RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Coalition forces torture Iraqi prisoners

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pam said:


Well Dave, I could put as much effort in responding to you as Britneyspears--Whatever. But you see, reading misleading posts that disproportionize situations--Like the posts you've put forth have done just tell me to not bother. I've dealt with enough self centered and insufferable people to spot them from a mile away. And that's the case here, and it is such that I never want to affiliate myself with because they are impossible to convince. So I don't beat around the bush and just tell it like it is.

You can imply that I'm rude and that I'm disregarding parts of your posts that show you as someone who cares, but that doesn't lead me away from the fact that I find what you say to be....Distasteful for lack of a better word.

No worries though. This bloke Whomod seems to be scoring higher than you on the idiot-meter. He's almost tying with this other guy Mcdonough or.....Something that I'm reading up on in other threads.

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Originally posted by Dave:
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This story reads like the US have overthrown one tortuous regime and replaced it with another.

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Dave said:

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pam said:


Well Dave, I could put as much effort in responding to you as Britneyspears--Whatever. But you see, reading misleading posts that disproportionize situations--Like the posts you've put forth have done just tell me to not bother. I've dealt with enough self centered and insufferable people to spot them from a mile away. And that's the case here, and it is such that I never want to affiliate myself with because they are impossible to convince. So I don't beat around the bush and just tell it like it is.

You can imply that I'm rude and that I'm disregarding parts of your posts that show you as someone who cares, but that doesn't lead me away from the fact that I find what you say to be....Distasteful for lack of a better word.

No worries though. This bloke Whomod seems to be scoring higher than you on the idiot-meter. He's almost tying with this other guy Mcdonough or.....Something that I'm reading up on in other threads.

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Can't handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.

For all that I fundamentally disagree with Dave TWB, the G-man and others on a broad range of issues, at least they can each hold their own in an argument, and don't resort to "boo-hoo, you're impossible to convince so I won't bother to back up my position."

I'm capable of being persuaded to change my mind. There have been some very persuasive arguments on this board about issues like abortion and others, whcih have really got me thinking and compelled me to change my position.

But as for you....Honestly, with posts like yours, you're wasting our time here. All of the regular posters may radically disagree on a variety of issues, but at least we are capable of articulation.

Fiannly, you accuse me of "disproportionalising" the torture by US soliders of prisoners occurring in Iraq. What makes you think that, with all of the evidence now coming out, described on the radio this mornng as "thousands" of photographs, that I have "disproportionalised" it?

Oh yes, that's right: its because I'm a retard. Silly me.

Thanks for playing. The door is over there.

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Many in Middle East view deaths of U.S. contractors with indifference
Posted by: Editor on Thursday, April 22, 2004 - 02:00 PM

By Hannah Allam
Knight Ridder Newspapers

AMMAN, Jordan - One question emerged for many Arabs who watched the grisly images this week of four American civilians whose bodies were burned and mutilated after an ambush in Iraq:

So what?

While the horrific killings Wednesday in the restive town of Fallujah outraged Americans and prompted the U.S.-led coalition to vow an "overwhelming" response, the incident barely registered in the Middle East, where the big news was an Enrique Iglesias concert in Egypt. The dead contractors were largely forgotten.

"Who cares?" said Fida Alsha'er, a columnist for a Jordanian women's magazine. "It's another example of how American life is considered something very expensive, very important, while the Arab life is worth nothing."

The Uncle Sam restaurant sits in the heart of Amman, the Jordanian capital, and its sign is all-American red, white and blue. But that's where the kinship with the United States ends. Tamer, a 24-year-old waiter who wouldn't give his last name, watched Egyptian soap operas at the cafe Saturday instead of western channels that featured persisting questions of when the U.S. would retaliate.

"It's not good to celebrate mutilation, but Iraq is an Arab country under American occupation," Tamer said with a shrug. "Iraqis have the right to fight back."

The four Americans, who worked for a North Carolina security firm, were ambushed as they drove through Fallujah on Wednesday. A jeering mob kicked, beat and dragged their charred corpses through the street. Two bodies were shown hung on a bridge over the Euphrates River. Clerics on Friday denounced the dismemberment as a grave sin in Islam, but stopped short of condemning the killings.

The two most-watched Arab satellite channels, al Arabiya and al Jazeera, showed unusual restraint in their treatment of the images Wednesday. Arabiya aired most of the scene, but blurred the bodies. Jazeera refrained from showing any photos. It was not clear whether the decision was out of sensitivity or because the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council has in the past banned both stations for airing "inflammatory" footage.

In Iraq - as well as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Algeria and Egypt - newspapers ran initial reports of the incident at the bottom of the front page or buried inside. By this weekend, the papers either ignored developments in the story or stressed the failure of U.S. troops to stop the bloodshed in Iraq.

On Saturday, CNN International featured relatives eulogizing the dead men as freedom-loving heroes. Arabic-language news channels showed footage of Iraqis ripping, burning and trampling on the American flag at an unrelated demonstration. Most Arab media never even identified the slain men.


"There is so much animosity against Americans that people, on the whole, don't regard this mutilation as against individual corpses," said Labib Kamhawi, a Jordanian political analyst. "They feel this was something done against American policy, against America."

Amr al Azm, a 40-year-old Syrian archeologist, has given lectures in the United States on Arab jubilation at American deaths, particularly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He likens the situation to a speed demon cruising down the highway and cutting off other drivers. When the fast car crashes, al Azm said, the gut reaction of the law-abiding drivers is, "He got what he deserves."

That instinctive satisfaction of mighty America taking a loss, he added, was only intensified by Israel's assassination last month of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the beloved spiritual leader for the Palestinian militant group Hamas. An Israeli gunship fired three rockets at the elderly and disabled sheikh as he left a Gaza City mosque after prayers, sparking massive protests throughout the Arab world.

A shadowy group calling itself "Brigades of Martyr Ahmed Yassin" claimed responsibility for the Fallujah ambush in a statement that, like the attack itself, received little attention in the Arab world.

"It's not a big incident in the daily litany of woes in the Middle East," al Azm said in a telephone interview from his home in Damascus. "The Arab media is full of this stuff every single day. Just last week, we saw the mutilated remains of Sheikh Yassin and his wheelchair. Was there similar outrage in America over that?"

Hundreds of American troops in Iraq never saw the gruesome Fallujah footage in full because many satellite TV networks didn't show it and many Internet sites are blocked on U.S. bases. Marine Lt. Col. John Pioli, however, happened to be in Jordan and watched a snippet of the incident on Arab television.

"For 10 minutes, I was disgusted, upset, extremely angry and thinking that being here is a waste of my time," said Pioli, who is helping to rebuild the Iraqi military. "Then I thought, `Nope, there's still too much work to be done.' I want to do what I need to do so I can prevent my son from ever having to come here.

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What I'd like to know, Dave, is:
Where is your outrage for the four Americans killed in Fallujah three weeks ago, who were beaten to death, burned, had their bodies dismembered, had their vivisected bodies dragged by Iraqis through the streets of Fallujah, and then hung on display from a nearby bridge?
Where is your outrage, where is the world's outrage, at this?!?

And where is your outrage for al Qaida's beheading (beheading !!) on video ( !!) of an American civilian, Michael Berg. Something that has been graphically run repeatedly on arab news. No doubt to gleeful audiences throughout the muslim world.

From what I've seen, these incidents have largely been ignored and glossed over in Arab and European news. Selective rage is reserved for the shortcomings of the United States.

And as Fouad Ajami said in the PBS discussion I posted on page 2 of this topic (which you apparently ignored) the Arabs always have negative things to say about the United States, as do France, as do other anti-American factions and leftists worldwide. With or without Abu Ghraib.
The United States is already correcting its mistakes.

Our allies understand that this is war, and these kind of things, tragic as they are, unfortunate as they are, occasionally happen in war.
And for our enemies, it's just another excuse to attack the United States, just more feul for an already raging fire of partisan hatred for the United States.

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All those atrocities are outrageous but keep in mind they were done by thugs and terrorists. They're not really accountable to anyone except themselves and their own hatred. There is outrage over the prison scandal BECAUSE people expect better from the United States of America. Ever since the mercanaries' bodies were mutilated and now with the beheading, i've seen some people react as if the prison scandal is justified in light of these actions. As if it's OK to lower ourselves because our enemy is himself low. I'm not throwing blanket accusations of entire groups of people thinking this way mind you. I've just seen and read some people embrace this mindset.

Criminals will use any excuse for their actions. They murder for no other reason than that it makes them feel powerful in an unempowered society.

It's also refreshing to see the military deal with this in a swift and descisive manner. Still, there are a lot of unanswered questions of just how far up the OK to violate the Geneva Conventions went. I'm sure we'll get answers to that soon enough though. The torture of Iraqi prisoners (and prisoners in Guantanamo and Afghanistan) is not about our image in the world. It is about the dignity of human beings. Regardless of their crime. We are a nation of laws, not of vengance and retribution.

To read that we are now jailing the wives of suspected senior Baathist officials in hopes of coercing their husbands into providing information is unfathomable. That is guilt by association and it's been largely overshadowed by the prison abuse scandal. This runs completely counter to what we're supposed to stand for.

The U.S. government has taken us into a war that is justified as a God-given mission to bring freedom to the world, beginning with Iraq. Our qualifications for the mission are our high morals, exemplified, presumably, by the "spirit of the American people" often referred to by Bush. If we're to be taken seriously by the Arab world, we need to be true to our rhetoric.

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from TIME magazine, Sunday, May. 09, 2004
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THE SCANDAL'S GROWING STAIN:
Abuses by U.S. soldiers in Iraq shock the world and roil the Bush Administration. the inside story of what went wrong --and who's to blame
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By JOHANNA MCGEARY
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Haider Sabbar Abed al-Abbadi kept his shame to himself until the world saw him stripped naked, his head in a hood, a nude fellow prisoner kneeling before him simulating oral sex.
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"That is me," he claims to a Time reporter, as one of the lurid photographs of detained Iraqis suffering sexual humiliation at the hands of U.S. soldiers scrolls down a computer screen. "I felt a mouth close around my penis. It was only when they took the bag off my head that I saw it was my friend." In the nine months he spent in detention, al-Abbadi says he was never charged and never interrogated.
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On that awful November night, four months after his arrest, he thought he and six other prisoners were being punished for a petty scuffle. They were herded into Cellblock 1A. The guards cut off their clothes, and then the degrading demands began.
Through it all, al-Abbadi knew the Americans were taking photos, he says, "because I saw the flashbulbs go off through the bag over my head." He says he is the hooded man in the picture in which a petite, dark-haired woman in camouflage pants and an Army T shirt gives a thumbs-up as she points to a prisoner's genitals.
He says he was in the pileup of naked men ordered to lie on the backs of other detainees as a smiling soldier in glasses looks on.
And al-Abbadi says he was told to masturbate, though he was too scared to do more than pretend, as a female soldier flaunted her bare breasts.
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Those scenes, caught in shocking candor by someone's digital camera, played over and over last week in the world's newspapers and magazines and across the airwaves.
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Jarring new examples emerged: the same female soldier, holding a leash wrapped around the neck of a naked prisoner cringing at her feet. Even when the shots were pixilated or cropped for modesty, nothing could hide the raw cruelty of U.S. soldiers ridiculing the manhood of Iraqi captives.
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Of all places, these atrocities occurred at Abu Ghraib prison, once the infamous home of Saddam Hussein's torture chambers. The accounts of these misdeeds would be sickening in the best of times. But with each new revelation of abuses inflicted by U.S. troops in Iraq, it seems evident that the damage goes far beyond the appalling acts of a few miscreants.
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As public doubts about the war grow, the images of sadism symbolized all that is going wrong with the U.S. venture in Iraq. The photos touched off a global outcry, especially in the Arab world, where they provoked fresh fury among millions of Muslims opposed to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq and provided grist for every conspiracy theorist who claims the U.S. is bent on debasing Islam and humiliating Arabs.
"We're going to live with the consequences of this for the next 40 years," says a senior White House official, and few would accuse him of exaggeration.
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Most immediately, the scandal has imperiled the U.S. effort to pacify Iraq by turning even more ordinary Iraqis against the occupation and reinforcing the sense that control is slipping everywhere, less than two months before the U.S. is due to hand sovereignty back to the nation.
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Nothing the Bush Administration said or did could contain the damage. The President, who says he first learned of the existence of the photographs when they were aired two weeks ago on CBS's 60 Minutes II, went on Arab television to proclaim the abusive treatment "abhorrent" behavior that "does not represent the America that I know."
His words weren't enough to dent the outrage of Muslims who wondered why he failed to apologize.
A day later Bush finally said he was sorry, but America's image in much of the Arab world may well be irredeemable. U.S. officials tried to portray the sordid scenes as the isolated acts of a few low-ranking soldiers who were violating U.S. policy. The military, they pointed out, has already rooted out the offenders and is disciplining them.
"Please don't for a moment think that's the entire U.S. military, because it's not," said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, spokesman for coalition forces in Iraq. But the horror stories keep coming.
An Army investigation of conditions at Abu Ghraib concluded that prison guards had carried out "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton abuse" for months.
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The Army is investigating reports of crimes committed at other detention facilities in Iraq. Testifying before the Senate last Friday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the Pentagon has obtained more photos and video footage that show U.S. troops engaged in even worse behavior. "We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience," Senator Lindsey Graham said. "We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges."
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A senior Pentagon official tells TIME that the Pentagon is considering the possibility of showing the unseen material to members of Congress. The scandal has metastasized into a full-blown political crisis as Washington tries to figure out who to blame.
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The seven reservists involved in the photographed abuses have been charged with conspiracy, maltreatment and indecent acts.
And six additional soldiers up the chain of command have been severely reprimanded and one was admonished.
But many are looking for accountability higher up.
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Rumsfeld took most of the fire after the White House put out word he had been chastised by Bush for not reporting how bad the allegations were or warning that the photos were about to break on 60 Minutes II.
Called on the carpet by furious members of Congress, Rumsfeld conceded, "I failed to identify the catastrophic damage that the allegations of abuse could do to our operations in the theater, to the safety of our troops in the field, to the cause to which we are committed."
A senior Pentagon official says Rumsfeld is more shaken than in any previous crisis.
"He's not a man of self-doubt," says the official, but he's "questioning himself and others more rigorously than previously."
Rumsfeld told Senators that he intends to keep his job, but he betrayed doubts about his future.
"If I felt I could not be effective, I'd resign in a minute," he said.
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Asked by Indiana Senator Evan Bayh whether it "would serve to demonstrate how seriously we take the situation" if he were to step down, Rumsfeld responded, "That's possible."
Evidence that further abuses took place under his watch could well raise the pressure on him to resign. To see if more probes should be initiated, Rumsfeld plans to appoint a blue-ribbon panel of retired officials to examine the slew of investigations into prison management and guard training now under way.
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The Army is studying the deaths of 25 detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, including two that have been ruled homicides, while the Justice Department is examining the role of the CIA and contract employees in the deaths of three other detainees.
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So many questions remain unresolved.
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Were the Abu Ghraib abuses carried out by rogue officers or done on someone's orders?
Were they an excessive campaign for intelligence, or humiliation for fun?
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Did the U.S. get useful intelligence, or was it a nasty waste?
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As Americans struggle to make sense of the news, they want to understand:
Why did this happen?
And what is being done about it?
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A HOUSE OF HORRORS
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The trouble at Abu Ghraib was a long time brewing. The 260-acre prison complex lies behind tall walls off a highway 20 miles west of Baghdad.
In the days of Saddam it housed thousands of criminals and political prisoners who were subjected to unspeakable torture at the whim of the regime.
The U.S. military decided to reopen the prison last August for all Iraqis being detained and renamed it the Baghdad Correctional Facility.
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But reminders of the prison's grim history were inescapable. From the ceiling of each 10-ft.-by-12-ft. cell still dangled a large hook, which had been used to hang inmates from their hands or feet.
Waleed Sabih al-Delami, detained after soldiers found suspicious wires near his house, tells Time the Americans picked up where Saddam left off. He says he was suspended from such a hook three times during his five-month stint in U.S. custody at Abu Ghraib.
His feet were tied, and his arms were bound behind his back.
"They would take a stick and put it through the rope and pull me off the ground," he says. While he was bound and suspended, a military translator stood by him, shouting: "You are a terrorist! You are a terrorist!"
But no real questioning took place.
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Guarding the thousands of detainees sent to Abu Ghraib by coalition forces across Iraq was a nasty billet for the 800th Military Police Brigade, which includes the reserve 372nd Military Police Company, and the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which also operated there.
A senior military official who lived at Abu Ghraib says soldiers were underequipped and undermanned. The reservists in particular had virtually no training for their prison-guard jobs.
Discipline flagged.
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In November and December, around the time most of the abuse photos were taken, Abu Ghraib was under constant attack from nightly mortar raids.
Basic sanitation for the troops consisted of overflowing portable toilets, and soldiers jerry-rigged showers from pumps they bought themselves.
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Six months after reopening as a prison, Abu Ghraib still had no single declared commander.
All the while, detainees kept flooding in, at the rate of 250 a day. When the abuses occurred, there were some 6,000 prisoners. The MPs had no good system for keeping prison rolls: criminals, insurgents and innocents were all lumped together. Escapees and some detainees believed to be of high intelligence value went unrecorded.
In September 2003, Major General Geoffrey Miller, commander of the secret U.S. detention center for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, visited Iraq to straighten out the prison. He recommended that the MPs should act not just as guards but as "enablers for interrogation."
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In November, a second visiting general advised the exact opposite, saying MPs should have nothing to do with interrogation.
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The conflict had apparently not been resolved by the prison's top brass when the photographed abuses occurred.
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Between October and December of last year, the poorly trained, demoralized reservists in the 372nd crossed the line. William Lawson, uncle of Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick II, claims that his nephew and the other guards were following orders when they tortured and sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners. The MPs told investigators they did it because officers in the military-intelligence unit and civilian contractors working with them told them to "loosen up" men for interrogation.
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Sabrina Harman, who appears in one photograph grinning behind a pile of naked detainees, told the Washington Post that the MPs were instructed by military-intelligence officers to "make it hell" on the prisoners in order to make them talk. Now facing possible court-martial, Harman is allegedly the one who attached wires to a hooded man's hands and forced him to stand on a box, threatening him with electrocution if he fell off.
If the soldiers were following orders, why did they photograph themselves in the act?
The MPs claim the pictures too were meant to serve as a psychological tool to scare new prisoners into talking.
Frederick's uncle says the platoon had tried to soften them up with techniques like sleep deprivation, "but they found the best way was with these photographs, and it apparently worked very effectively." Lawson says his nephew complained about some of the measures and was told, "Don't worry about it."
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Yet the photos, showing MPs smiling and mugging as they degrade their prisoners, suggest that the accused were hardly acting against their will.
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Reports of scandalous U.S. behavior inside Abu Ghraib have circulated in Iraq since the day it reopened.
Amnesty International raised questions back in July, but coalition forces blamed any trouble on the general disorganization of the occupation's early months. Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) brought serious allegations of abuse (which they are bound to keep confidential) to U.S. attention beginning in October.
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Pierre Gassman, head of the ICRC delegation in charge of Iraq, told TIME that his team found credible, disturbing evidence of mistreatment after interviewing virtually all the prisoners during that visit.
The Red Cross reported its findings to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the overall prison commander, and to staff officers attached to the office of Lieut. General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Baghdad.
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In February, after more prisoner interviews, Red Cross officials sent a comprehensive report directly to the staffs of Sanchez and L. Paul Bremer, head of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority.
Later that month, Gassman met with Bremer and Sanchez. Gassman says he had the impression that the officials were aware of the allegations of prison abuses before he entered the room.
They were.
For months Bremer's authority had been hearing complaints from released prisoners and families of those still in detention. The State Department knew enough to realize, says a senior official, "this was going to be a problem."
Aides to Bremer and Secretary of State Colin Powell say that as early as last fall, both men raised the issue in meetings with the rest of the Administration's national-security team.
Yet no action was taken until mid-January, when Specialist Joseph Darby, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company, got hold of some of the incriminating photographs. He slipped an anonymous note under the door of a superior officer, reporting the misbehavior, and then turned over the photos proving it.
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Beginning the next day, the Army launched a discrete investigation. Sanchez immediately admonished Karpinski for "serious deficiencies" and quietly suspended her from command.
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In January Sanchez ordered a full-scale probe of prison practices under the charge of Major General Antonio Taguba, who completed his "Secret/ No Foreign Dissemination" report in early March.
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The report, first obtained by The New Yorker two weeks ago and now on the Internet, blames MP commanders for poor leadership and a refusal to enforce basic standards.
But it points to plenty of other failings as well.
Overcrowded cells held too many prisoners guarded by unsupervised reservists with inadequate training.
Left on their own, the soldiers of the 372nd practiced systematic and illegal abuse beyond what appeared in the photos, including forcing prisoners to wear women's underwear, pouring phosphoric liquid on prisoners, sodomizing a man with a chemical light and using dogs, which Muslims consider unclean, to intimidate detainees.
Taguba's report supports the contention of MPs like Frederick that the soldiers were told that inflicting such indignities would "set the conditions" for favorable interrogation by military-intelligence officers, CIA officers and private contractors.
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Taguba concluded that a quartet of military-intelligence officers and civilian contractors "were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib." According to testimony from another accused abuser, Sergeant Javal Davis, military-intelligence officers essentially egged the guards on:
"Loosen this guy up for us. Make sure he gets the treatment."
Davis testified that military-intelligence officers praised Specialist Charles Graner, another of the accused, for his efforts, using "statements like 'Good job, they're breaking down real fast.'"
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On March 20, the military announced that...
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Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick,
Spc. Sabrina D. Harman,
Sgt. Javal S. Davis,
Spc. Charles A. Graner,
Spc. Megan Ambuhl
and Private Jeremy Sivits
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...of the 372nd Military Police Company were being held in Iraq and charged with conspiracy, dereliction of duty, assault, maltreatment and indecent acts.
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A seventh soldier, PFC Lynndie R. England, the jaunty G.I. Jane in many of the photos, who is now pregnant, was sent to Fort Bragg, N.C., where she was later charged with the same offenses.
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Six soldiers up the chain of command were given formal reprimands that will end their military careers, and one was less severely admonished.
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Although Taguba recommended firing the two civilian contractors, their U.S. companies say the Pentagon has made no such formal requests yet..

The Justice Department is trying to figure out if the private contractors can be prosecuted under any U.S. law.
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Devastating as it is, the Taguba report only addresses one set of abuses. Though U.S. officials insist that the Abu Ghraib crimes were rare instances of misconduct, the problem may well be more widespread.
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Britain's Ministry of Defense is investigating 12 cases of civilian death, injury or mistreatment in Iraq at the hands of British soldiers, and is considering action against troops for six deaths.
Charges of mistreatment of Iraqi detainees by four British soldiers are also being investigated.
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Freed detainees have scores of horror stories to tell.
Though most of the accounts have not been corroborated, the scandal makes anything seem possible.
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Nabil Shakar Abdul Razaq al-Taiee, 54, a retired electrical worker who was arrested last December, told TIME that as recently as March, he witnessed soldiers beating prisoners, including a mentally unstable man who was thrown in a shipping container and pummeled and taunted for days.
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Another former prisoner, Mohammed Unis Hassan, was arrested by U.S. forces for looting a bank last July. He told Time of a seven-month odyssey through the prison system that included beatings, humiliation and soldiers having sex with female detainees.
At the Baghdad airport holding pen, he laughed at interrogators who asked if he knew which terrorists were exploding bombs.
When he failed to provide information, they beat him with a cable or a riot stick on the back of the legs. He saw U.S. soldiers strip the clothes off a fellow inmate and put their feet on his head, making him lie naked on the ground for hours.
Mohammed claimed that prisoners, angered by the death of an old man forced to lie on his face, loosened a tent pole and hit a U.S. soldier so hard that "he died."
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Eventually Mohammed, 24, wound up in a cell at Abu Ghraib, where he was beaten for hiding a pack of cigarettes.
A woman soldier that he recalled as "so beautiful" pushed his arms through the bars of the cell and cuffed them so tightly he couldn't move. Then, he says, she poked his eye with her finger so hard he couldn't see afterward. Three months after the incident, Mohammed's left eye was gray and glassy, allowing only modest vision of blurry shapes. He says the guards at Abu Ghraib drank whisky and walked the halls with cans of beer.
And he says he saw an American guard having regular sex with an Iraqi woman prisoner on the floor above and across the hall from his cell.
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WHAT DID THEY KNOW?
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The firestorm of outrage provoked by the Abu Ghraib pictures seemed to catch U.S. officials by surprise.
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Army General John Abizaid, chief of the U.S. Central Command that oversees Iraq, told Time that after learning of the abuses in January, he sent word of it to General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Though military investigators had been aware for months that graphic photos existed, Pentagon officials showed no particular urgency in finding out how bad they were or informing anyone else about them.
When Myers learned several weeks ago that CBS was about to air the pictures, he persuaded the network to delay the broadcast for two weeks. An earlier telecast might jeopardize the safety of Americans held hostage by Iraqi insurgents, he said, and further inflame anti-U.S. tensions in the country.
But amazingly, Myers hadn't actually seen the pictures. When he appeared on television four days after they were broadcast, he admitted he hadn't read Taguba's report yet. Rumsfeld's response was equally clueless. Just hours before the CBS show, says Republican Senator John McCain, Rumsfeld trooped up to S-407, the secure Intelligence Committee room in the Capitol, "and briefed us on how they're armoring the humvees. Rumsfeld never mentioned a word about the story that was to run that evening."
Democrats and Republicans alike were furious that the Defense Secretary had kept them in the dark about the looming scandal.
"If the answer is, 'He didn't know much and that's why he didn't tell us,'" said Representative John Spratt, a senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, "then the follow-up question is, 'Why didn't he know much?'"
When Rumsfeld fielded questions at a press conference early last week, he still hadn't read the entire Taguba report either.
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And Rumsfeld neglected to inform the most important person of all: his Commander in Chief.
Rumsfeld advised Bush in February of an "issue" involving mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq, says a senior White House aide. But he didn't warn anyone that cbs was about to document the abuse with shocking photos.
Throughout official Washington, there is little agreement about whether the malfeasance at Abu Ghraib was isolated or is symptomatic of a broad breakdown of interrogation standards.
A senior White House aide says the abuse had nothing to do with interrogations but was the work of a handful of bad hats, egged on by a ringleader who was doing it for kicks. "It was the night shift," he says.
Military officers tell TIME that reserve Brigadier General Karpinski was responsible for the wrong-doing.
"When a commander says, 'I didn't know,' that in itself is an indictment," says a senior officer serving in Iraq.
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But the practices employed at Abu Ghraib may be more widespread than the U.S. has acknowledged.
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Human rights groups and many military experts say the Administration's approach to prosecuting the war on terrorism, including open-ended detention of captives, denial of due process and intense pressure to come up with "productive" interrogations, may have created a climate that fosters abuse.
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One U.S. official says that some FBI agents were well aware that the military was using "very aggressive" interrogation methods that would not be condoned in the U.S.
An Army officer seems to confirm that.
Among Arab men, he tells TIME, sexual insecurity is a powerful lever: fear of homosexuality and, almost as significant, female domination, are particular issues.
"We don't like to talk about it," says the officer, "but it is working."
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If so, success has come at a staggering cost.
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LOSING THE WAR
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Once all the apologies were spoken, a battered Administration was searching for more tangible ways to repair the damage.
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Major General Miller has been hustled back to Baghdad to fix the prison system.
He promised to halve the number of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and end the practice of hooding captives.
But he refused to entirely rule out the use of other tactics, like sleep deprivation and "stress positions," if they were approved by a senior officer.
A senior Pentagon official says Rumsfeld has taken a personal interest in coming up with a dollar figure to compensate Iraqis who have been wronged.
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Abizaid tells TIME that he thinks the outrage will fade as the U.S. demonstrates its willingness to take action against the perpetrators.
"Our openness about it," he says, "is a lesson about the rule of law."
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As the President told Arab interviewers, "A dictator wouldn't be answering questions about this."
Nevertheless, the scandal has made it exceedingly difficult for the U.S. to build support for its faltering project in Iraq by pointing to good intentions.
.
Bush has always seemed his most impassioned when he railed against Saddam's "torture chambers" and "rape rooms."
As other rationales for invasion ( like Iraq's alleged store of weapons of mass destruction ) evaporated, the purpose of human liberation had remained.
Even last week Bush was telling an audience in Michigan, "Because we acted, the torture rooms are closed."
The newest inhuman prison scenes struck at the very heart of his claim that the U.S. was in Iraq to promote freedom and liberty.
"This is our greatest strength," says Republican Representative Christopher Shays, "and we've blown it."
.
For many Iraqis, no amount of U.S. generosity or contrition will ever erase the taste of humiliation conveyed by the photographs, especially given the symbolic importance of Abu Ghraib. It was Saddam's torture chamber, and now it's ours.
.

TIME contributing writers and editors to this story:
Timothy J. Burger, James Carney, Sally B. Donnelly, Michael Duffy, Elaine Shannon, Viveca Novak, Douglas Waller, Michael Weisskopf and Adam Zagorin; Mark Thompson; Brian Bennett, Paul Quinn-Judge, Simon Robinson and Vivienne Walt; Helen Gibson

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"The Whomod Technique"
http://www.rkmbs.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=258330&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=&vc=1&PHPSESSID=
( got a lot to chew on here, don't ya ? )

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whomod said:
It's quite healthy IMO to connect with your feminine part of your brain but I draw the line at referring to it as a seperate individual.

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Sorry Mod but I don't have a penis. And I'm beginning to think you don't either considering how much it looks like your compensating. I mean....All the articles you seem to love posting.

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Several published sources say video footage exists of Iraqi guards raping young boys while U.S. servicemen watch and of U.S. servicemen raping an Iraqi woman.

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Most detainees were civilians, and few were suspected of terrorism. The Red Cross, in its February report on conditions in Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, estimates that 70 to 90 percent of Iraqi detainees were picked up erroneously. This means that most of the people who endured this treatment were as innocent of terrorism as you or I...

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pam said:

Sorry Mod but I don't have a penis. And I'm beginning to think you don't either considering how much it looks like your compensating. I mean....All the articles you seem to love posting.

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It's been adressed already but really, besides contributing nothing but petty insults and misplaced bravado, do you have anything at all to say that sounds more mature than say the insults one would hear in a Jr. high schoolyard?

And please, then explain what you DIDN'T like about the article I posted in a more intelligent way than simply saying "Arabs,fuck 'em". which is what i'm expecting.

Because if you're incapable of articulation and intelligent discourse, then I don't need to further waste my time adressing you.

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whomod said:
And please, then explain what you DIDN'T like about the article I posted in a more intelligent way than simply saying "Arabs,fuck 'em".

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Wait wait wait!! Are you saying that I implied that Arabs should be fucked or are you saying that you decided to be immature awhile ago and posted something along those lines?


..................A hell, maybe a note.

Well, y'see Who, I could let a bunch of publicists that I don't truly have ALL my faith in do the talking for me here, but then this wouldn't be a real discussion. A bit like you seem to opt in not making it when you get cornered on a subject (as I've noticed along the way). But if posting huge articles that couldn't possibly be finished in one sitting is the proper way to discuss, then I could grab the equivilent of 3 sunday newspapers and post them here that disclose my Conservative views ad nauseum.

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JQ said:
This whole scandal keeps getting worse and worse.

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Most detainees were civilians, and few were suspected of terrorism. The Red Cross, in its February report on conditions in Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, estimates that 70 to 90 percent of Iraqi detainees were picked up erroneously. This means that most of the people who endured this treatment were as innocent of terrorism as you or I...

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As further proof some of the prisoners tortured weren't criminals or terrorists, look at todays headline: U.S. soldiers release 300 Iraqi's from prison.

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Dave said:
Its clear you are new here. Can you contribute something intelligent? I personally haven't called anyone a "retard" since I was 11.

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Rumsfeld Approved Iraq Interrogation Plan -Report

Sat May 15, 4:18 PM ET

By Jeremy Pelofsky

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a plan that brought unconventional interrogation methods to Iraq (news - web sites) to gain intelligence about the growing insurgency, ultimately leading to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, the New Yorker magazine reported on Saturday.

Rumsfeld, who has been under fire for the prisoner abuse scandal, gave the green light to methods previously used in Afghanistan (news - web sites) for gathering intelligence on members of al Qaeda, which the United States blames for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the magazine reported on its Web site.

Pentagon spokesman Jim Turner said he had not seen the story and could not comment. The article hits newsstands on Monday.

U.S. interrogation techniques have come under scrutiny amid revelations that prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad were kept naked, stacked on top of one another, forced to engage in sex acts and photographed in humiliating poses.

Rumsfeld, who has rejected calls by some Democrats and a number of major newspapers to resign, returned on Friday from a surprise trip to Iraq and Abu Ghraib prison, calling the scandal a "body blow." Seven soldiers have been charged.

The abuse prompted worldwide outrage and has shaken U.S. global prestige as President Bush (news - web sites) seeks re-election in November. Bush has backed Rumsfeld and said the abuse was abhorrent but the wrongful actions of only a few soldiers.

The U.S. military has now prohibited several interrogation methods from being used in Iraq, including sleep and sensory deprivation and body "stress positions," defense officials said on Friday.


SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM

The New Yorker said the interrogation plan was a highly classified "special access program," or SAP, that gave advance approval to kill, capture or interrogate so-called high-value targets in the battle against terror.

Such secret methods were used extensively in Afghanistan but more sparingly in Iraq -- only in the search for former President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) and weapons of mass destruction. As the Iraqi insurgency grew and more U.S. soldiers died, Rumsfeld and Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone expanded the scope to bring the interrogation tactics to Abu Ghraib, the article said.

The magazine, which based its article on interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, reported the plan was approved and carried out last year after deadly bombings in August at the U.N. headquarters and Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad.

A former intelligence official quoted in the article said Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, approved the program but may not have known about the abuse.


'DO WHAT YOU WANT'

The rules governing the secret operation were "grab whom you must. Do what you want," the unidentified former intelligence official told the New Yorker.

Rumsfeld left the details of the interrogations to Cambone, the article quoted a Pentagon consultant as saying.

"This is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program," said the Pentagon consultant in the article.

U.S. officials have admitted the abuse may have violated the Geneva Convention, which governs treatment of prisoners of war.

The New Yorker said the CIA (news - web sites), which approved using high-pressure interrogation tactics against senior al Qaeda leaders after the 2001 attacks, balked at extending them to Iraq and refused to participate

After initiating the secret techniques, the U.S. military began learning useful intelligence about the insurgency, the former intelligence official was quoted as saying.

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http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/index.htm

Dick Cheney bluntly urged the defense secretary's critics to cease and desist. "Don Rumsfeld is the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had," said Cheney, a former defense secretary himself, through a spokesman. "People ought to let him do his job." That drew an unusually tart rejoinder from [GOP Sen Lindsey] Graham of South Carolina.

He called Cheney's comment "inappropriate" at a time investigations were still under way. "As to the White House," Graham added, "please don't say things like 'get off his back.' We just don't want a bunch of privates and sergeants to be the scapegoats here," Graham said, without pointing a finger at anyone. "This is about system failure, this is about felony offenses. Nobody's on their back. We're doing our job."

Last Sunday, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a member of the Senate committees on foreign relations and intelligence, said there were "probably in the range of 30" investigations under way into the treatment of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan under U.S. control.

"There are many, many investigations ongoing now as a result of deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, deaths that came at the hands of United States officials," he said on CBS' "Face the Nation," noting that some have been referred to the Justice Department.

"This is deeper and wider than I think most in this administration understand," Hagel said. "Aside from the fact that we're losing the Iraqi people, we're losing the Muslim-Arab world, and we're losing the support of our allies."

Some of you would call these Republicans "RINOS [republican in name only]" if you're not calling them"fucking liberals" or just outright "traitors". I Just call them sane people.

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The Defense Department strongly denied the claims made in the report, which cited unnamed current and former intelligence officials and was published on the magazine's Web site. Pentagon (news - web sites) spokesman Lawrence Di Rita issued a statement calling the claims "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture."

" No responsible official of the Department of Defense (news - web sites) approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos," Di Rita said in his statement. "This story seems to reflect the fevered insights of those with little, if any, connection to the activities in the Department of Defense."

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U.S. Atrocities in Iraq
It's the end of the semester at George Mason University, and for the past couple of weeks, I've been too busy preparing final exam harassment for my students to pay much attention to all the news stories about how U.S. soldiers were torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. Now that my spring semester's work has just about been completed, I decided to bring myself up to speed on these American atrocities.


I braced myself for the worst. Part of my 1959 Fort Jackson, S.C., basic training involved lessons on evasion and escape. Our drill sergeant, who had fought in the Korean War, told us about how North Koreans tortured American prisoners of war. His graphic descriptions gave us added incentive to pay attention to what we were being taught about evasion and escape.


Remembering his graphic descriptions, and given the worldwide condemnation of our soldiers, I was prepared to see pictures of American soldiers engaged in atrocities such as: eye gouging, piercing of prisoners' hands and knees with electric drills, beating soles of prisoners' feet, cigarette burns, fingernail extraction, whipping and placing prisoners in acid baths. I also thought I might see pictures of Iraqis looking like the diseased and starved World War II American prisoners of the Japanese who were brutally marched from Bataan to Camp O'Donnell. When they were liberated from Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, many didn't weigh much over 100 pounds, if that.


Much to my surprise, I saw none of this. What I saw in no way could be described as torture or atrocities, at least if we stick to historical definitions of torture and atrocities. Among the pictures I saw were: Pfc. Lynndie England with a dog leash tied to a naked Iraqi. Iraqi prisoners forced to parade naked before their jeering captors. Two American soldiers — a male and a female — forcing a group of Iraqi prisoners into simulating group sex. An American female soldier playing with two naked Iraqi captives. A British soldier urinating on an Iraqi prisoner. Of the pictures I saw, the worst acts shown were an Iraqi woman being gang-raped and an American soldier putting a rifle butt to an Iraqi prisoner's groin.









These acts aren't anything that Americans should be proud of, but at the same time, they don't qualify as torture and atrocities so far as those terms have been historically defined. Moreover, they are mild in comparison to the kind of prison treatment to which Iraqis have become accustomed.


Before we condemn our soldiers too much, we might consider that this war is the most humane war ever fought. In toppling the Saddam Hussein regime, there were relatively few non-combatant casualties. Afterward, our troops and American and foreign civilians went to great lengths to begin to rebuild the country, and much of that rebuilding has little to do with what was destroyed in war.


How has this unprecedented effort been rewarded? Our soldiers have been ambushed and murdered by Hussein holdouts and Muslim fanatics. American and foreign civilians have been brutally murdered and their corpses treated in unspeakable ways — and all of this to the glee of large Iraqi mobs. We should keep in mind that our soldiers are humans. I think it's understandable that they might want revenge against perpetrators who've been involved with the murder and maiming of their comrades.


Don't get me wrong about this. Their actions are not to be condoned. But if President Bush and Congress want to know whether our soldiers' actions constitute torture, I suggest they ask former American Japanese POWs or, better yet, ask former Hanoi Hilton resident Sen. John McCain.


By the way, if our soldiers are to be court-martialed for anything, it should be for stupidity — stupidity of permitting photos to be taken of what they were doing.


-Walter Williams

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the G-man said:

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Dave said:
Its clear you are new here. Can you contribute something intelligent? I personally haven't called anyone a "retard" since I was 11.

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Just out of curiosity, Dave, were you as offended/shocked/mildly annoyed/whatever by whomod calling a group of us, myself included, "fucktards" as you are with pam calling you a retard?

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Dave said:
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britneyspearsatemyshorts said:
and i believe what will [separate] us from the thugs is we will punish those who did this, and not condone it.....

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And he's absolutely correct, and its a credit to the US military that it works like that.
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But the damage has been done. Dave TWB misses the point in my comment:
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Dave said:
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This story reads like the US have overthrown one tortuous regime and replaced it with another.

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and reads it as
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Dave the Wonder Boy said:
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You say there is no difference between the U.S. military occupation, and the murderous tyranny of Saddam. That is an infuriatingly partisan and anti-American distortion.

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Yes, it is both partisan and an anti-American distortion, but I don't say it. You've put up a strawman, offering an incorrect interpretation of what I've said for the purpose of furthering your own argument. Read it again. This story, about the torture of Iraqi nationals, does read like a torturous regime has been replaced by another - and this is what people in the Middle East are reading. The reality is no doubt different to how this is being played in the Middle Eastern press.
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And now go and read what I said to bsams in reponse to whether he asked if I really believed it. While the torture of prisoners is clearly systemic, I don't think its a government policy.

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britneyspearsatemyshorts said:
as far as i can tell he's the least political person in politics, i watched the senate comittee hearing for the white houses 25 billion fund for the war and he asked very smart and direct questions regardless if it was good for the white house or for the democrats, on the other side of the isle i find Lieberman to be very unpolitical too.....

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Dave the Wonder Boy said:


In your prior comments here, you clearly heap disproportionate condemnation on the U.S. for actions far less barbarous than what Iraqi resisance and al Qaida inflict on U.S. civilians and soldiers.

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And ad-lib when called on it.

You can circumvent the truth all you like, but anyone who reads these two quotes of yours and mine (in the above post)can plainly see that you share the views of "the story".
"The story reads..."(which is shorthand for how the press distorts U.S. harrassment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, in the anti-American Arab, European and other global press, disproportionately labeling as "American atrocities" the renegade actions of a small pocket of U.S.soldiers, the exact number of soldiers and officers investigated of which detailed in the TIME cover story article I posted above. In all, less than 20, UNauthorized abuses, out of 135,000 U.S. troops currently in Iraq. Turned in by U.S. soldiers, court-martialed by U.S. soldiers, actions condemned and apologized for all the way up the chain of command, all the way to the President, by a special appearance on two Arab news networks, no less.)

"The story reads", as you say, yes.

But you also hold the U.S. to a higher standard, while infuriatingly alleging that because the U.S. is expected to do good things in Iraq or any country, that the good is not worthy of reporting, only the bad.

"The story reads" is your own unclear shorthand for "the Arab press spins it as...". I understand that now, but it was unclear to me in your earlier posted comment. But it's not a strawman argument on my part as you allege. It's your own shorthand lack of clarity.

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And given how you feel that the Arab, and global, anti-American press should on principle spin it that way, because Americans are the representatives of democracy and espouse bringing these democratic principles to Iraq, and any abuses should be emphasized, and any progress and benevolent action should be ignored by the press and not reported (because, as you say, it's expected that America does these benevolent things. How can it be "expected" by people in the Arab world and elsewhere globally, if these benevolent and democratic-process American things are never reported, only the mis-steps? It's an infuriatingly distorted notion.)

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Given these stated views of yours, even after you've explained your views with clarification I still fail to see how I've misrepresented your views in some kind of alleged "strawman" argument.

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If four cops in L.A. beat up a suspect, that doesn't undermine the criminal justice system in California. Those are the actions of four cops, not those of the legal system of California. And those cops are accountable before the California legal system for the laws they violated.

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The soldiers in Iraq are similarly facing court-martial.
The disciplinary system in Iraq's military prisons are being completely overhauled.
Apologies have been exhaustively made at every level of the U.S. military and government.

Whether to say it as your personal opinion, or in a more veiled way as "the story", endorsing coverage of it in this way, as "American atrocities", in a twisted misrepresentation of what the U.S. is doing to democratize Iraq, that ignores all the good being done, it is still very partisan and distorted of you to say:
"This story reads like the US have overthrown one tortuous regime and replaced it with another."

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That's not a "strawman argument", it's your own lack of clarity, and your own wordplay and circumnavigation of your previously stated views. Or perhaps just your not fully realized understanding of the full ramifications of covering "the story" in the manner you suggest.

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Originally posted by Dave:
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Originally posted by Dave the Wonder Boy:
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If four cops in L.A. beat up a suspect, that doesn't undermine the criminal justice system in California. Those are the actions of four cops, not those of the legal system of California. And those cops are accountable before the California legal system for the laws they violated.

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Actually, I think it does undermine the legal system in California, and so did the rioters who protested when the cops in the Rodney King trial were acquitted. Perhaps you've picked a bad analogy.

In any event, we are not talking about 4 bad cops bashing a guy on the street. What we have here is an already volitile situation where many soldiers tortured prisoners, and who say they were told by their superior officers to do this.

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Originally posted by Dave:
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Dave the Wonder Boy said:
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That's not a "strawman argument", it's your own lack of clarity, and your own wordplay and circumnavigation of your previously stated views. Or perhaps just your not fully realized understanding of the full ramifications of covering "the story" in the manner you suggest.

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The sad thing about the story and how it portrays U.S. democratic institutions is that it was disclosed by the "liberal press".
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Many Arabs are going to think, "oh, those soldiers are being court marshalled and punished only because the stories were shown on TV by an independent press".
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It took 60 Minutes to bring this to light. The photos were not disclosed by the US government in a "we're coming clean and we're willing to make amends" press conference. If not for 60 Minutes, the photos might never have seen the light of day, and the soldiers would have been honourably discharged at the conclusion of their tours. And many people in the Middle East, and elsewhere, are going to rapidly draw that conclusion from the damage control that the White House has mounted.
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So, hooray for the liberal press.
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A question for those people who believe in "an eye for an eye" justice..... Seeing the beheading by the terrorists of the American man no doubt makes many people think that the terroists should be treated in a similar manner. Its a barbaric crime, and many people understandably might think it deserves an appropriately gruesome response.
.
Bear in mind that this crime was reportedly in response to the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers - clearly, this was disproportionate as well as inhuman and cruel. How do you think the American soldiers should be dealt with, if you believe in an "eye for an eye"? Wouldn't it also be inhumane to force them to engage in the same poses for photographers?

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I say, screw the liberal press, for even concocting that notion.

As the TIME cover story article I posted makes clear, these abuses and photos are from the October 2003 to December 2003 period.

Letters reporting the abuses were written to Senators --both Republican and Democrat-- to military commanders in Iraq, to the civilian authority in Iraq (Paul Bremer's office), to the Pentagon and Joint Chiefs, to Rumsfeld's office, and to President Bush himself. Many of these inquired with each other, and yet all took took several months time to see that it was a real situation.

I dislike how this is portrayed as "Bush's failure of leadership". Everyone in the checks and balances system made a similar failure of leadership, for about 8 to 12 weeks.
But it was a short-term lapse, not a total failure of the system. Which I think is a reasonable period of time for questions of impropriety to be investigated.
It could have happened faster, but 8-12 weeks is not outrageous. It wasn't like this went on for years, unchecked.

Investigation began in January, and the military police in question were relieved of duty within days.
The investigation has been going on since January.
The involvement of the press (the liberal press) did nothing but compound, exploit, exacerbate and distort what truly occurred, before all the facts have been investigated, creating a distorted Arab rage that further endangers U.S. troops (specific example: Berg's beheading four days after the story broke).

~

And yes, I did read your exchange with britney. I don't agree with your interpretation, that your exchange with britney gave any clarity to your prior comments that I somehow missed.
And I certainly always read the previous posts to a topic before I post a response.

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Dave the Wonder Boy said:
Well, T-Dave, while I disagree with some of your last post, I do appreciate the more polite discourse, and even your acknowledgement on a few points.

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Originally posted by Dave:
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Originally posted by Dave the Wonder Boy:
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If four cops in L.A. beat up a suspect, that doesn't undermine the criminal justice system in California. Those are the actions of four cops, not those of the legal system of California. And those cops are accountable before the California legal system for the laws they violated.

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Actually, I think it does undermine the legal system in California, and so did the rioters who protested when the cops in the Rodney King trial were acquitted. Perhaps you've picked a bad analogy.

In any event, we are not talking about 4 bad cops bashing a guy on the street. What we have here is an already volitile situation where many soldiers tortured prisoners, and who say they were told by their superior officers to do this.

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I think the analogy is still a good one. Four L.A. cops wearing badges ostensibly represent the legal system of California.
But they were not acting in a manner consistent with California law, and they were charged with those violations.

Similarly, the 7 U.S. military police, their 8 superior officers who looked the other way and let it happen, and the 4 U.S. non-military intelligence interrogators who ostensibly encouraged the abuse, are all being prosecuted, either(the enlisted men) by military court or (the civilians) by U.S. civil law.
The law endures, the violators will be prosecuted. The U.S. is not, by any attempted stretch of the Arab or European press, who have had nothing good to say about the United States anyway, whether a month ago, a year ago or five years ago, no matter how well the U.S. was/is adhering to democratic principles.

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Dave the Wonder Boy said:
The way the liberal press distorts it is by portraying it as an Auschwitz or Sarajevo or Tianaman Square, or equal to Saddam's torture and rape chambers that killed an estimated one million of his own people being un-earthed now in mass graves.
But they are not the same, by any stretch of the imagination. To allege they are the same is partisan propaganda.
These aberrant indulgences by 7 accused U.S. military police, with lesser complicity by 6 superior officers, and 4 civilian intelligence interrogators are portrayed as a state-sanctioned abuse of prisoners done with American government impunity.
That is simply not the true case, but that is how it's being reported.

Relative to these and other historic incidents of mass abuse and genocide, while the Abu Ghraib incident is a serious crime, they are not comparable.

These Abu Ghraib incidents are being fully investigated, apologized for and disclosed, by every level of American military, legal and executive authorities in Iraq and Washington.

And it would have been disclosed anyway, at the end of the investigation, once all the facts were fully investigated.
Premature disclosure by CBS and the other media just whacks the Arab beehive with a stick, creates an obstructive swarm, and makes it that much harder to gather the facts.

I envision hundreds of Iraqis who oppose U.S. presence in Iraq, who will make up stories of abuse, just to make the American military look bad.
They don't give a crap, the Arab world didn't give a crap about Saddam's genocide and abuse for the last 30 years. But because they know it matters to the United States, and to American voters, and other westerners who do care about human rights, they will exploit American embarrassment to the limit, and then some, with further manufactured allegations.

This happens in the United States as well. A cop I know in Boynton Beach said that when they arrest someone in the inner city, residents in the 'hood will file false complaints, that cops used "the N-word" or physically abused them or whatever.
Just out of spite.
But no matter how specious, these allegations have to be taken seriously and investigated.
And that makes it difficult to discern the true incidents of illegal abuse of authority.

And no matter how thoroughly disproven, those with an axe to grind will always allege these things truly happened, and that exoneration is just further proof of abused authority.

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Dave said:

Yet again, Dave, you are comparing American democracy to Nazi Germany, totalitarian China and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.

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Dave said:
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Running an argument which says, "Look, compared to that, we're clean!" doesn't work.

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Dave said:
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The US holds itself to higher moral standards.

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Dave said:
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As for the "premature disclosure" by CBS.... how could any reporter worthy of the name not report a news story with those photographs? This is blame shifting: you can't blame CBS for reporting something the fault of which lies in a breakdown in the chain of command.

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Dave the Wonder Boy said:

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Dave said:

Yet again, Dave, you are comparing American democracy to Nazi Germany, totalitarian China and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.

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No, yet again, you are deflecting the true issue, by boxing my statements into a dismissive category.

I am comparing well-known atrocities over the last hundred years, and saying: these Abu Ghraib harassments by a few unauthorized U.S. soldiers, while a serious crime, are overblown by the media and partisan liberals and other anti-American groups worldwide in being falsely labelled as "atrocities".
Well they're not !
They're harrassments, they're abuses by 7 U.S. soldiers, that are being prosecuted and punished by the U.S., not by some outside power that had to come in and clean up some massive genocide that the U.S. perpetrated.

As opposed to slaughters, systematic abuse of authority, and mass graves evident in historic war crimes, and complete lack of disclosure and accountability in the other well-known atrocities, true atrocities, of the other nations listed.

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Dave said:
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Running an argument which says, "Look, compared to that, we're clean!" doesn't work.

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That's not what I said at all.

I said these are crimes by these 7 U.S. soldiers, 6 superior officers, and 4 civilian intelligence officials.
And that they are being prosecuted, and were being prosecuted, by the United States, well before CBS made these events public, and that while these Abu Ghraib harassments are crimes, they cannot fairly be labelled the same as the well-known genocides and atrocities ( true atrocities) that I listed.
The U.S. military investigated and stopped these abuses itself.
To allege they are the same as real atrocities, and not just crimes, un-authorized and abberant within the U.S. military system, is just so much anti-American liberal partisan spin.

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Dave said:
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The US holds itself to higher moral standards.

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Yes, it does.
But apparently to yourself and other anti-Ameican elements, taking responsibility and adhering to thoise standards is the same as being a rogue nation that commits atrocities with impunity.

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Dave said:
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As for the "premature disclosure" by CBS.... how could any reporter worthy of the name not report a news story with those photographs? This is blame shifting: you can't blame CBS for reporting something the fault of which lies in a breakdown in the chain of command.

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CBS could have waited until the investigation was complete before making a disclosure. They know the rage those photos will inspire in the muslim world, in the half-investigated, half-defined context they were released a week ago.
Responsible journalists, patriotic journalists, would have waited until the full investigation was concluded, before releasing inflammatory pictures that will only inspire more rage and violence against U.S. troops in Iraq.

Instead, it's another case of journalists going on the air, saying "We don't relly know what happened, but here we are on the air reporting it first and exclusively."

That's sensationalism, not journalism.

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It was only later that the extent of charges, as I've said, extends only to 7 U.S. military police, 4 interrogators, and 6 superior officers.

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When I say "patriotism", I partly mean U.S. nationalism, but more precisely I mean social responsibility. As I made clear in my above post. And the story, and the photos from Abu Ghraib of prisoners being humiliated, were published before the full extent of abuse was known.

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Dave said:
But at the end of the day I think it would be more irresponsible not to have aired the report, and not allowed the American people to take the military to task over it. The army is responsible to the people, after all, and the people need to know what the army (or elements of it) are doing over there. The military cannot be allowed to run around doing this sort of thing unchecked, or in secret. Transparency in government is a cornerstone of a free society. This report was part of that process of transparency, though the exercise of a free press.

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Reuters, NBC Staff Abused by U.S. Troops in Iraq

1 hour, 50 minutes ago
By Andrew Marshall

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. forces beat three Iraqis working for Reuters and subjected them to sexual and religious taunts and humiliation during their detention last January in a military camp near Falluja, the three said Tuesday.

The three first told Reuters of the ordeal after their release but only decided to make it public when the U.S. military said there was no evidence they had been abused, and following the exposure of similar mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

An Iraqi journalist working for U.S. network NBC, who was arrested with the Reuters staff, also said he had been beaten and mistreated, NBC said Tuesday.

Two of the three Reuters staff said they had been forced to insert a finger into their anus and then lick it, and were forced to put shoes in their mouths, particularly humiliating in Arab culture.

All three said they were forced to make demeaning gestures as soldiers laughed, taunted them and took photographs. They said they did not want to give details publicly earlier because of the degrading nature of the abuse.

The soldiers told them they would be taken to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, deprived them of sleep, placed bags over their heads, kicked and hit them and forced them to remain in stress positions for long periods.

The U.S. military, in a report issued before the Abu Ghraib abuse became public, said there was no evidence the Reuters staff had been tortured or abused.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of ground forces in Iraq (news - web sites), said in a letter received by Reuters Monday but dated March 5 that he was confident the investigation had been "thorough and objective" and its findings were sound.

The Pentagon (news - web sites) has yet to respond to a request by Reuters Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger to review the military's findings about the incident in light of the scandal over the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Asked for comment Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said only: "There are a number of lines of inquiry under way with respect to prison operations in Iraq. If during the course of any inquiry, the commander believes it is appropriate to review a specific aspect of detention, he has the authority to do so."

The abuse happened at Forward Operating Base Volturno, near Falluja, the Reuters staff said. They were detained on January 2 while covering the aftermath of the shooting down of a U.S. helicopter near Falluja and held for three days, first at Volturno and then at Forward Operating Base St Mere.

The three -- Baghdad-based cameraman Salem Ureibi, Falluja-based freelance television journalist Ahmad Mohammad Hussein al-Badrani and driver Sattar Jabar al-Badrani -- were released without charge on Jan. 5.

"INADEQUATE" INVESTIGATION

"When I saw the Abu Ghraib photographs, I wept," Ureibi said Tuesday. "I saw they had suffered like we had."

Ureibi, who understands English better than the other two detainees, said soldiers told him they wanted to have sex with him, and he was afraid he would be raped.

NBC, whose stringer Ali Muhammed Hussein Ali al-Badrani was detained along with the Reuters staff, said he reported that a hood was placed over his head for hours, and that he was forced to perform physically debilitating exercises, prevented from sleeping and struck and kicked several times.

"Despite repeated requests, we have yet to receive the results of the army investigation," NBC News Vice President Bill Wheatley said.



Schlesinger sent a letter to Sanchez on January 9 demanding an investigation into the treatment of the three Iraqis.

The U.S. army said it was investigating and requested further information. Reuters provided transcripts of initial interviews with the three following their release, and offered to make them available for interview by investigators.

A summary of the investigation by the 82nd Airborne Division, dated January 28 and provided to Reuters, said "no specific incidents of abuse were found." It said soldiers responsible for the detainees were interviewed under oath and "none admit or report knowledge of physical abuse or torture."

"The detainees were purposefully and carefully put under stress, to include sleep deprivation, in order to facilitate interrogation; they were not tortured," it said. The version received Monday used the phrase "sleep management" instead.

The U.S. military never interviewed the three for its investigation.

On February 3 Schlesinger wrote to Lawrence Di Rita, special assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying the investigation was "woefully inadequate" and should be reopened.

"The military's conclusion of its investigation without even interviewing the alleged victims, along with other inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the report, speaks volumes about the seriousness with which the U.S. government is taking this issue," he wrote.

ABUSE SCANDAL

The U.S. military faced international outrage this month after photographs surfaced showing U.S. soldiers humiliating and abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.

An investigation by Major General Antonio Taguba found that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees" in Abu Ghraib.

Seven U.S. soldiers have been charged over the Abu Ghraib abuse and the first court martial is set for Wednesday.

U.S. officials say the abuse was carried out by a small number of soldiers and that all allegations of abuse are promptly and thoroughly investigated.

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