Clark University - Clarknews winter 2004
In Closing (winter 2004)
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| Matthew McAllester M.A. '02 Photo by Rob Carlin |
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Inside Iraq
Matthew McAllester M.A. '02, a reporter for Newsday who was featured in the spring 2003 issue of Clarknews, returned to campus in September to participate in the Higgins School of Humanities Fall 2003 Lecture Series. McAllester described his recent experiences in Iraq, where he was arrested and held in solitary confinement in Baghdad's notorious Abu Grabe Prison for eight days in early March.
McAllester discussed his support for the war in Iraq, as well as the difficulties facing U.S. and British troops as they work to maintain the peace and rebuild the country. But he focused mainly on the culture of fear in Iraq and the importance of understanding that fear in helping to shape Iraq's future. In his remarks, McAllester described his own encounter with that fear during his stay in Abu Grabe prison. "There's an Iraqi saying about Abu Grabe: To enter is to be lost, to come out is to be reborn," he said.
This excerpt from McAllester's speech follows his description of the night he listened to a guard nearly beat an Iraqi prisoner to death. McAllester said he could have witnessed the beating—that as a journalist, he was "meant to bear witness"—and lamented that he had turned away from the incident in fear. McAllester, who repeatedly noted that he only endured eight days of terror while the Iraqi people have endured 35 years of it, used this example to illustrate how such prolonged and intense fear changes the way individuals understand their world.
Read the complete transcript of McAllester's speech.
"Sometime over the next few days, I came to see the big guard, the man who'd almost beaten this prisoner to death, as a source of some comfort. Over the past months, being in Iraq during the war, I'd unfortunately turned into a solid smoker. And in Abu Grabe a cigarette—it was just like the movies—a cigarette became a companion, a comfort, an amazing luxury, and you'd do anything for one, to take the boredom away.
"The big guard was also a smoker, and one day, I heard my next-door neighbor, my next-door prisoner, Molly Bingham, who is a photographer, successfully plead a cigarette from him. ‘Beautiful?' he asked, out of my sight, and I assumed he was asking Molly what she thought of his looks.
"When he walked past, I asked for a cigarette also, and the man held out a pack of extra-long, super-thin white cigarettes, that should really have been dangling from the fingers of a bejeweled beauty in an early James Bond film. These were the beautiful things that the guard had referred to. And I thanked him with all the warmth I could generate.
‘No problem,' said the man in a gentle voice, in English, smiling.
"Abu Grabe and Saddam's Iraq did things like that, making you turn away from torture and then form a tiny alliance, or reliance, on the torturer.
"In the second-by-second struggle to survive, I found that I could only hesitatingly betray the very essence of human solidarity, and a deposit of guilt could be made on my soul. It was the sort of deposit, I'm afraid, that's also weighing on the souls of many Iraqis now. Fear of that magnitude just does unwholesome things to you."
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