Crimes Against Humanity: A Review of The Language of Empire

Remember Abu Ghraib? Once Saddam Hussein's most notorious prison, the huge complex was converted into an American military prison after the US invasion of Iraq in April 2003. Most of us had never heard of Abu Ghraib until reports of torture, complete with horrifying photos, were made public a year later. In The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media, Lila Rajiva examines the US government and mainstream media's discourse following the torture disclosures, peeling away the layers of misinformation, distortion, omissions and re-framing to reveal the cold and calculated ideology of empire.

The images are seared into our minds. US military personnel laughing at a pile of naked Iraqi bodies. The iconic silhouette of a hooded prisoner, his wired hands extended. Snarling dogs snapping at exposed genitals. Yet these are just a fraction of the incidents documented by hundreds of photos and witness testimony. Most of the evidence, including the rape and torture of Iraqi women and children, was judged by the press, the Pentagon, and Congress to be too disturbing for the American public to view and discuss.

After a flurry of righteous indignation and promises to investigate, the Abu Ghraib story was quickly eclipsed by the Republican and Democratic conventions, and the sensational accounts of the beheading of American Nick Berg. Of course, partial investigations were conducted, though the command structure has had impunity, and the public's attention has been focused on legal fine points as if any crimes committed were against the US system of justice rather than the flesh and blood of Iraqi human beings.

By exposing the political context in which the abuses of Abu Ghraib took place, Rajiva demonstrates that such pornographic violence is not only predictable but inevitable, a necessary component of the corporate elite's quest for "full spectrum dominance." The author analyzes the American media's portrayal of the Abu Ghraib crimes through the lenses of race, religion, and gender, leaving the reader with a stark reminder that these events can only be understood in relationship to government actions such as the rendition of certain prisoners to countries that torture, the savaging of our right to privacy, our right to hear the charges against us, and our right to speak freely.

Rajiva addresses the phenomenon of a neoconservative power so vast and comprehensive in its reach and scale that it is virtually invisible to the majority of Americans. Part research and analysis and part polemic, this book is difficult reading, both in terms of its grisly subject matter and in its organization, which could have benefited from closer editing. Still, in a time when the corporate-controlled American media filters out any challenges to the status quo of inequality and sanitized violence, The Language of Empire provides an important dissection of the mechanisms of imperial power in all its monstrous excess.