Perhaps you remember when Donald "Wormhole Soul" Rumsfeld talked about Abu Ghraib on the TV. I cannot tell you what day it was, nor what month, nor what year, nor what venue, nor what channel. But I can tell you there is a safety-orange sentence that leapt out at me and to this day glows in my mind because it was one of those "trail-off" sentences, and I don't mean in volume, but in focus. As in when he said it, it was let slip by, as if a habit statement, a perfunctory statement, a "given," a throwaway line. Yet to me, it raised sirens. The line was in reference to the fotos from Abu Ghraib. The ones that rocked our world. If you remember, after speaking about the fotos at one point he said (and it is a well-documented line, I don't mean to say I am alone in having the information) there may be even worse ones coming soon. And he said it with fear cloaked in a casual delivery.

Now, I am not quoting. I don't even think he said these exact words. But I recognized the tactic at once. He dreaded to admit anything more than what was on the table. No person caught doing sneaky shit admits more than they have to. It's a stupid, immature, self-destructive thing to do if you are trying to get away with something. But Rummy was so sure that the whole truth would be discovered that he made the decision that softening us up for the terrible blow—which would tend to invite more probing and unwanted questions—was somehow safer and more advantageous to his dirty handed position than investing in the idea that the whole truth would remain secret. Now that implies quite a lot, given what he was already admitting to.

I don't remember anyone jumping on that line. But I remember his aura at that moment, and everything clicked, I guess, but either way, I understood right away that the prisons were rape factories. And that there was evidence of it.

Seymour Hersh is the man who broke the story of My Lai to us, as well as the story of Abu Ghraib. And here's what he has had to say about the latter atrocity:

Some of the worst things that happened that you don’t know about. OK? Videos. There are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at [Abu Ghraib], which is about 30 miles from Baghdad — 30 kilometers, maybe, just 20 miles, I'm not sure whether it's — anyway. The women were passing messages out saying please come and kill me because of what’s happened. And basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been [video] recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. That your government has, and they’re in total terror it’s going to come out. It’s impossible to say to yourself, how did we get there, who are we, who are these people that sent us there. [...]

I can tell you some of the personal stories of some of the people who were in these units who witnessed this. I can also tell you written complaints were made to the highest officers. And so we’re dealing with an enormous, massive amount of criminal wrong-doing that was covered up at the highest command out there and higher. And we have to get to it, and we will. And we will, I mean, you know, there’s enough out there, they can't — [applause]

—Seymour Hersh : The US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison

Now, this article is almost four years old. And that other wave of evidence has been contained. For now. We don't talk about Abu Ghraib a whole lot anymore. A few low-level soldiers were thrown to the wolves, and we seem to have called it a day.

I don't really feel I owe it to anyone to explain the depths of my feeling or the volume of my delivery in so many areas that I write about. Whatever. I'll tell you what my problem is. I'm a feeling human who is witnessing horror over a period of many years. I cannot turn away. And yet I cannot habituate.

Like a facial expression that adds more truth to a spoken statement than the words being said alone, I constantly add in the terrible unsaid truths of our invasion and occupation of Iraq to all that is spoken by the media, no matter how loudly or over what bed of music or what shift in conversation is attempted. I factor it into all conversations about patriotism and war or economies or the USA or government and green zones and Progress and Freedom.