If the now notorious photographs of Abu Ghraib had not come out, would the scandal have ever broken? Even when it did, we know the torture and the ritual humiliation of Iraqi men and women and children continued to take place in American’s prisons in Iraq, where some fifteen thousand people are incarcerated without trial.

There are many deeply disturbing things about the Abu Ghraib photographs — their military-porn genre, the obscene racism they illustrate, as well as the depravity and cretinism of America’s soldiers as they run amok. No “bad apples” these, but highly representative examples of the present-day ethos of the United States, with its ignorant fool for president, its corrupt cabals for government, its thieving corporations and sinister ideologues.

What is most disturbing, however, is not what we manage to see, but what remains hidden from our eyes, from our knowledge. The cruelties, the interrogations, the torture with drills, the rapes, the filth, the blindfolds, the tied hands and feet, the exposure to extremes of cold and heat, to rats and violent dogs, to blaring, punishing din, that takes place in America’s new-fangled prisons in Iraq. Prisons that resemble nothing more precisely than they do the jails of Saddam Hussein.

In his magisterial book, The Twilight of American Culture, Morris Berman argues that the social and economic inequalities of society in America (in terms of wealth disparity, the US leads the world!), the lack of investment in socio-economic problems, the rapidly growing illiteracy (millions of Americans can now hardly read or write), the ever-expanding prison population (which is largely Afro-American), have made it so that “rather than providing a model for the third world, the United States appears to be imitating it.” This is frighteningly obvious in the wearing away of hard-won civil liberties, in a political atmosphere that Norman Mailer has called “pre-fascistic.”

A generation is presently growing up in the world that equates America with torture, with corruption, exploitation, mendacity, cupidity, stupidity, with brazen waste — to the tune of billions — of other peoples’ money, with racism, with secret and illegal flights, with far-flung gulags, crass colonialism and wanton war. A generation that sees America as one massive and malignant base — as Base America.

Go to any capital city—to London, Amman, Djakarta, Paris, Tunis, Warsaw, or most spectacularly, to Baghdad—and you will see roads cut off, pedestrians thwarted, traffic redirected at a certain spot: at the bunker housing America’s place of representation. Make no mistake: these “Green Zones,” as they should now be dubbed — absolutely all of them! — are places worthy of your rarest pity. Only the weak require such impregnable fortifications. Only hated dictators do, who live in fear of violent retribution for their crimes.

Thanks to today’s America, I am left with this significant photograph. An Iraqi man — one of the many thousands rounded up in the first phase of occupation, perhaps for failing to throw flowers! — sits in the burning sun, and a black hood suffocating him, blindfolding him, imprisoning him. A black hood drenched in urine, another little tactic of this war, which makes him love his captors better, as he smells their stench. The hood resembles those beloved of Spanish Inquisitors, or members of the Ku Klux Klan, re-designed with him in mind. This hood is now his world. This hood is America.
He cannot see his little boy, who has somehow crept through barbed wires and found him. He can barely hear his questions or his sobs. His fingers move to touch his small son’s hair, which he feels is hot, too hot, from baking in this sun.

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RANA KABBANI is a leading author and broadcaster.