Sometime between now and the June 30th deadline for handing over “full sovereignty” to the new Iraqi government, some American representative will have to walk into the Iraqi desert and count the grains of sand, to make sure they’re all handed over. The unlucky bureaucrat assigned to this task can use neither supercomputer nor statistical modeling method; the only tools allowed will be a pencil, notebook and magnifying glass. It may sound absurd, but is it any more absurd than anything else going on in Iraq these days?

The new government is announced and three of the top five spots have gone to members of the now-disbanded Iraqi Governing Council, the discredited puppets of the American occupiers. The new prime minister, Iyad Allawi, is a Shi’ite, a former member of Saddam’s Ba’ath Party and a longtime fixture on the CIA payroll. The new president is a symbolic man for a symbolic office. Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar is a Sunni Arab who grew up in Mosul, a northern city near Kurdish territory and is a leader of the Shammar tribe, which has many Shi’ite members. He spent much of the past 20 years in Saudi Arabia, which will come in handy on the oil front.
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The two questions that most urgently need answers in the Iraq torture scandal are: How far up and for how long? How far up the chain of command did authorization of torture go and how long has this been sanctioned practice?

The trickle of testimony on this subject has become a stream; next week it will likely become a torrent and by mid-June, a flood. The Bush administration is offering a handful of soldiers for courts martial. It’s impossible that responsibility ends there. Congressional representatives have been shown 1,800 photos of torture. Given the unlikelihood that all torture was photographed, it wold be logistically impossible for seven people to generate that much torture in the evening hours, after supervisors were off duty.
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When my friend Lynn was in college, a history professor assigned her to research the Holocaust by reading microfilms of American newspapers from the 1930s and 40s. Although many people claimed to have been shocked to discover in the spring of 1945 that Nazi Germany had sent the bulk of Europe’s Jews into a system of slave labor and death camps, Lynn found a good deal of the story had been reported in the American press – a piece here and a piece there over the course of years. Perhaps it was the fault of newspaper editors, that none of them gave a reporter time to put all the pieces together in a comprehensive whole, perhaps the problem was human nature, no one wanted to look beyond a limited, occasional report to learn the whole, horrible truth.

An anthropologist might argue that it is human nature to shield ourselves from uncomfortable truths, that there is an evolutionary advantage to doing so. In 1991, journalists Allan Nairn and Amy Goodman traveled to East Timor to report on the oppression of the Timorese by Indonesia. They were looking for trouble and they found it, getting caught in the middle of a massacre of Timorese civilians by Indonesian troops. Mr. Nairn reports that as this awful event unfolded around him, his mind refused to accept the evidence of his senses. At first he thought the soldiers were just trying to intimidate the crowd when they raised their rifles. Even as they started firing, Mr. Nairn’s mind told him they must be shooting blanks – surely no one would shoot unarmed civilians. The people falling to the ground must be frightened or hysterical, he thought. Only when he saw blood pouring from bodies would Mr. Nairn’s mind finally accept the fact that people were being murdered before his eyes.
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I’m in Canton, Ohio this week to attend the annual shareholders’ meeting of Diebold, Incorporated, the leading manufacturer of touch-screen voting machines that don’t work. I’m not a shareholder; I’m an unwelcome guest. I’ll explain why shortly.

After the fiasco that was the 2000 presidential election in Florida, Congress passed, and George W. Bush signed, the Help America Vote Act. (Those two developments alone should have put us on our guard.) The ostensible purpose of HAVA was to provide states with federal funds to upgrade obsolete voting technology. No sooner had the bill passed than state and local election officials were inundated by high-pressure sales reps from vendors of touch-screen voting machines.

Secretaries of state and boards of election were carried away on a schmoozy tide of extravagant promises – Faster and more accurate vote tallies! Ballots can be displayed in several languages! No hanging chads, pregnant chads, swinging chads! No confusing butterfly ballots that cause people to vote for Pat Buchanan!
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