TT: Berg's execution helps U.S. propaganda regain its sheen

So says Keith Smith.

I suspect that in any war, human nature being what it is, there is a minority likely to break and move to take it out on captives whatever the war conventions that have been ironed out in the comfort of a hotel room by the generals and the politicians. I suspect, too, that the people whose job it is to prevent the men who have reached the breaking point from crossing the lunatic line and beating the stuffing out of their blind-folded prisoners are the army leaders-in the instant case, the army commanders in that Abu Ghraib jail.

If then, my suspicions are correct, then the people who failed America were not so much the ordinary GI Joes who tortured their captives, not that they are to be exonerated, but the men at the top, all the painful evidence leading to the inescapable conclusion that at that particular prison at that particular point in time there was a woeful breakdown in the chain of command which is to say there was woeful breakdown in military discipline, the stark consequences of which it is plain to see.

Well, not so plain because the sawed-off-neck horror (and whatever they did the Americans, although they lost it, didn't kill anybody far less saw off anybody's screaming head with a knife) may well be only the beginning and the real price of those pictures flashed by today's technology all around the world will be the cost in many lives-Americans' as well as non-Americans' whose countries for better or worse (more worse than better at this point in time) have sided with the stumbling "Super Power" in this the so-called "war on terror", Lord alone knows how many Muslim martyrs will now be persuaded to the jihad cause.

I'll tell you something, though, and it is that I don't know that in a macabre way, the beastliness done to Mr Berg will not end up serving his country in that, before that, what the mad outpouring of American anger mangled more than anything else was the American's claim to a certain moral superiority, the waving of a white flag heralding a democratic advance that would help erase Arab angst and lift many in the Middle East to a different dimension that would, in turn, see these fatalistic fiefdoms becoming worthy members of a modern swathe of nations.

Well, the brutality meted out to Mr Berg may well have, even after "Abu Ghraib" have restored at east the sheen of that propaganda for, in their anxiety, eagerness even, to extract more than a tooth for a tooth, the Al Qaeda militants may have made a big mistake in that the action of their own anger hit much of the world in the, well, jugular. There is something, something heinous in the sawing off of a man's neck, as distinct from, say, guillotining it or lopping it off with one swift stroke of a sword that speaks of a deeper savagery and, that is to say, a low order.

The thing is I am yet to see a single Trinidadian re-tell the story without him or her gingerly feeling their own neck, the look in the eyes a mixture of disbelief, wonderment and disgust, the whole amounting to a kind of vicarious vomit, an instinctive human retching impossible to deny by explanations of cultural difference and certainly hardly lessened by the inexorable circumstance of distance.

In spite of this last paragraph, Keith Smith cannot resist indulging in schadenfreude.

He cannot resist equating mistreatment of prisoners with murder.

He cannot resist scoffing at the war on terror.

The irony of this last is that TT is very much about to be on the frontline of the war on terror, as the arrests in Cocorite, here also, a couple weeks ago prove.

What will Keith Smith and his fellows in the media say, then, when TT has to wage its own WoT?