Notes Toward an Essay on Torture: Frat-House Frolics

Remember when Rush Limbaugh made excuses for the Abu Ghurayb photographs by comparing them to fraternity hazings?

Last Thursday, police in Chico, California, arrested five members of the Chi Tau fraternity at the California State University campus in that town for the death of Matthew Carrington a candidate for membership in the fraternity. The description of the circumstances of Carrington's death seems eerily reminiscent of the reports coming out of Guatanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Liberal bloggers and pundits ripped Limbaugh several new ones for his dismissal of the Abu Ghurayb atrocity as a frat-house prank. Dismissing Abu Ghurayb is the act of a moral cripple. Yet the people whose reaction to the horrors perpetrated by their government is a shocked, outraged "How can they do this – Americans don't torture!" would do well to open their eyes to quite how beastly ordinary Americans can be.

For the wrong reasons, Rush Limbaugh was right. There is a link between the insane cruelties perpetrated by Americans against military detainees and the insane cruelties perpetrated on Frat Row – and the insane cruelties perpetrated behind the closed doors of suburban homes.