Following exhaustive research in the form of intense introspection conducted over the course of the better part of an entire minute, I am pleased to announce that the mystery of the origin of the Abu Ghraib saga has finally been unravelled, to my satisfaction anyway.
I’m sure you recall how captured Terrorismistic Suspects (aka Muslims, aka Fundos, aka Coalescence of the Damned) have, for many years, had the most unspeakably sad machinations performed on their unwilling unmentionables, willy-nilly.
I just wanted to refresh your memory, in case you had succeeded in cordoning off the holiday-snap imagery from your conscious mind, which may well have boggled at the terroristicable atrocities broadcast far and wide across high bandwith internet connections.
I have tried to understand how such a thing came to pass. What impetus spurred representatives of The Free World to resurrect inquisitional measures unknown in The Civilized World for centuries? (Apart from interwar Germany which is, without doubt, the only known exception. Of course, neither Soviet nor post-Soviet Russia is included in Nigel Farquhar-Lloyd’s List of Civilized Countries.)
I have long (i.e. since yesterday) suspected, in this terrible affair, the long arm of Gresham’s Law; viz the tendency for money of inferior moral value to circulate more freely than money of superior moral and equal nominal value, better know by the maxim “dirty money drives out clean.” And lo and behold, it turns out that The Original Abu Ghraib Experience was the brainchild of one Klaus John von Finkelstein, an itinerant entrepreneur previously un-known for his failure to sell the benefits of “Fair and Lovely” cream to Scandinavian fräuleins.
Herr Finkelstein stumbled on the idea one morning as he lay awake contemplating the cracked and peeling plaster of his bedroom ceiling. The hounds of insolvency had been howling at the rusty gates of his deluxe shanty shack for months and he had managed to filter out of his surroundings the bloodcurdling noise. Until a minute earlier he had been contemplating the geometrical asymmetry of a two day old navel orange.
The orange was, as oranges tend to be, coloured a festive orange. Invitingly orange this one was. So inviting, in fact, that he had accepted the invitation and inserted a long, thin, crooked finger up its mini-me side. A second later he let out a stream of expletives, for the orange had responded by squirting him in the eye. Thus his ceiling-contemplation was initiated with just the one eye, the other being covered by the palm of his hand.
By an extraordinary coincidence, the patch of flaked-off ceiling he espied was the exact shape of Iraq’s territorial boundary. He knew this because his mother’s grandfather on her uncle’s side had chosen this shape as the logo for his wildly successful leather thong and bullwhip business, which he had named Iraklion Tanneries™ in the mistaken belief that Iraq had been called Iraklion in antiquity. It is not known what connection grandad had with Iraq.
Putting two and two and three together, he came up with the number seven, his lucky number according to either Sydney Omarr or his own illegitimate twin brother Mel Bourne (no relation to International Man Of No History, Jason). Exposition of how Finkelstein arrived at the number seven has no bearing on the outcome of this tale, but was inserted to give you an idea of how numerous strands of coincidence had been frenetically intertwining themselves within his hitherto empty destiny.
To cut a long story short in the interests of 21st century attention spans, Finkelstein came up with a cunning plan. It is rumoured that he said, “My Lord, I have a cunning plan.” But the absence of a Lord of any denomination within twenty miles of his Godless shack would seem to indicate that one of his neighbours was watching an episode of the first Blackadder series at the time.
In a nutshell, his plan was this.
Given that the Western world had a centuries-old tradition of sado-masochistic peversion, the same had to be true of the Eastern world. Knowing how private matters relating to licentiousness still are in our part of the world, Finkelstein was convinced that it was simply a matter of providing deviant believers with a discreet environment in which to practice, and have practised upon them, their perversion, for a price.
With the world in general, and the economies of the east in particular, booming like the Guns of Navarone there would be no shortage, he reasoned, of well-heeled, even stilletto’d punters queueing up to sample the deviational dee-lites he would conjure up for their pleasure. Plus he knew a black-leather queen of a bank manager who proved to be surprisingly compliant in the loan approving department.
Finkelstein commissioned the world’s most celebrated deviants to create, around Abu Ghraib, a package tour of infernal delights such as the world had never seen. He hired Madison Avenue’s maddest creative directors to design a multimedia campaign to lure willing victims. Finally he signed a contract with then El Presidente Saddam Hussein, and sat back in anticipation, dollar signs cha-chinging around him.
No one came. None except a twenty-three year old tree surgeon from Lala Musa who had been experimenting with electric shock therapy as a substitute for insecticide on fruit farms. He was seen exiting Abu Ghraib, after a non-sampling tour of the facilities, ashen-faced. He had aged considerably and now looked twenty-four.
In an effort to cut his losses, Finkelstein auctioned his options off on e-bay. He received one bid – from representatives of the Coalition of The Willy-Nilly, which at that very moment was in the process of invading Iraq. Finkelstein bailed and the rest, as they say, will be history in times to come. Rumours that he was responsible for designing the facilities at Guantanamo Bay are patently false. Research into its true origins will have to be conducted by others.
Meanwhile, all attempts to trace the whereabouts of Klaus Finkelstein have been unsuccessful. The trail is as cold as yesterday’s news.
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