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The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media (Paperback)

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Under the rule of Saddam Hussein, the prison of Abu Ghraib (the Father of the Raven) was a place of ill omen, notorious for horrific suffering and torture and mass executions. After the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military made Abu Ghraib one of the major detention centers for Iraqis suspected of sympathizing with the resistance. The revelations since April 2004 of systematic torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib have not easily been assimilated into the mythology of the U.S. "war on terror."

The Language of Empire focuses on the response to these revelations in the U.S. media, in congress, and in the larger context of U.S. global politics and ideology. Its focus on the media is a prelude to showing how the language of multiculturalism, humanitarianism, and even feminism have been hijacked in the cause of an illegal and brutal imperialist war.

The media have colluded with the Bush administration in manipulating images of the U.S. occupation of Iraq in such a way as to present it as a clash between civilization and barbarism, and in selectively using legal and procedural issues to distract from the basic criminality of the invasion itself. The circuitous logic through which U.S. imperialism presents itself as a defender of legality and democracy is exposed for all to see in this important and timely work.



From the Back Cover

"With a calmness and clarity of purpose worthy of Virgil, Lila Rajiva leads us step-by-step into a darkness none of us want to confront. But face it we must, if we have any hope of derailing the mad machinery of death and torture unleashed on the world by the Bush Imperium. The horror chambers of Abu Ghraib have become a stomach-turning symbol of the official sadism of the Iraq war. A tragic excess, say some; the work of a demented few, say others. But Rajiva looks deeper, exposing how the perverse logic of torture has infected the language and psychology of the American imperial project, from its sycophants in the press and its evangelists in the pulpit. Her book is an unsettling expedition into the political consciousness of cruelty." —JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, coeditor of CounterPunch and author of Grand Theft Pentagon

"Lila Rajiva has written a citizen's report on the scandal of Abu Ghraib. With the eye of a forensic scientist, she assembles material from the media and reframes it in such a compelling way that I am led to conclude that we, in the U.S., have lost our moral compass. Our government knew the extent of the damage and yet, aided by the media, managed to disguise its culpability. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to see America become what it has not yet been." —VIJAY PRASHAD, author of The Karma of Brown Folk and Darker Nations: The Rise and Fall of the Third World

"There can be no mistaking the putrid stench clinging to the events, processes and mentality described with the eloquence of excruciating precision in this fine study by Lila Rajiva. It is that of Nazism, by any other name. Hence, like the good Germans before us, today's good Americans bear an unequivocal obligation—morally, legally, and in every other sense—to do whatever is necessary to expose the myriad Eichmanns, large and small, residing within our ranks. As The Language of Empire makes abundantly clear, to shirk such responsibility is to forfeit claim to any humanity we might still possess." —WARD CHURCHILL, author of A Little Matter of Genocide and On the Justice of Roosting Chickens --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

  • Paperback: 224 pages
  • Publisher: Monthly Review Press (November 1, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1583671196
  • ISBN-13: 978-1583671191
  • Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.7 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #128,173 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Lila Rajiva
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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Abu Ghraib, United States, Washington Post, Cold War, Middle East, Geneva Conventions, Red Cross, New York Times, White House, Nicholas Berg, President Bush, State Department, Amnesty International, Abu Gliraib, Christian Science Monitor, Daniel Pearl, Fox News, Michael Berg, Saddam Hussein, Human Rights Watch, Saudi Arabia, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, Gulf War, Homeland Security
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Powerful, February 26, 2006
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This book was clearly hastily written, and is thus somewhat uneven. At times the author lets her voice get in the way of her evidence. The chapter analyzing the congressional hearings, which attempts to trace where the orders for Abu Graib came from, is confusing. Although Nicholas Berg (the American 'civilian' beheaded in Iraq) emerges as a fascinating character, some of the theories about his story seem to cancel each other out--for example, if he was done in by Russian mob associates (as is implied at one point), then what does this have to do with the rationality of terrorism (the issue raised at another point)? Nevertheless, in toto the book provides a vivid, compelling portrait of the Abu Graib torture and is ultimately convincing in arguing that this is part of the essence of the American intervention in Iraq, rather than an unfortunate failure. Rajiva's argument that this is rooted in a belief in the exercise of power for the sake of power, among virtually all levels of the civilian and military authorities, is unsettling, as is her dissection of the discourses of legalism and moral purity used to obscure the crimes. The idea that torture is central, not marginal, to the occupation will linger with you. Probably not the book to hand someone who supports the US occupation of Iraq (the author's rhetorical excesses will likely turn them off) it will nevertheless strengthen the conviction of those who already understand that liberation does not come through 'shock and awe'.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Abu Ghraib -- The Unveiled Face of American Empire?, July 14, 2007
When the US government decided to invade Iraq, I assumed that even if it was not directly related to WMDs or 911, Iraq would be rid of a vicious dictator and be grateful to our kind and heroic troops who liberated them. In the first few days of war, my heart was pounding with pride as our brave troops rolled across Iraq. But then I noticed an odd thing. Our troops were putting hoods over the heads of POWs. Where did that come? Had I missed a meeting somewhere along the way? Why are the good guys hooding prisoners. And come to think of it, when did our troops get helmets and outfits that make them look like the Imperial Storm Troopers in the Star Wars movies?

Then along came the torture story of Abu Ghraib and you could have knocked me over with a feather. WTF! Where were the officers? Where was the Sargeant NCO?. I have read enough war books to know that troops on duty always have some kind of officer supervision around. It is one thing for a wayward soldier to go off on a prisoner in an isolated setting, but here we have hooded prisoners strung up for hours? Not to mention the nightly nude pyramids, panties on the head, etc. Where were the officers?

The answer is movingly laid out in Lila Rajiva's book, The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media. As explained so well in this book:

"Abu Ghraib is the unveiled face of American Empire . . . . To accept this truth means derailing the comfortable locutions in which America is the exceptional superpower, an essentially righteous nation, and a force of unmitigated good in the world. It means accepting a darker vision of the country as one corrupted initially by its postwar hegemony and now slowly descending into the same abyss out of which its twentieth-century enemies have crawled." Pages 181-82.

This is what I had been noticing with the hoods and the Storm Trooper outfits. Have we been compromised and corrupted in some degree? As Rajiva asks:

What if Abu Ghraib were not the anomalous exception in an open society but a gathering shadow of darkness that creeps day by day over a society that was really never as open as it claimed to be? What if a society that has wrestled with one too many demons has come to resemble some of them?

I won't spoil the book by telling you how this question is answered, but from the title, you can guess that it involves a large contribution by our increasingly bland and uniform media conglomerate coverage that will not, and possible cannot, view the world from any position except from that of our "increasingly remote elite ruling class that appropriates the machinery of government to its own ends." When you add that to the fact that 40% of Americans cannot find Iraq on a map, you will see that almost anything can happen and we Americans will tolerate it and accept the bland assurances of government and media that the "excesses" of Abu Ghraib are the result of just a few "bad apples."

You simply must read this book if you are at all interested in how these things creep into our US culture over time with very little notice until one day we wake up and realize we have troops all over the world, they look like Storm Troopers, we are all being stopped and frisked at will in public places like airports, and our government is being accused by the world community of violating the Geneva Convention and committing war crimes.

This book includes much more that I can summarize here. It describes the Abu Ghraib abuses, how the story was first hidden and then released slowly into national consciousness. It describes the bland legalities in which the incident is given a reassuring context. "Nothing to see here folks. Move along." The book then describes some interesting aspects of the Nick Berg beheading, not the least of which is its incredibly fortuitous timing, in that it came right after the initial Abu Ghraib expose and significantly shifted the attention of most Americans back onto the brutality of the "terrorists" as opposed to the US torturers.

Also included is an interesting account of an aspect of the Iraq coverage I had never considered, which is the complete absence of any reporting or pictures of the abuse of women. And Abu Ghraib certainly held many, many, women. What happened to them or might have happened? Read the book and you will see.

The book also describes the "prolonged isolation" and other mental and physical tortures that have developed in the US's own domestic prison system, the largest in the world with about 3,000,000 prisoners, or as Rajiva puts it, "Abu Ghraib is the externalized heart of an American gulag no different in kind if not degree from that of the Soviets, no different from the carceral system of any empire." (163).

Top that of with a description of the US's air war over Iraq, its "surgical strikes" and "smart bombs" that have incinerated so many civilians and you do have do wonder as Rajiva asks in the final chapter, "What if the war ON terror is really a war OF terror?"

I hope not, but read the book and then you decide.

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Forbidden Questions, July 15, 2007
By Patricia Goldsmith (Island Park, NY USA) - See all my reviews
This book is a must-read. A combination of CIA torture expert Alfred McCoy and political language expert George Lakoff, with a strong dash of investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, Rajiva's book explores the black depths of our culture in an attempt to answer the question that was immediately and explicitly forbidden in the days following 9/11: why did this happen?

But when you start digging under the bland layers of media propaganda, you have to be willing to follow wherever the evidence leads. You have to be willing to ask the big questions, the ones that our corporate media exist to distract us from. As Rajiva says:

". . . it is at the public's imagination that the new war is directed, with its black psychological operations that erase the boundary between civilian and military, war and peace, state and non-state. Civilizational war is a literary creation, a narrative spun out of whole cloth of psychological operations by spy agencies whose masters stand to benefit from such a war. . . .

"Return again to the pictures from Abu Ghraib. What if Al Qaeda is only a pretext? What if the war ON terror is really a war OF terror? Who would benefit? What if Abu Ghraib were not the anomalous exception in an open society but a gathering shadow of darkness that creeps day by day over a society that was really never as open as it claimed to be? What if a society that has wrestled with one too many demons has come to resemble some of them?"

We should all return again to those pictures, and then take a good hard look at the latest headlines: the commuting of Scooter Libby's sentence, the military failure in Iraq, the dark warnings that we're due for another terrorist attack, the extreme rightward shift of the Supreme Court. It's time for citizens to put it all together and start pushing back before the darkness becomes permanent.

Whether we like the questions or not, they are essential, precisely because they are forbidden. And whatever answers you ultimately come up with, Rajiva's book is an indispensable start for exploration.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Cuts through the junk in the media
This is a very insightful and provocative book that is much more nuanced than the blurbs suggest. A lot of what Rajiva wrote here ahead of better- known writers turned out to be... Read more
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1.0 out of 5 stars If You Like Air America and Conspiracy Theory This IS FOR YOU!
For those of us that are not conspiracy theorists this was not an enjoyable book.

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