Splashes from Beyond the Ocean: It Smells Like Death

Imagine you are in the following absurd situation: you are driving your car, with a corpse in the front seat. A mummified woman — to be more precise. It stinks unbearably, but you persevere. You drive your car like this for a month, two, ten months. Until one day you park your car incorrectly. The police stops by to write you a ticket. But they look inside…and then a string of uncomfortable questions ensues.

Unbelievable, but a fact, nevertheless: there is such a case. Last week the police found a mummified body in a California woman’s car. According to the initial police report the woman from Orange County felt sorry for a homeless elderly woman and gave her shelter in the car. The elderly woman, however, passed away while inhabiting the car. As a result, since our driver was afraid to call the authorities, but could not go about her business without a car — she lives in the U.S. — she decided to leave the body inside, covering it with some pieces of clothing. Thus, this otherwise exemplary citizen, traveled around for almost a year with a withering companion next to her. She even put a box of baking soda in the car to somewhat reduce the stench.

By now you’ve said at least once, “Disgusting!” haven’t you? A person really wonders how such a thing is possible. You may even be entertained if you have a well-developed sense of black humor. However shocking this piece of news is, though, it pertains to just one isolated case — a kind of unique, “only in America” thing.

That same multifaceted America, however, does other things, too, that do not belong on the unique cases page. An example of those can be found in the latest “leak” on the website WikiLeaks, which also last week published 391,832 logs from the war in Iraq. You’ll agree with me that the American military-political adventure in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf has for a long time been no less absurd than — excuse the grotesqueness of my comparison — a corpse riding the front seat. Her body has been sitting in Uncle Sam’s car for eight years now; and it seems that no one will take it out in the foreseeable future. Not that this is his first time driving a corpse around: a Vietnamese mummy had bared her teeth in that front seat, while the one from Afghanistan has already become a skeleton.

Let’s forget the metaphors, however, since the facts are far more disturbing. The new logs document 109,032 deaths in Iraq in the period 2004-2009, of which 66,081 are civilians, 15,196 are Iraqi policemen and soldiers, and 3,771 are soldiers of the Coalition Forces (including 13 Bulgarians).

The published pages confirmed many of the existing suspicions regarding some of the most disgusting secrets of this war. One of which, for example, is the crucial role that private military companies like Blackwater have played in Iraq and Afghanistan. The three Bulgarian helicopter pilots killed near Tikrit in 2005 actually worked for Blackwater. Another secret pertains to the way the Bush administration systematically covered up information about the civilian victims of the war (surprised, aren’t you?). Still other reveals that the truth about prisoner abuse in places like Abu Ghraib far surpasses the cruelty that has been admitted to so far. According to these logs, the ones responsible for the security of the “new regime” in Iraq have been the most menacing torturers of them all (an even bigger surprise!), acting with the silent blessing of their American allies. The files documenting Iran’s support for the Shiites can potentially cause a diplomatic scandal. And so on…

The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde and Der Spiegel were given exclusive access to the materials on WikiLeaks. The prestigious journalistic institutions then came up with their own commentaries on the logs — supplemented with state-of-the-art multimedia options: probably an effort to hide their embarrassment, as their reporters were not the ones to unearth them. Nonetheless, I am not going to go as far as to proclaim WikiLeaks the new face of journalism, since the methods that its founder Julian Assange employs are also susceptible to serious criticism. For instance, it became clear that the Talibans in Afghanistan have read all the 77,000 documents released on WikiLeaks in July 2010, meticulously taking note of the names of America’s local allies. Is it worth leaking information, if it leads to new victims?

One thing, however, is beyond question: since the U.S. is the only world policeman at the moment, there is no one who can even write them a parking ticket. Thus, it would be a total death job, if it were not for those who appear from time to time, asking why Uncle Sam buys so much baking soda.