killing, sexual humiliation isn't a major theme. It's at least the case that the present widespread exposure to sexual and homosexual imagery in contemporary America-- think Mapplethorpe-- is a rare thing in human societies, even when homosexuality is de facto tolerated. Were the reservists' imaginations thus fired? Give a group of rural Maryland working stiffs control of some Iraqis, and who'd have guessed that they'd start staging what looks like soft-core gay porn?

Such pictures were bound to shock Muslims. But the real question is why they've had such traction in American generally unconcerned about bombing Iraqi cities. Indeed-- the story about prisoner abuse was largely ignored until the pictures came out, and the Pentagon sat on the report, not counting on its becoming such a hot potato.

The Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal joins a lineup of "abuse" scandals that have captivated America, and from there spread around the world. Why has "abuse" proven such a potent charge? The sexual and cultural opening of the 60s destroyed a dominant code of propriety to which everyone paid at least lip service. Such a code still largely persists in the Islamic world. In the West, its taking-down opened the possibility of today's vibrant, open gay communities. But the counter-reaction abetted a resurgent American right-wing and religious fundamentalism. For the US's increasingly spinning-apart society, the concept of "abuse" has become an oddly central fixture of discourse. From the fundamentalist right, "abuse" is new jargon for God-given moral absolutes. For liberals, the term is their quasi-scientific substitute. In a society in which fracturing communities and opportunistic media have shattered formerly shared rules of propriety, "abuse" has-- in an oddly vigorous way-- become the West's central moral category, a rare point of universal agreement. Indeed, the term has formed become the basis of a Western secular religion-- with many people casting their identities in terms of being abuse "survivors." And the exorcism of "abuse" and "abusers," like the exorcism of witches, has been a major force pushing increasing authoritarianism throughout the West.

So far abuse scandals-- and the new forces created to mount them-- have hit institutions, such as the Catholic church or Boy Scouts, that are widely seen as having passed their sell-by dates and so are ripe for attack. Or, with the Satanic ritual abuse hysteria that hit daycare centers in the 80s, the target was an institution viewed with radical ambivalence. But the Iraqi abuse scandal, for the first time, has hit a target seriously powerful. Just as compelling as the photos themselves is the image of Bush and Rumsfeld on their knees pretending to express shocked apologetics, like bishops disavowing wayward priests. Invoking the theology of abuse, Rumsfeld called himself a "survivor" when he made a surprise tour of Abu Ghraib after his grilling before Congress. But as the US military scrambles to find fall guys for the scandal, and as the accused in their defense try to implicate higher-ups, Rumsfeld's boast may prove premature.

There's no question that what went on at Abu Ghraib was mean and cruel. But to see it as uniquely horrible is a species of sexual hysteria. Far worse is being done quietly-- except for screams-- in well-soundproofed rooms by the CIA without any sexual element.