George Bush's stupid war in Iraq went from bad to worse this week as revelations of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by Americans made all the front pages around the world.

The elite manipulators in D.C. are now pretending that they didn't know what was going on. "Why, golly, it was just a small number of troops and they'll be disciplined by darn. How dare they act that way? That's not the American way. We're disgusted by the photos."

Do you buy what these elites are saying? If so, please go stand over there with other gullible people where you can listen to Radio Pudgy tell you that what happened in Abu Ghraib was no big deal and that, golly, Bill Clinton did....and that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Eventually, it may come out that what happened at Abu Ghraib wasn't really the fault of the prison guards. But for now, they're taking the hits. The elites are seeing to that. Hopefully, enough good, decent people will see what really went on and begin pointing fingers at the elites who set up the conditions that led to the actions that these guards took. Could it be that these guards were manipulated by the elites in Washington? Is it possible that the guards might even have been selected--in a sort of real world Marat/Sade sense--because of their psychological profiles, and that they were mixed and matched so that their personal chemistries might be expected to lead to the torture and humiliation of the prisoners?

Don't buy it? Try this for an example. Suppose you wanted to harm a guy who owned a liquor store, but you didn't want to have anything come back against you. What could you do? Maybe, if you were very clever, you would somehow work it out so that you could have a bunch of alcoholics guard the place. Maybe you could even have your underlings tell the alcoholics that the liquor store owner was a filthy this or that and a despicable human being. Suppose further that you had your underlings tell the alcoholics that no one would ever know what they did while they were on guard duty. What might be the result of all this? Should the alcoholics be held responsible for what does happen? Weren't they set up? Meanwhile, you, being the clever elite that you are, would have deniability and could express outrage at what happened and you could say that the guards would be prosecuted because that's not the way things are supposed to be, and we're all responsible for our own actions.

So, how does that relate to our soldiers in Abu Ghraib? Well, it appears that they believed that no one would care what they did. Just look at their smiling faces in the photos. Those aren't the looks of people who think they're doing anything wrong or that they have something to hide. The guards probably had dehumanized the prisoners, in their own minds, because of the propaganda that these guards were fed. The neocon elites made sure of that. In addition, they were apparently told to soften these evil "terrorists" up so they would give information to the U.S. that would presumably save other American lives. With this as background, the guards probably thought that not only were they not doing anything wrong but they may have even believed that they were doing something heroic for America.

But, what about the specific actions they took that involved various forms of S&M? That too could be predicted. Enter the id--the dark Lord of the Sandflies--that savage that lives within our unconscious minds where it is imprisoned by a thin wall of societal rules. Put people beyond those rules, such as on a deserted island or in a foreign land in the midst of a war, and watch the id come out with all its knuckle dragging fury like an x-rated version of the Incredible Hulk. Watch as civilization falls away from those in such a situation and watch as the id, with its cruel animal sexuality, does what it wants to do with no fear of punishment.

The American guards at the Iraqi prison aren't monsters. They're not evil and they aren't any different from most other people. Put other Americans or people of any other nationality in the same circumstances, with the same chemistry, and the results would be similar. It's all about human psychology. The U.S. government has been playing with psychology in ways that it shouldn't, and it creates "monsters" by stitching together certain psychological profiles. For example, do you think it was just an accident that the Bush administration put female guards in charge of men in a culture that considers such things sinful and evil? Do you consider it an accident that all the guards in the photos appear to be white? Why no blacks? Could it be that the elites figured that blacks might be too sympathetic to the brown Iraqis and that the right chemistry wouldn't develop if this were the case?

Stay tuned as more and more stories of unspeakable acts start flowing out of Iraq. The id is loose in a land without civilization's constraints; thanks to the neocon Bush administration. Meanwhile, some people in San Francisco are probably wondering what the guards did wrong. The photos just look like normal party pictures to them.

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