Rush Limbaugh needs his eema kicked!

[NebariNookiee]

Limbaugh on Torturing Iraqis: U.S Guards Were Just "Having a Good Time"
Media Matters/Paul Joseph Watson | Updated May 7 2004

Hours before President George W. Bush announced plans to address the Arab world to condemn the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison, Rush Limbaugh justified the U.S. guards' mistreatment of the Iraqis, stating that they were just "having a good time," and that their actions served as an "emotional release."

As reported by Wonkette.com, Limbaugh's comments can be found on his website. From the May 4 Rush Limbaugh Show, titled "It's Not About Us; This Is War!":

CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men –

LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?

The day before, on his May 3 show, Limbaugh observed that the American troops who mistreated Iraqi prisoners of war were "babes" and that the pictures of the alleged abuse were no worse than "anything you'd see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage."

LIMBAUGH: And these American prisoners of war -- have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture.

LIMBAUGH: You know, if you look at -- if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I mean, I don't know if it's just me, but it looks just like anything you'd see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe I'm -- yeah. And get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City -- the movie. I mean, I don't -- it's just me.

The official US Army report listed all the abuses committed at the prison. Rush Limbaugh labels the following as 'just having a good time' and 'blowing some steam off'.
a. (U) Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees;
b. (U) Threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol;
c. (U) Pouring cold water on naked detainees;
d. (U) Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair;
e. (U) Threatening male detainees with rape;
f. (U) Allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell;
g. (U) Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick.
h. (U) Using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
.................
a. (S) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
b. (S) Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
c. (S) Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
d. (S) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
e. (S) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear;
f. (S) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
g. (S) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
h. (S) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
i. (S) Writing “I am a Rapest” (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;
j. (S) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture;
k. (S) A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee; [FORGET THE DOUBLE SPEAK, THIS IS RAPE]
l. (S) Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;
m. (S) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.

ALL OF THE ABOVE ACTIVITIES ARE DESCRIBED BY LIMBAUGH AS 'BLOWING SOME STEAM OFF AND HAVING A GOOD TIME'. SO, ACCORDING TO LIMBAUGH, IF YOU HAVE A BAD DAY AT WORK, JUST GO AND FIND A WOMAN, POUR BATTERY ACID ON HER, RAPE HER AND THEN BEAT HER TO DEATH - YOU'LL JUST BE BLOWING SOME STEAM OFF!

Neo-Con talk show hosts across the country from Limbaugh to Michael Savage are making outbursts on a daily basis that would make Adolph Hitler or Joseph Stalin blush. Savage openly calls for putting anyone who criticizes the government in a forced labor camp.

In an age of increasing regulation of free speech, it's astounding that talk show hosts with tens of millions of listeners can get away with advocating torture, rape and murder. The new definition of 'conservatism' according to Limbaugh is making naked men perform homosexual acts for laughs. The world truely has turned upside down.

[SabaceanBabe]

holy crap

this is all just wrong on too many levels to count

[grinner]

You have the power... turn to a different station.

[Jeff O'Connor]

This guy ticks me off. But that's just me.

[NYPinTA]

holy crap

this is all just wrong on too many levels to count

Ditto.

[La Bomba]

Wow, that thread title won't start any arguments or anything!

I agree. that was a very stupid thing to say.

[NebariNookiee]

No worries grinner -- I don't listen to that blowhard fat bastard anyway. But free speech and choice aside -- those comments just proves how moronic neo-con thinking truly is.

It's hypocrisy in it's truest form -- this guy spoke out against Clinton and the Government during Clinton's time in office - constantly berated and belittled the man on air the entire 8 years of Clinton's term -- now he advocates throwing those who speak out against this administration into prison camps -- and he justifies the abuses over in Iraq as "just blowing off steam" -- however supports Limbaugh needs their brain examined... or bashed in, one of the two.

[zap]

You have the power... turn to a different station.

true enough grinner, but how can anyone in thier right mind call these things anything but torture? We are supposed to be the "good guys"! We were supposed to be liberating those people, freeing them from EXACTLY this type of abuse! You did not actually say very much with this statement grinner, but it implies that you agree with Limbaugh?

If American soldiers feel they must turn to torture and rape of prisoners of war, then they are the same as the terrorists we seem so desperate to eliminate from the world. I would rather be proud of America's military, and I understand that a very small percentage of American soldiers engaged in these abuses, but they HAD to have realized on SOME level how much harm this would create.

[Twich]

I listen to Rush and some other conservative talk shows and I've been bothered that they seem to excuse the actions of the men. They are downplaying it...and both hubby and I are bothered and disturbed by it. There are no excuses for this type of behavior. It's never proper and it's not right and we think the people involved should fry.

OTOH, the left wing is making this a political issue (calling for Rumsfeld's resignation? This WAS public knowledge before the 60 Minutes expose...but no one had the pictures before then. It was released by the Army as public knowledge as the investigations were going on. But the details weren't *all* released because they were in the middle of an investigation. There's STILL an investigation going on into part of it. And myself? I don't WANT them to frell up an investigation...I want these people to sit and make big rocks into little rocks for the rest of their lives...but there's no reason for Rumsfeld to resign over it. Sheesh.)

Also, (duck...cause I'm gonna spark some political debate here and I can't believe I'm doing it. I always said I wouldn't incite things like this.) aren't these the same people who are supporting a Presidential candidate who admitted to doing the same things to people...even cutting off limbs and murdering people 30 years ago?

*sigh* It's all just one big fat hairy mess. If I could get my hands on the people who caused all of this....grr.

[Twich]

I would rather be proud of America's military, and I understand that a very small percentage of American soldiers engaged in these abuses, but they HAD to have realized on SOME level how much harm this would create.

Not everyone has foresight..unfortunately. And not everyone in the military is perfect. But not everyone is to blame for this either.

[Adam L Garcia]

consider changing my hat to stay "Limbaugh, kiss my eema." the jerk.

Adam

[TheBladeRoden]

Geez, the guy's starting to make my side look bad. I can't wrap my head around the notion that those methods are reasonable ways to relieve stress but smoking marijuana is just plain evil.

[NebariNookiee]

I can't wrap my head around the notion that those methods are reasonable ways to relieve stress but smoking marijuana is just plain evil.

That's pure poetry!!!!! Can I use that?

[grinner]

true enough grinner, but how can anyone in thier right mind call these things anything but torture? We are supposed to be the "good guys"! We were supposed to be liberating those people, freeing them from EXACTLY this type of abuse! You did not actually say very much with this statement grinner, but it implies that you agree with Limbaugh?

If American soldiers feel they must turn to torture and rape of prisoners of war, then they are the same as the terrorists we seem so desperate to eliminate from the world. I would rather be proud of America's military, and I understand that a very small percentage of American soldiers engaged in these abuses, but they HAD to have realized on SOME level how much harm this would create.
I am not implying anything. I am just stating the fact that some people seem to not get... that THEY DON'T HAVE TO LISTEN. Change the channel. I listen to Howard Stern... but there are times when I can't stand what he airs... so I turn to something else. There are things on television that I don't agree with... so I don't watch them. That is what my 'You have the power... change the channel' statement implied... nothing else.


I do think that part of this is becoming a big to do over a tiny issue. As I said in another thread... What occured in this prison, while horrid and wrong, is NOTHING compared to what Saddam did... or what the Terrorists are doing to US/UK/Allies Civilians... or don't you remember the bodies of people who were over in Iraq HELPING the Iraqies burned and mutilated? Where was the civility there? When you have an opponant that is pouring disdain upon the Geneva Convention rules of War and don't follow them... and who then complain that the Convention rules are being abused by attacking Mosques and other places... when the Geneva Convention expressly states that if you are attacked from Religious institutions that as the attacked... you can destroy said Religious Institutions in order to protect yourself. This two faced attitude does tend to lead to frustration in some people. So, while I don't agree with what occured... I can understand why some took things into their own hands. It has been reported that those Iraqius that were killing in the prison were prodding the others to riot. They were the antagonists... I have no problems with their deaths.

[Jeff O'Connor]

That's pure poetry!!!!! Can I use that?

Hot frell... not if I beat you to it, NebariNookie! :rollin: That IS good.

[divinedaydreams]

I listen to Rush and some other conservative talk shows and I've been bothered that they seem to excuse the actions of the men. They are downplaying it...and both hubby and I are bothered and disturbed by it. There are no excuses for this type of behavior. It's never proper and it's not right and we think the people involved should fry.

OTOH, the left wing is making this a political issue (calling for Rumsfeld's resignation? This WAS public knowledge before the 60 Minutes expose...but no one had the pictures before then. It was released by the Army as public knowledge as the investigations were going on. But the details weren't *all* released because they were in the middle of an investigation. There's STILL an investigation going on into part of it. And myself? I don't WANT them to frell up an investigation...I want these people to sit and make big rocks into little rocks for the rest of their lives...but there's no reason for Rumsfeld to resign over it. Sheesh.)

Also, (duck...cause I'm gonna spark some political debate here and I can't believe I'm doing it. I always said I wouldn't incite things like this.) aren't these the same people who are supporting a Presidential candidate who admitted to doing the same things to people...even cutting off limbs and murdering people 30 years ago?

*sigh* It's all just one big fat hairy mess. If I could get my hands on the people who caused all of this....grr.

I'm sorry but I don't care what side of the line your on this is just plan wrong. Blowing off steam my butt. My first patrol in the Coast Guard was an Alien Migration Interdiction Operation. It lasted two months of doing box ops 200 miles off of Hawaii. We were changing teams three times and day plus whenever the migrants thought to uprise. I never went over but fatigue even in the two months was a lot. No one ever thought to hurt even the jerks who were running the whole thing. I understand the people over in Iraq are under a lot more stress but still there should be something in their character that says this is wrong! They were all taught in boot camp what to expect as prisoners of war. These were civilians not war criminals I believe and shouldn't matter if they were.

Rumsfield IMHO is a jerk and a control freak. You don't leave people who are doing misconduct were they can do it again. I don't care if there is an investigation. He knew just like the church knew things were happening and they both choose to cover it up rather than do anything. So now they both have a mess to clean up and quite frankly I think he should go. A man with his power is supposed to be looking out for the American people. Allowing behavior like this is not in the American people's best interest.

Ok done ranting.

[NebariNookiee]

I do think that part of this is becoming a big to do over a tiny issue. As I said in another thread... What occured in this prison, while horrid and wrong, is NOTHING compared to what Saddam did... or what the Terrorists are doing to US/UK/Allies Civilians... or don't you remember the bodies of people who were over in Iraq HELPING the Iraqies burned and mutilated? Where was the civility there? When you have an opponant that is pouring disdain upon the Geneva Convention rules of War and don't follow them... and who then complain that the Convention rules are being abused by attacking Mosques and other places... when the Geneva Convention expressly states that if you are attacked from Religious institutions that as the attacked... you can destroy said Religious Institutions in order to protect yourself. This two faced attitude does tend to lead to frustration in some people. So, while I don't agree with what occured... I can understand why some took things into their own hands. It has been reported that those Iraqius that were killing in the prison were prodding the others to riot. They were the antagonists... I have no problems with their deaths.

A tiny issue? This is a bit more than the infringing of rights here pal -- This is some twisted shit! You're justifying atrocities that make our military no better than the regime we're supposed to be liberating these people from. It’s pure hypocrisy to state that you condemn Hussein for his actions, but this is no big deal. Pure and utter hypocrisy. That statement, sir, is the definition of evil.

And don’t give me anything about “a few bad apples” – this goes way deeper than a few solders getting their jollies. When you throw human beings into a hole to rot where they have no rights to legally defend themselves – those presiding over these prisoners WILL abuse their power. It’s human nature to abuse such power. As far as I’m concerned – I hold the whole military accountable for this. This is sick. I have lost all respect of our military over this.

[grinner]

You can feel that way if you want. If you want to paint everything with a broad brush go right ahead. If you are predisposed to dispise the Military as you appear to be, this is just another justification for your antipathy of the Military.
If you want to blame everyone that is in the military for the actions of a few... then the reverse can also be used... that the actions of Islamist terrorists are the actions of ALL Muslims. How does that work for ya? Oh it doesn't? Well then, there is your answer.

[Twich]

I'm sorry but I don't care what side of the line your on this is just plan wrong.

If you read my posts you saw in EVERY SINGLE one that I have stated unequivocally that this was wrong and those who did it should be brought to justice. And quickly.

Blowing off steam my butt. My first patrol in the Coast Guard was an Alien Migration Interdiction Operation. It lasted two months of doing box ops 200 miles off of Hawaii. We were changing teams three times and day plus whenever the migrants thought to uprise. I never went over but fatigue even in the two months was a lot. No one ever thought to hurt even the jerks who were running the whole thing. I understand the people over in Iraq are under a lot more stress but still there should be something in their character that says this is wrong! They were all taught in boot camp what to expect as prisoners of war. These were civilians not war criminals I believe and shouldn't matter if they were.

I agree with pretty much everything you said except a few things. There are degenerates in the military. Being in the military doesn't make you a more moral (or less moral) person. People still join just for the money or because they have nowhere left to go. A few years ago, my hubby actually trained with a man who was just convicted of murdering like five women after brutally raping them. This was a small number of people who are guard and reserve. They didn't receive training that was as extensive as those who are full time military and they don't do it every day....except for now when they've been called up.

That all being said, let me repeat again and again and again what I've already said. They were wrong and they need to go down for it. Pure and simple.



Rumsfield IMHO is a jerk and a control freak. You don't leave people who are doing misconduct were they can do it again. I don't care if there is an investigation. He knew just like the church knew things were happening and they both choose to cover it up rather than do anything. So now they both have a mess to clean up and quite frankly I think he should go. A man with his power is supposed to be looking out for the American people. Allowing behavior like this is not in the American people's best interest.

Ok done ranting.

I'm not a big fan of Rumsfeld myself. A lot of the changes he planned before 9-11 would have decimated the military. That being said though, if a couple of employees are caught doing something illegal in a multinational corporation, you don't ask the CEO to step down. It is NOT Rumsfeld's fault these people were morons. I don't like the way he runs some parts of the military, but I don't believe he needs to step down over this.

Once it was brought to light, NO ONE was left in power in the prison. They were immediately removed from duty although they are still in country. They are being 'held' in country. That does not mean that the allegations and pictures came to light and that these people were left in charge. It's the faults of the people in that chain of command who refused to listen or see the problems beforehand. THEY need to go down with the ship as well. There are a lot of people between an E-5 and Rumsfeld. A LOT.

No one chose to cover this up. NO ONE. It was not picked up or reported by the news until pictures came to light. The Army released the information when investigations were happening, but with little detail. Until the pictures came to light it wasn't a 'story' enough for the media to cover it. There WAS NO COVER UP. CBS was asked by the US Military to hold off for a bit on reporting and showing the pictures because the investigation was still underway. There was NO COVER UP of this story. The NEWS didn't report it. It's still a fairly recent story. From January to May for an investigation into something like this isn't unusual...and in a foreign land with limited resources. That makes it harder.

No one is allowing or permitting this sort of behavior. It's being felt through the ranks of the US Military and let me tell you, people here are PISSED. They want justice done (and more) to the morons who would do this. It's ruined a LOT of the good things that Americans (many whom I know) have done overseas. No one's looking at the schools or elections that are now working in cities throughout Iraq. No one's looking at the electricty or water that's now flowing to all Iraqis. And no one's looking at the good deeds being done by US soldiers every day. They're all focused on this crap and it pisses people in the Military off.

[NebariNookiee]

I hold the Administration accountable too for dropping these prisoners into a legal black hole they'll never get out of. But of couse it can be justified. Just like lying about the reasons for going to war can be justified cause Hussein was a "bad man"

Give it up. No one can justify this. Anyone who even attempts to are no better than "them"

[Twich]

A tiny issue? This is a bit more than the infringing of rights here pal -- This is some twisted shit! You're justifying atrocities that make our military no better than the regime we're supposed to be liberating these people from. It’s pure hypocrisy to state that you condemn Hussein for his actions, but this is no big deal. Pure and utter hypocrisy. That statement, sir, is the definition of evil.

And don’t give me anything about “a few bad apples” – this goes way deeper than a few solders getting their jollies. When you throw human beings into a hole to rot where they have no rights to legally defend themselves – those presiding over these prisoners WILL abuse their power. It’s human nature to abuse such power. As far as I’m concerned – I hold the whole military accountable for this. This is sick. I have lost all respect of our military over this.


NN, as much as I love you, you're wrong. Flat out. WRONG. And you've disgusted me to a point I thought I'd never reach here at FMD. Know why? You're talking about MY HUSBAND and MY FAMILY. You've just flushed him down the toilet with a bunch of frelling degenerates and I don't appreciate that attitude at all.

Get the chip off your shoulder NN and realize that not everything in life is black and white.

[NebariNookiee]

No one's looking at the schools or elections that are now working in cities throughout Iraq. No one's looking at the electricty or water that's now flowing to all Iraqis. And no one's looking at the good deeds being done by US soldiers every day. They're all focused on this crap and it pisses people in the Military off.

No one's looking at the hundreds of thousands of innocents dying in the streets -- not just by the "bad guys" but by our own military. Justify it as casualties of war -- wait till it hits our shores. Justify it then.



NONE OF THIS SHOULD BE HAPPENING!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry you feel that twitch -- I can't help the rage I feel. Humans suck. I'm ashamed to be a member of the human race seeing this shit. It's sick.

[Twich]

NN, you are totally out of control and have no clue what you're talking about. There are not hundreds of thousands of people dying in the streets. There are people being killed every day by TERRORISTS.

**Edited because I apologize for my outburst.


I have never justified any of the acts commited by these men and women. I've tried to point out how badly they've made the rest of the GOOD men and women of the Armed Forces look. THAT doesn't mean I'm defending them.

I'm finished with this thread and taking a break for a few days. The turn it's taken has officially disgusted me beyond belief.

[grinner]

I hold the Administration accountable too for dropping these prisoners into a legal black hole they'll never get out of. But of couse it can be justified. Just like lying about the reasons for going to war can be justified cause Hussein was a "bad man"

Give it up. No one can justify this. Anyone who even attempts to are no better than "them"
I don't have to 'give it up'... just have to say that we will have to disagree on this topic.

[grinner]

No one's looking at the hundreds of thousands of innocents dying in the streets -- not just by the "bad guys" but by our own military. Justify it as casualties of war -- wait till it hits our shores. Justify it then.



NONE OF THIS SHOULD BE HAPPENING!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry you feel that twitch -- I can't help the rage I feel. Humans suck. I'm ashamed to be a member of the human race seeing this shit. It's sick.
Just like... oh... I don't know... 9-11-01 shouldn't have happened... or 3-11-04 shouldn't have happened... or any other Terrorist action. This isn't a 'Crusade' this is us getting tired of getting hit for no real reason other than the fact that we are not Mulsims. Sometimes you have to do the hard choice. Sorry you feel that making the hard decision isn't worth the effort.

[NebariNookiee]

Twich -- I know more than you think. I'm not some blind left-winged whose protest happy -- I'm not some disgruntled liberal who spouts peace and love -- screw'em. I'm all for maiming and killing -- but don't give me bullsh*t justifications for it. terrorists shmerrorists – those fight us over there are local militia, not terrorists!

Entire corporations and grand institutions have crumbled over the actions of a very few. It’s human nature. These idiots who pulled this just undid everything we’ve supposedly been fighting for. The high-ups knew about it – Rumsfield knew about it – he testified today that he knew. Aside from the solders who did do it – those who stood by and allowed it are just as guilty. This little thing is about to snowball into something huge! The world is about ready to kick us in our head –

[Frellster]

It's horrible that we are torturing these prisoners. Rush Limbaugh always says things to upset poeple. That's his thing.
Grinner, change your avatar please, that's just too gross.

[NebariNookiee]

This isn't a 'Crusade' this is us getting tired of getting hit for no real reason other than the fact that we are not Mulsims. Sometimes you have to do the hard choice.

It is a crusade, Bush said it himself. (And if you want -- I'll give you the quote too) And its our Foreign Policy that makes us the target. That and the fact that we're a bunch of frelling hypocrites who think we're better than the rest of the world.

But you are right about one thing -- sometimes you have to make the hard choice. And I've made mine.

[Johnsgirl727]

Grinner, change your avatar please, that's just too gross.
:rollin:....I'm forced to agree!

[divinedaydreams]

Sorry Twich I wan't clear, I know you personnally and the rest of the military (remember my hubby was over there too and has come home and serves in the Coast Guard) would condone or do such things. The first part was directed towards what Rush and his ilk are saying.

However we are finding out that the Red Cross and officials knew in December that stuff like this may be going on. Nothing was done at that time, it was brushed away as anti war redirick (sp?). There are more pictures and even film out there. It would not have taken much for the military PTB to look into this quietly and quickly or changed the system in the prison to make such deeds harder to do if not impossible. Lack of training so wide spread that it could cause this is not an excuse. These units are not totally reservist they do have active duty personnel with them and are overseen by active duty chains of command. Somebody should have put a stop to this a long time ago not just when pictures get released. There is no excuse and when rumblings started in December Rumsfield should have taken steps to nip any hint of such actions in the bud by getting people in there to ensure stuff like this wasn't happening. You can't tell me the Red Cross's concern never touched his ears the man is to much of a control freak for it not to have.

[Twich]

NN, were you this outraged when the US civilian contractors were dragged through the streets, burned and mutilated? Or was that okay because *they* were the bad guys?

I wish you had proven that you do know more than what you're talking about, but you still accuse me of justifying something that I never have. If you read back through ALL of the threads about this you'll see I'm just as angry as everyone. I just don't think we need to put the whole US Military in front of a firing squad for it.

And terrorist...what is your definition of terrorist? Terrorism is defined as a systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion. I would say that kidnapping people, blowing up civilians in car bombs and torturing people IS terrorism. And yes, I believe those people who took those pictures and thought it was 'just fun' are terrorists too. But to say "it's just the local militia" doesn't cut it. They ARE terrorists.

[grinner]

Grinner, change your avatar please, that's just too gross.
sure... just because you told me to... [/sarcasm]

[Twich]

[QUOTE=divinedaydreams]Sorry Twich I wan't clear, I know you personnally and the rest of the military (remember my hubby was over there too and has come home and serves in the Coast Guard) would condone or do such things. The first part was directed towards what Rush and his ilk are saying.

[QUOTE]

No problem DD. :hug: I've just been accused in this thread a few times of justifying it or making it 'okay' and that's irking me. This whole thing ticks me off as much as anyone else.

I know there were active duty full timers over there. I'm just afraid they got a 'bad one' in charge. My hubby's served under some hum dingers...that makes me wonder how bad the folks over there were.

I don't know anything about the Red Cross and it's investigation. I know this stuff happened in November...and I thought that by December the investigations were underway and that the people had been removed from their jobs, but I admit to not knowing dates/facts in that arena. Just generalizations.

And now, I really am going. You guys post too quickly for me to get away from the computer. But I do need a break from this topic and the forums for a while.

[NebariNookiee]

I gotta give you kudos for that one grinner. By the way -- great avatar.

[divinedaydreams]

sure... just because you told me to... [/sarcasm]

grinner I don't think that one is much better but then its what makes you.

[Third EYe]

Um, I've listened to Rush for the past week with the exception of today, and that article did not tell the whole story. I'm not in total agreement with Rush on this, but to some extent he's correct. As disapointed as I am in the servicemen and women who took part in those dispicable acts, like Paul Harvey said today, what about our men and women being slaughtered in the streets of Iraq, aren't they more important?

Now, for those of you whining and crying about naked men being stacked on top of each other, and I'm not excusing anything, remember how people with the same mind set treated our dead.

I heard one liar on the radio supposedly an Iraqi dissedent living high on the hog here in Denver stating that muslim men would rather die than wear womens underwear. Bullsh%t!!!! If that were true, they would have killed each other or commited suicide. Besides, they still wipe thier ass with thier hand. I can't take anyone seriously who can't use toilet paper. And don't give me that dren that they are poor. I'd use a tshirt first.

And to the one who called Rush a fat bastard, he weighs less than you. He's like 180. I'm heavier than that, and nowhere near fat.

Again, I'm appalled with what is going on with those few soldiers. At the same time, I have perspective.

[divinedaydreams]

Here you go Twich.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=4&u=/ap/20040507/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_prisoner_abuse

[Johnsgirl727]

sure... just because you told me to... [/sarcasm]
Crap!! That's even worse!!! Change it back! Change it back! :fear: :nopeek:

[divinedaydreams]

Besides, they still wipe thier ass with thier hand. I can't take anyone seriously who can't use toilet paper. And don't give me that dren that they are poor. I'd use a tshirt first.

Actually according to my hubby who was over there they don't use toilet paper because they would rather wash themselves after going. They had to put signs in the showers because the locals would use them to go since they could wash right there.

[Third EYe]

I been there too.

[divinedaydreams]

Going to try pasting the article for the link above but since it was on Yahoo not sure how well it will take.

Bremer First Heard of Abuse in January

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By LOUIS MEIXLER, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer first heard of allegations that troops were mistreating Iraqi captives at Abu Ghraib prison in January, a spokesman said Friday. The Red Cross claimed it had been warning of prisoner abuse throughout Iraq (news - web sites) since the very beginning of the U.S.-led invasion.


AP Photo


Reuters
Slideshow: Abuse of Iraq Prisoners Investigated





Latest headlines:
· Abuse Will Make U.S. Job in Iraq Harder
AP - 2 minutes ago
· Bush Loyalty Put to Test by Rumsfeld
Reuters - 2 minutes ago
· Rumsfeld: 'Deepest Apology' for Iraq Prison Abuse
Reuters - 6 minutes ago
Special Coverage





Bremer's spokesman, Dan Senor, said he did not know when Bremer first saw the photos of abusive acts. It was the pictures, not the initial announcement of the investigation, that ignited international outrage.


In mid-January, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, announced an investigation into allegations of mistreatment of prisoners at a coalition detention facility in Iraq — prompted by complaints of a U.S. guard at Abu Ghraib who told his superiors he could not tolerate abuses he had witnessed.


"Ambassador Bremer was made aware of the charges relating to the humiliations in January 2004," when the investigation was announced, Senor told reporters.


The international Red Cross, meanwhile, said Friday it had warned U.S. officials of abuse of prisoners in Iraq more than a year ago, shortly after the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion.


It continued giving verbal and written reports through to November, including detailed allegations of mistreatment at Abu Ghraib.


Pierre Kraehenbuehl, director of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said the abuse represented more than isolated acts, and the problems were not limited to the Abu Ghraib prison.


"We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system," he told a news conference in Geneva.


He confirmed that a leaked ICRC report to U.S. authorities, published Friday by the Wall Street Journal, was genuine.


The newspaper said that the 24-page report described prisoners kept naked in total darkness in empty cells at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison and male prisoners forced to parade around in women's underwear. Coalition forces also fired on unarmed prisoners from watchtowers, killing some of them.


In another episode, nine men were arrested by coalition forces in Basra and beaten severely, leading to one death, it added.


"Ill-treatment during interrogation was not systematic, except with regard to persons arrested with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an intelligence value," the report said, according to the newspaper.


It said that information obtained suggested that ill-treatment "went beyond exceptional cases and might be considered a practice tolerated by" coalition forces.


The report was given to U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer and military commanders in February but represented a summary of the information given to U.S. authorities during the previous year, Kraehenbuehl told a news conference.


He said some of those discussions earlier were with the commander of the unit in charge of Abu Ghraib prison, the 800th Military Police Brigade, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski.


She has said since returning to the United States that she knew nothing of the abuses. She said U.S. military intelligence actually controlled the facility where interrogations took place.


The neutral, Swiss-based ICRC is designated by the Geneva Conventions on warfare to visit prisoners of war and other people detained by an occupying power, to ensure countries respect their obligations under the 1949 accords.





President Bush (news - web sites) apologized Thursday for the abuse at Abu Ghraib, saying he was "sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families." He said the images had made Americans "sick to their stomach."

In Baghdad, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt on Friday acknowledged it would take "some effort" by U.S. troops to repair the damage caused in relations with Iraqis — particularly after the publishing of pictures. He said that court martial procedures against six soldiers charged in the abuse shown in the photos would be open to the press.

Iraqi anger over the abuse spilled over into the confrontation between the U.S. military and radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militiamen clashed with troops in Najaf and Karbala on Friday.

In a sermon at Friday prayers in a Kufa mosque, al-Sadr rejected Bush's apology for the abuse. And an al-Sadr aide, Sheik Abdul-Sattar al-Bahadli, offered worshippers in Basra up to $350 for the capture of a British soldier — adding that anyone capturing a female soldier can keep her as a slave — apparently in retaliation for the treatment of Iraqi prisoners.

Adel al-Allami, an official at an Iraqi human rights organization, said his group tried for months last year to get an audience with U.S. occupation officials.

He said it wanted to present a list of reported abuses at prisons as well as complaints about mistreatment of Iraqis during U.S. raids on homes in the search for insurgents.

"We knew of many human rights violations and sent a number of memos," al-Allami said, saying the group had reports of detainees being beaten and deprived of sleep.

Iraqi civilians also complain about heavy-handed methods used by soldiers during raids, including the hooding of detainees, damage to homes and theft of property, he said.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Human Rights Watch said the U.S. government should allow human rights organizations to monitor detention facilities in Iraq and elsewhere in order to bring a stop to the mistreatment of prisoners.

"Torture flourishes in the dark," said the organization's executive director, Kenneth Roth. "If the Bush administration really wants to put a stop to torture in U.S. detention facilities, it has to open them up to outside scrutiny."

Rumsfeld apologized for the abuse and told a Senate committee on Friday he favors compensating the victims for their suffering.

Also Thursday, Britain's Ministry of Defense said that it is questioning a soldier who has made new claims that British soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners. The soldier, who was not identified, had gone to British police with allegations of mistreatment. Britain is already investigating published photos allegedly showing its soldiers threatening and urinating on prisoners in Iraq.

The Iraqi rights group, known simply as Human Rights Organization in Iraq, was founded in 1960 but kept a low profile during Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime. It asked repeatedly for meetings with coalition officials, but each time officials "would give excuses for not meeting," al-Allami said. The group finally got a meeting three weeks ago, he said.

U.S. officials "have felt that Americans have total protection from any sort of prosecution ... This is the authority of the strong over the weak," he said.

___

AP correspondent Alexander G. Higgins in Geneva contributed to this report.

[divinedaydreams]

I been there too.

Well I'm glad your home safe.

[generic_screenname]

like Paul Harvey said today, what about our men and women being slaughtered in the streets of Iraq, aren't they more important?


No. No one life is more important than another, what a shitty thing to say.

[grinner]

Crap!! That's even worse!!! Change it back! Change it back! :fear: :nopeek:
here ya go.

[Third EYe]

No. No one life is more important than another, what a shitty thing to say.


FILTER???

The prisoners are being mistreated, not killed, that is the diference. You misunderstood, and I didn't quote Harvey, which I should have clarified, I paraphrased.

[divinedaydreams]

I think it is fair to say if you don't have a thick skin get out of this thread now. That is if your still here.

[Third EYe]

grinner that looks just like my dad!

[generic_screenname]

here ya go.
That one's kinda funny, actually. Funny and terrifying.

[Third EYe]

Well I'm glad your home safe.


Thank you, it was years and years ago, I've been home a long time now.

[divinedaydreams]

FILTER???

The prisoners are being mistreated, not killed, that is the diference. You misunderstood, and I didn't quote Harvey, which I should have clarified, I paraphrased.

Actually which would you prefer to be humilated, tortured, and raped or death? I think that may be the line each of us has to draw. Some people can take the first part and walk away, others even the threat of such would have them choosing death.

Edited to add that usually in prisons suicide is not an option. Especially if the take away your clothes so you can't even hang yourself.

[grinner]

Actually which would you prefer to be humilated, tortured, and raped or death? I think that may be the line each of us has to draw. Some people can take the first part and walk away, others even the threat of such would have them choosing death.
I could survive the first three... but death is so final. That is why I think that there is a difference between what occured in the Prison and what some Iraqis are doing to Civilians who are over there to rebuild the country.

[NebariNookiee]

Terrorism is defined as a systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion.

To play upon people's fears to justify an illegal war -- by definition, that sounds like terrorism to me.

I'm outraged by anyone who needs a reason to commit atrocities. That includes those who drag mutilated bodies down the street. That also includes superior officers who turn a blind eye to the evils those under them commit. That includes those who produce and store VX nerve gas even though they know they can never use it. It also includes world leaders who prey upon a nation's fears in order to enforce asinine directorates. Us... them... it doesn't frelling matter -- we're all human beings -- we're all guilty of evils committed against each other and the world.

[Nicola]

Besides, they still wipe thier ass with thier hand. I can't take anyone seriously who can't use toilet paper. And don't give me that dren that they are poor. I'd use a tshirt first.

You know it consistently amazes me the misconceptions that people hold about muslim practices.

Of course they don't use toilet paper. Toilet paper is extremely unsanitary. And no. The cultural practice not, as you so eloquently put it, to "wipe their ass with their hand."

Water. It is amazing you know, how much more sanitary it is to rinse your private parts after defectation and urination with water.

The next time your are in a Middle Eastern country make sure you pay attention to the water taps in each stall. They are there for those using the facilties to wash their private areas.

Wash.

Not wipe off with a dry piece of paper that will, no doubt, leave bacteria and other nasties behind.

I swore I would not get involved in this thread - but sometimes the misinformation that is posted really needs to be addressed.

[Third EYe]

yeah yeah Nicola, I understand, and the left hand never gets involved?

Useless

[vacantlook]

I thought I'd just add these Limbaugh quotes to the thread:

Limbaugh: prisoner abuse "brilliant"

On his May 6 radio show, Rush Limbaugh continued to defend U.S. military personnel accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners, comparing the abuse photos to "good old American pornography":

LIMBAUGH: All right, so we're at war with these people. And they're in a prison where they're being softened up for interrogation. And we hear that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another. Sounds to me like it's pretty thoughtful. Sounds to me in the context of war this is pretty good intimidation -- and especially if you put a woman in front of them and then spread those pictures around the Arab world. And we're sitting here, "Oh my God, they're gonna hate us! Oh no! What are they gonna think of us?" I think maybe the other perspective needs to be at least considered. Maybe they're gonna think we are serious. Maybe they're gonna think we mean it this time. Maybe they're gonna think we're not gonna kowtow to them. Maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart. Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured. But boy there was a lot of humiliation of people who are trying to kill us -- in ways they hold dear. Sounds pretty effective to me if you look at us in the right context.

Still, Limbaugh says it's no different from a pop concert or homoerotic pornography:

LIMBAUGH: The thing though that continually amazes -- here we have these pictures of homoeroticism that look like standard good old American pornography, the Britney Spears or Madonna concerts or whatever, and yet the Libs upset about the mistreatment of these prisoners thought nothing of sitting back while mass graves were being filled with three to 500,000 Iraqis during the Saddam Hussein regime.

On his May 5 show, Limbaugh attributed the American public's outrage over the allegations to "feminization":

LIMBAUGH: I think a lot of the American culture is being feminized. I think the reaction to the stupid torture is an example of the feminization of this country.

Source Link (http://mediamatters.org/items/200405070002)

[divinedaydreams]

grinner I think I like the little girl the best.

[grinner]

it's from a horror film that I can't remember the name of.

the little girl kills everyone.

[NebariNookiee]

And this coming from the guy who screamed that drug addicts should be locked up and have the key thrown away when he had a drug problem himself. We'll see how feminine he is when he's being gang raped in prison.

[NebariNookiee]

it's from a horror film that I can't remember the name of.

the little girl kills everyone.

Dude -- that's the European market poster for the new Dawn of the Dead. I liked your "Flannel-Man" avatar better

[Third EYe]

And this coming from the guy who screamed that drug addicts should be locked up and have the key thrown away when he had a drug problem himself. We'll see how feminine he is when he's being gang raped in prison.


I never said that NebariNookie, I never said that, nor have I have thought that.

You are lying.

[grinner]

Dude -- that's the European market poster for the new Dawn of the Dead. I liked your "Flannel-Man" avatar better
really... cause it was linked to a different movie. Something like... the hunted or something.

[NebariNookiee]

I never said that NebariNookie, I never said that, nor have I have thought that.

You are lying.

No no -- I meant Rush Limbaugh, not you! (ducks for cover)

[divinedaydreams]

"feminization" has nothing to do with it. He fails to see that Madonna and Britney are doing this stuff of their own free will. People in the porn industry are doing what they like to do. Rape videos are illegal because not all parties are willing. These prisoners didn't say please strip me naked and put me in sexual positions so I can be video taped for your pleasure and my own humilation. The guards had all the control.

Oh and if you want an eye for an eye then kill them don't do this stuff that you wouldn't condone in your own country's prisons.

[NebariNookiee]

really... cause it was linked to a different movie. Something like... the hunted or something.

Yeah -- that's the poster that scared some European housewife. Remember? They wanted it banned or some silly crap like that.

[grinner]

ah... yes, that is correct. I wonder why they have it linked to a different movie

[divinedaydreams]

Their silly that's why.

[zap]

........<SNIP>........Now, for those of you whining and crying about naked men being stacked on top of each other, and I'm not excusing anything, remember how people with the same mind set treated our dead......<SNIP>.......Again, I'm appalled with what is going on with those few soldiers. At the same time, I have perspective.

The big, crucial difference in all of this: Our soldiers are professionals, and they are supposed to be representing us....or at least the very best we as a nation can and should be. What happened to those contractors was truely outrageous, and utterly appaling. It was done most likely by common citizens, not professionals.

Anyone that defends this torture, rape and abuse has very serious problems. I WANT to be proud of MY military! I WANT to believe that this shitty WAR has MEANING! And by meaning, I mean that we went there to UPLIFT that country! TO remove a horrible dictator, and show those PEOPLE what a democrasy is capable of doing! What have we shown them by doing this? We have shown them that their WORST fears about Americans is TRUE! We are FAR WORSE than Hussein in their minds because this abuse has occured!

NO ONE EVER DESERVES TO BE RAPED AND TORTURED! NO one! Not Hitler, not Hussein, not Dahmer, NOT ANY HUMAN BEING EVER!

Do all of us posting to this thread love America? Yes, I think we do. I also think this is a BRILLIANT chance for ALL of us, left, right, wherever to STAND TOGETHER and DEMAND better! It is OUR military! Let us NOT condone the very acts Hussein was so notrious for.

[Third EYe]

No no -- I meant Rush Limbaugh, not you! (ducks for cover)


My apologies, I shouldn't play bass fishing games and post at the same time.

Rush saying that, I do not remember if it's true or not. I do know that he said he never contradicted himself, which isn't accurate, he has, several times concerning his drug abuse.

[Antrobus]

Limbaugh is a buffoon - a living joke - a zit on the face of humanity - I can't be bothered to say anything more about that piece of sh*t - IMO!

As for Rumsfeld, he needs to go. If he's willing to take responsibility for what happened, which he did, then he needs to step down. He has lost his credibility. The buck has to stop somewhere and it appears to have stopped with him since he knew about this atrocity since at least Jan. '04 and didn't give it the gravity it deserved. Supposedly there are even worse photos and a video to come!

Sometimes the "big cheese" has to take a hit for the team. Rumsfeld needs to go! Better that he do it himself then to allow the Congress to impeach him, which they have the power to do. As I understand it, members of Congress are currently drafting the impeachment papers .

[Jeff O'Connor]

First of all - grinner, I think all the avatars you've put up are cool. :aok:

zapgun - I totally agree. No human being that lives or has lived, or will ever live, deserves rape. Totally.

My own two cents is short, here, because for one I don't have much to say that hasn't already been said, and for two, I want to try and make sure I stay as neutral as possible in this thread; I hate becoming enemies with someone as much as the other guy. I can only say that I choose not to listen to Rush Limbaugh because more often than not, what he says, I disagree with, in context to various things. So I don't listen to him, because why tune the radio to someone you just end up disagreeing with? I don't see the point. I don't listen to him, and that's my personal decision. We should all just decide not to listen to him if we don't want to, and naturally, vice versa. If more topics like this come up, from Limbaugh's quotes on his radio show, I'm sure this is bound to happen again. :shrug:

[LiLOrion]

I think it is fair to say if you don't have a thick skin get out of this thread now. That is if your still here.


I'm trying, but I cant seem to find the door. :candle:

[grinner]

Again... you have the power... change the channel.

[divinedaydreams]

I'm trying, but I cant seem to find the door. :candle:


I forget where it is myself but I'm not looking at the moment either. :D

[Antrobus]

change the channel

I wish I could change the channel on the whole thing! I wish I could turn to a channel where eveything is peaceful and docile - and people get along! But unfortunately that "channel" doesn't exist. Unless one wants to turn a blind eye towards "the banned topic" we have to face this and deal with it - daily.

I'm not angry at the military, per se, I'm angry that somewhere along the line someone promoted the idea that this kind of torture and humiliation was an acceptable tool for America to use on detainees, ignoring and violating the Geneva Convention. America - the home of the free and the brave! Well there was nothing free and/or brave to be seen in those horrendous photos!!

Right now I'm ashamed to be an American citizen. I don't say that lightly! I'm generally proud of my heritage. However right now I feel like hanging my head in shame - and on a personal level I didn't even do anything wrong!

[grinner]

I am sorry you are ashamed to be an American citizen... if you read your history books... you'll see that worse was done by the US in other wars... and usually after it comes out, those in power attempt to make amends. This is, sorry to say, a blip on the radar screen. I am not saying that those that did this didn't do anything wrong, what I am saying is that placing the blame upon every American/UK/Allied soldier is also wrong. I am not ashamed to be an American, I am proud to be an American. Name another country that would allow their indiscretions to see the light of day. I firmly believe that the US will be better for this situation coming to light. It may not be overnight... but at least we are admiting our mistakes. and it appears that well will also deal with the consequences

[stellar]

Hey grinner, what's that in his mouth? A candied apple or a human heart?

So who's the bigger ass, Michael Moore or Rush Limbaugh? I used to watch Rush when he had that TV show a bazillion years ago, but what he said was pretty fu**ing off-the-hook stupid. I'd suggest that he was off his meds, but chances are he's more probably back on his meds with lunatic ravings like this. I guess the Japs were just blowing off a little steam at Nanking. Come on Rush... be less insane... for me?

[generic_screenname]

So who's the bigger ass, Michael Moore or Rush Limbaugh?Hey if you put them together you'd get Rush Moore, the self-loathing radio host filmaker.

Sorry, I was possessed by the unholy spirit of Carrot Top for a minute there.

[grinner]

Hey grinner, what's that in his mouth? A candied apple or a human heart?
it's the gums of his mouth

[wormholewilma]

I don't excuse or condone in anyway what those loose cannons have done. Let's just not loose the context, we are doing a whole lot more good for the Iraqi people that have been done harm. If we wanted to keep from getting our guys killed we would do massive bombing from the air and the civilians be damned. But we aren't doing that.

No war campaign is perfect. Our nations fight for freedom is definatley not perfect. I believe when all is said and done, our world is better off without Sadam who would be more than willing to help terrorist to attack our country. And his own people are better off to. Not all like what is going on, but give it time. Things like this take time.
Look how long it took for us to become a free and thriving nation? And we had no help. It took things quite a while after WW11. And remember all the critisim the powers that be took for what happened there. But it was good that Hitler was finally stopped. Time people. Give things time. And keep holding the right people accountable. The terrorist for starting this whole mess. And the individual loose cannons who behaved so appaulingly. Let the rest of our fine military finish their job.

[Mrelia]

There is no excuse for torture. Period.
If Rush thinks those hilarious hijinks are so harmless, let's do that stuff to HIM! :devil:

Seriously, I feel that the people who took part in those sadistic activities shamed not only themselves, but their families, branches of the service and our whole country. They are war criminals and should be treated as such.

I have the greatest respect for our men & women in uniform and don't want those bad apples putting decent soldiers further in harm's way.

[Lord Loser]

Humans suck. I'm ashamed to be a member of the human race seeing this shit. It's sick.If you think you have another option, why not take it? If you don't wish that way out, then stop being stupid. If your sense of worth is built around what others do, listen to Third EYe and get a little perspective. You don't like Rush. Woo. Hoo. Guess what, I'm still getting up tomorrow. So there's VX in the midwest. Whoopie. Move out of the country. So there's an illegal war in the mideast. Frell-n-a. Run for President on that platform. But for hell's sake stop whining, and actually do something.

[grinner]

wow... just... wow.

[vacantlook]

Well, this certainly makes this board feel vastly less welcoming. Why not just pull out a bat and start beating anyone who wants to post in venting frustration and dislike about something?

[Lord Loser]

Well, this certainly makes this board feel vastly less welcoming. Why not just pull out a bat and start beating anyone who wants to post in venting frustration and dislike about something?The irony of your post is extremely humourous.

[vacantlook]

<insert dismissive eyeroll here>

[Third EYe]

[QUOTE=stellar]
So who's the bigger ass, Michael Moore or Rush Limbaugh? QUOTE]

Michael Moore's Letter April 14th 2004 (http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?messageDate=2004-04-14)


Read the above link, read the entire letter. I would have posted the part I hope everyone reads, most of it is just mindless lying, but one portion where he champions the terrorists and hopes the US loses the war is devestating.

Those who support Michael Moore, I wonder if you support his statements made in that letter to his "friends".

So, the answer is, Michael Moore is a bigger ass.

I'm ashamed that Michael Moore has the right to call himself an American.

[DRD2001]

The US should lead by example.

What was done was, IMO, disgustingly wrong and inexcusable. But these acts were done by individuals. They will be held accountable. Those higher up should be investigated too, because if nothing else, it happened on their watch. But inspite of my personal feelings about the president and the war, I still support our military. There are a bunch of young kids out there, in a foreign country, away from family, surrounded by the unfamiliar who are doing what they pledged and took an oath to do. I respect them for that. And on Monday morning, I am sending out DVDs to them. Some are Farscape and others were generously donated by diversifiedsellers for our troops. Some soldiers will be getting books. And even more will be getting letters.

As for Rush Limbaugh, I really could care less what he says. I don't listen to his show.

[Frellster]

I'm sickened by the images (of the torture - avatar was bad too, but it was graciously replaced) I can't stand mans' inhumanity towards man. Why must we humiliate and dehumanize poeple because they are our "enemy?" How do we spread PEACE, LOVE & COMPASSION?

[Frellster]

I think Rush is a far bigger ass than Micheal Moore. Sorry, ThirdEye.

[DRD2001]

And on the next episode of Celebrity Boxing, Limbaugh in one corner and Moore in the other. I'd love to watch them duke it out. Especially if there were a "steel" chair in the ring.

[stellar]

Boy that would be a disapointing fight. It would be like jello fighting cheese whiz.

[grinner]

I(of the torture - avatar was bad too, but it was graciously replaced) I am sorry... but why does my avatar matter? If I want to have an undead zombie as an avatar... why should you care?

[Third EYe]

I am sorry... but why does my avatar matter? If I want to have an undead zombie as an avatar... why should you care?


You might be sorry, but I'll always care.

What's an avatar?

[LadyCrais]

As reported yesterday...
(May 06, 2004 -- 08:05 PM EDT)
An interesting tidbit from this evening's edition of The (must-read) Nelson Report ...

We can contribute a second hand anecdote to newspaper stories on rising concern, last year, from Secretary of State Powell and Deputy Secretary Armitage about Administration attitudes and the risks they might entail: according to eye witnesses to debate at the highest levels of the Administration...the highest levels...whenever Powell or Armitage sought to question prisoner treatment issues, they were forced to endure what our source characterizes as "around the table, coarse, vulgar, frat-boy bully remarks about what these tough guys would do if THEY ever got their hands on prisoners...."

-- let's be clear: our source is not alleging "orders" from the White House. Our source is pointing out that, as we said in the Summary, a fish rots from its head. The atmosphere created by Rumsfeld's controversial decisions was apparently aided and abetted by his colleagues in their callous disregard for the implications of the then-developing situation, and by their ridicule of the only combat veterans at the top of this Administration.

Tough guys ...

-- Josh Marshall

The statement that is highlighted is what has been driving me around the bend the last 24 hours or so. This is exactly the SAME kind of behavior that was practiced by that man in the White House when he was in the governors mansion in Texas whenever death penalty cases were appealed to him. That is precisely WHY I refused to even consider voting for him. That he has surrounded himself with like-minded people should hardly come as a surprise to anyone. Only now it's not one reformed female prisoner who's paying the price. It's the entire world and the honor of our country.

---------------------------------------------
No Cover Up??

Rape Rooms: A Chronology
What Bush said as the Iraq prison scandal unfolded.
By William Saletan
Updated Wednesday, May 5, 2004, at 7:54 PM PT

"The Iraqi people are now free. And they do not have to worry about the secret police coming after them in the middle of the night, and they don't have to worry about their husbands and brothers being taken off and shot, or their wives being taken to rape rooms. Those days are over."—Paul Bremer, Administrator, [Iraq] Coalition Provisional Authority, Sept. 2, 2003

"Iraq is free of rape rooms and torture chambers."—President Bush, remarks to 2003 Republican National Committee Presidential Gala, Oct. 8, 2003

"There was an announcement by the Iraqi Governing Council earlier this week about the tribunal that they have set up to hold accountable members of the former regime who were responsible for three decades of brutality and atrocities. … We know about the mass graves and the rape rooms and the torture chambers of Saddam Hussein's regime. … We welcome their decision to move forward on a tribunal to hold people accountable for those atrocities."—Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan, White House press briefing, Dec. 10, 2003

"One thing is for certain: There won't be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms."—Bush, press availability in Monterrey, Mexico, Jan. 12, 2004

"On 19 January 2004, Lieutenant General (LTG) Ricardo S. Sanchez, Commander, Combined Joint Task Force Seven (CJTF-7) requested that the Commander, US Central Command, appoint an Investigating Officer (IO) in the grade of Major General (MG) or above to investigate the conduct of operations within the 800th Military Police (MP) Brigade. LTG Sanchez requested an investigation of detention and internment operations by the Brigade from 1 November 2003 to present. LTG Sanchez cited recent reports of detainee abuse."—Report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, senior U.S. military official in Iraq, describing a formal inquiry launched on Jan. 19, 2004

"Sources have revealed new details from the Army's criminal investigation into reports of abuse of Iraqi detainees, including the location of the suspected crimes and evidence that is being sought. U.S. soldiers reportedly posed for photographs with partially unclothed Iraqi prisoners, a Pentagon official told CNN on Tuesday."—Barbara Starr, CNN, Jan. 21, 2004

"Saddam Hussein now sits in a prison cell, and Iraqi men and women are no longer carried to torture chambers and rape rooms …"—Bush, remarks on "Winston Churchill and the War on Terror," Feb. 4, 2004

"Seventeen U.S. soldiers have been suspended of duties pending the outcome of the investigation into alleged allegations of abuse of Iraqi prisoners, a U.S. officer said Monday."—Associated Press, Feb. 23, 2004

"[B]etween October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force. … The allegations of abuse were substantiated by detailed witness statements (ANNEX 26) and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence. … I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts:

a. Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;

b. Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;

c. Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;

d. Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;

e. Forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear;

f. Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;

g. Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;

h. Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture; …

j. Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee's neck and having a female soldier pose for a picture;

k. A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee;

l. Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee …

These findings are amply supported by written confessions provided by several of the suspects, written statements provided by detainees, and witness statements. …

In addition, several detainees also described the following acts of abuse, which under the circumstances, I find credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses (ANNEX 26):

a. Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees;

b. Threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol;

c. Pouring cold water on naked detainees;

d. Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair;

e. Threatening male detainees with rape; …

g. Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick."

—Executive summary of Taguba report, finalized Feb. 29, 2004, briefed to superiors on March 3, 2004, and submitted in final form on March 9, 2004

"Every woman in Iraq is better off because the rape rooms and torture chambers of Saddam Hussein are forever closed."—Bush, remarks on "Efforts to Globally Promote Women's Human Rights," March 12, 2004

"There's still remnants of that regime that would like to take it back. … They could torture people and have rape rooms, and the world would turn their head from that and let it happen. But they can't do that anymore."—Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, BBC interview, March 16, 2004

"There are no more rape rooms and torture chambers in Iraq."—National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, CBS Early Show, March 19, 2004

"As you know, on 14 January 2004, a criminal investigation was initiated to examine allegations of detainee abuse at the Baghdad confinement facility at Abu Ghraib. Shortly thereafter, the commanding general of Combined Joint Task Force Seven requested a separate administrative investigation into systemic issues such as command policies and internal procedures related to detention operations. That administrative investigation is complete; however, the findings and recommendations have not been approved. As a result of the criminal investigation, six military personnel have been charged with criminal offenses to include conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty and maltreatment, assault, and indecent acts with another."--Brigadier Gen. Mark Kimmitt, Deputy Director for Coalition Operations, Coalition Provisional Authority Briefing, March 20, 2004

"Correspondent Brooke Hart: But in a 53-page secret report, Army Major General Antonio Taguba says an investigation found a disturbing pattern of sadistic, blatant, wanton criminal abuses. The report was completed in February, but the Pentagon said Defense Secretary Rumsfeld hadn't read it. Democratic lawmakers are frustrated. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M.: This is an unacceptable response. That's not the level of concern the American people would expect of their military commanders for this type of conduct."—"Pentagon officials to answer tough questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee regarding Iraqi prisoner abuse," CNBC, April 4, 2004

"SFC Snider grabbed my prisoner and threw him into a pile. …. I saw SSG Frederic, SGT Davis and CPL Graner walking around the pile hitting the prisoners. I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its [sic] ribcage. The prisoner was no danger to SSG Frederick. … I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open."—Testimony of Military Police Specialist Matthew Wisdom, hearing on charges of prisoner abuse, April 9, 2004; according to The New Yorker, "After the hearing, the presiding investigative officer ruled that there was sufficient evidence to convene a court-martial."

"The investigation started after SPC Darby … got a CD from CPL Graner. … He came across pictures of naked detainees."—Testimony of Special Agent Scott Bobeck, Army Criminal Investigation Division, same hearing, April 9, 2004

"Two weeks ago, 60 Minutes II received an appeal from the Defense Department, and eventually from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, to delay this broadcast—given the danger and tension on the ground in Iraq."—CBS News statement on its broadcast of photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse, April 29, 2004, referring to a DOD appeal received on or near April 15, 2004

"Our military is … performing brilliantly. See, the transition from torture chambers and rape rooms and mass graves and fear of authority is a tough transition. And they're doing the good work of keeping this country stabilized as a political process unfolds."—Bush, remarks on "Tax Relief and the Economy," Iowa, April 15, 2004

"We're facing supporters of the outlaw cleric, remnants of Saddam's regime that are still bitter that they don't have the position to run the torture chambers and rape rooms. … They will fail because they do not speak for the vast majority of Iraqis who do not want to replace one tyrant with another. They will fail because the will of our coalition is strong. They will fail because America leads a coalition full of the finest military men and women in the world."—Bush, remarks on the USA Patriot Act, Pennsylvania, April 19, 2004

"We acted, and there are no longer mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms in Iraq."—Bush, remarks at Victory 2004 Reception, Florida, April 23, 2004

"The pictures show Americans, men and women, in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners. There are shots of the prisoners stacked in a pyramid, one with a slur written on his skin in English. In some, the male prisoners are positioned to simulate sex with each other. And in most of the pictures, the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing, or giving the camera a thumbs-up."—Dan Rather, 60 Minutes II, April 28, 2004

"A year ago, I did give the speech from the carrier, saying that we had achieved an important objective, that we'd accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein. And as a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq."—Bush, remarks in the Rose Garden, April 30, 2004

"There are those who seek to derail the transition to democracy because they want to return to the days of mass graves and torture chambers and rape rooms. But that's not going to happen."—McClellan, White House press briefing, April 30, 2004

"A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba … listed some of the wrongdoing: 'Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.' "—Seymour M. Hersh, "Torture at Abu Ghraib," The New Yorker, posted April 30, 2004

"Because we acted, torture rooms are closed, rape rooms no longer exist, mass graves are no longer a possibility in Iraq."—Bush, remarks at "Ask President Bush" event, Michigan, May 3, 2004

"I'm not a lawyer. My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture. … I don't know if it is correct to say what you just said, that torture has taken place, or that there's been a conviction for torture. And therefore I'm not going to address the torture word."—Rumsfeld, Defense Department Operational Update Briefing, May 4, 2004

"It's very important for people, your listeners, to understand in our country that when an issue is brought to our attention on this magnitude, we act—and we act in a way where leaders are willing to discuss it with the media. And we act in a way where, you know, our Congress asks pointed questions to the leadership. … Iraq was a unique situation because Saddam Hussein had constantly defied the world and had threatened his neighbors, had used weapons of mass destruction, had terrorist ties, had torture chambers …"—Bush, interview with Al Arabiya Television, May 5, 2004

-------------------------------------------------------

All of which completely ignores that the Red Cross and other human rights groups have been complaining loudly and vociferously since shortly after the troops arrived. There are now something in the neighborhood of 25 separate investigations being made, throughout Iraq and Afghanastan.

-------------------------------------------------------

For Twitch:
1) In most cases, the word "contractors" is a euphemism for mercenaries. I don't know what the 4 contractors who were dragged through the streets did, but I can at least understand that the Iraqis might have confused them with those other "contractors" that were responsible for those that have been responsible for these kinds of crimes.

2) These are standard military practices within specific branches. See below.

3) 30-40% of the prisoners being held and tortured in this and other prisons are entirely innocent, yet Rumsfield has refused to let them go. See further below:

---------------------------------------------------
(May 07, 2004 -- 09:59 PM EDT )
This article in tomorrow's Guardian suggests that some of these sexual humiliation methods apparently practiced at Abu Ghraib are taught to various special forces and military intelligence troops in the US and the UK, both to use them and also to prepare themselves to withstand them.

What's now happening in Iraq is that the same methods are being passed down to untrained and unsupervised reservists; and the whole situation spirals out of control.

I'm not sure this is the whole story. But it has a ring of truth to me, mixing, as it does, ugliness with disorganization and a spiralling cycle of unaccountability.

The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.
The techniques devised in the system, called R2I - resistance to interrogation - match the crude exploitation and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.

One former British special forces officer who returned last week from Iraq, said: "It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq that the prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what they were doing."

He said British and US military intelligence soldiers were trained in these techniques, which were taught at the joint services interrogation centre in Ashford, Kent, now transferred to the former US base at Chicksands

...

Many British and US special forces soldiers learn about the degradation techniques because they are subjected to them to help them resist if captured. They include soldiers from the SAS, SBS, most air pilots, paratroopers and members of pathfinder platoons

...

"The crucial difference from Iraq is that frontline soldiers who are made to experience R2I techniques themselves develop empathy. They realise the suffering they are causing. But people who haven't undergone this don't realise what they are doing to people. It's a shambles in Iraq".

The British former officer said the dissemination of R2I techniques inside Iraq was all the more dangerous because of the general mood among American troops.

"The feeling among US soldiers I've spoken to in the last week is also that 'the gloves are off'. Many of them still think they are dealing with people responsible for 9/11".

Not an excuse, certainly, but here I think we can start to see the contours of the perfect storm -- hideous methods, at least reserved for restricted cases, parcelled out to unsupervised amateurs, abetted by what might be generously termed high-level indifference. Marathon Man? Lord of the Flies?

-- Josh Marshall

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
'Cooks and drivers were working as interrogators'

Witness: private contractor lifts the lid on systematic failures at Abu Ghraib jail

Julian Borger in Washington
Friday May 7, 2004
The Guardian

Many of the prisoners abused at the Abu Ghraib prison were innocent Iraqis picked up at random by US troops, and incarcerated by under-qualified intelligence officers, a former US interrogator from the notorious jail told the Guardian.
Torin Nelson, who served as a military intelligence officer at Guantánamo Bay before moving to Abu Ghraib as a private contractor last year, blamed the abuses on a failure of command in US military intelligence and an over-reliance on private firms. He alleged that those companies were so anxious to meet the demand for their services that they sent "cooks and truck drivers" to work as interrogators.

"Military intelligence operations need to drastically change in order for something like this not to happen again," Mr Nelson said. He spoke to the Guardian in a series of interviews by phone and email.

He claimed that "many of the detainees at the prison are actually innocent of any acts against the coalition and are being held until the bureaucracy there can go through their cases and verify their need to be released."

"One case in point is a detainee whom I recommended for release and months later was still sitting in the same tent with no change in his status."

Mr Nelson said that the same systemic problems were also responsible for large numbers of Afghans being mistakenly swept into Guantánamo Bay. He estimated that "30-40%" of the inmates at the controversial prison camp had no connection to terrorism.

"There are people who should never have been sent over there. I was involved in the process of reviewing people for possible release and I can say definitely that they should have been released and released a lot sooner," he said.

The former commander of the Guantánamo Bay Camp, Major General Geoffrey Miller, was transferred to Iraq a month ago to overhaul the prison system there, although he has been criticised for his recommendations last year that US prison guards in Iraq help "set the conditions" for interrogations by softening up detainees.

Such allegations have been made before by victims' families and human rights groups but Mr Nelson's story represents the first insider's account by an American interrogator. It amounts to an indictment of a system gone awry, and contradicts claims by the White House and the Pentagon that Abu Ghraib does not represent a systemic problem.

Mr Nelson denies any involvement in the physical and sexual abuse of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, and is listed in the official military report into the scandal as a witness rather than a suspect. He says he resigned from his job in February in fear for his life, because Abu Ghraib was coming under increasing attack by Iraqi insurgents, and because of his disillusion in the military leadership there. He is now working for a private contractor - but not as an interrogator - in another country that is part of the US "global war on terrorism". He did not want his whereabouts published.

Mr Nelson said he had come forward to speak now because he believed that military intelligence was seeking to blame the Abu Ghraib scandal on a handful of soldiers to divert attention away from ingrained problems in the military detention and interrogation system.

As a witness in an ongoing investigation, Mr Nelson said he could not talk about the abuses of specific prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but he said the nature of the detention system makes the imprisonment and abuse of innocent people all but inevitable.

"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home. They take it out on the nearest person they can't understand."

"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, "the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him," he said.

According to Mr Nelson's account, the victims' very innocence made them more likely to be abused, because interrogators refused to believe they could have been picked up on such arbitrary grounds.

"Now, whether the detainees are put into the general intelligence holding area, where they rot for a few months until final release, or if they are placed in solitary confinement because their story seems unbelievable is completely in the hands of the interrogator's opinion," he said. "It is in solitary that the abuses can be committed. So, in theory it is in fact very possible that purely innocent Iraqis could be placed in an environment where they could be brutalised, abused, "softened up" or even killed."

"At Abu Ghraib there were plenty of detainees talking or wanting to talk, but the leadership was focused on the "hard" targets of high-value," Mr Nelson said. "This was mainly because the leadership was almost completely focused on getting the highest ranking Ba'ath party members still in hiding. And many of the interrogators were anxious to "go after" the difficult eggs. They wanted to be the one interrogator who broke the linking detainee and found such and such high value target. They weren't interested in going through the less glamorous work of sifting through the chaff to get to the kernels of truth from the willing detainees, they were interested in "breaking" the tough targets."

Much of the problem lay in the quality of US interrogators, Mr Nelson said, explaining that only the youngest and least experienced intelligence officers actually question detainees.

"Once you get up to a level of NCO [non commissioned officer] or warrant officer you generally get moved into administration. You are taken out of working as an interrogator," he said.

As the number of suspects sucked into the system exploded, the Pentagon came to rely increasingly on interrogators from private contractors to question them. Mr Nelson was one of a team of roughly 30 in Abu Ghraib employed by a Virginia-based firm, CACI International. He believes his decade of experience in military intelligence made him well-qualified to do the job, but he had growing doubts about his colleagues.

"I'd say about of the contractors that it's kind of a hit or miss. They're under so much pressure to fill slots quickly... They penalise contracting companies if they can't fill slots on time and it looks bad on companies' records," Mr Nelson said. "If you're in such a hurry to get bodies, you end up with cooks and truck drivers doing intelligence work."

"There was someone was hired as an interrogator or screener whose previous job was a truck driver. That was pretty close to when I was leaving," Mr Nelson recalled. "My eyes went really wide at that point - really scraping the bottom of the barrel."

CACI International did not respond to a request for comment on Mr Nelson's account. The firm has told other reporters that it has not been contacted by military investigators about the work of its employees at Abu Ghraib. Its recruitment notices seeking interrogators state that the job "requires a top secret clearance" and note that the successful applicant would operate "under minimal supervision."

Mr Nelson worked at Guantánamo Bay as a senior interrogator attached to the Utah National Guard. He said that most of the interrogators there were military professionals, but that by the time he left in early 2003, private contractors had begun to arrive.

There is no evidence of abuses on the scale of Abu Ghraib being committed at Guantánamo Bay, but Mr Nelson said that like the Iraqi jail, it was packed with innocent people, who are only now being released.

"Mistakes were made and people who should never have been sent there ended up there, and it's taken this amount of time to get people to take the decision to get these people out of there," Mr Nelson said.

"All it takes is the signature of a low ranking NCO to send someone right around the world and have them locked up indefinitely but it takes the signature of the secretary of defence to let them go."

[Twich]

Here's the thing. If you (in the general sense) are going to condemn an entire administration or even an entire country for the practices of a few, then maybe you should do that across the board. Why does no one hold the entire Iraqi population responsible for the deaths of the civilian contractors? Why does no one hold the entire population of Saudi Arabia responsible for September 11th? Why is it that those who hold the entire US Military, or the entire government...yes even the entire population of the United States responsible for the actions of these half dozen people aren't willing to do that across the board? Because it's perfectly fine to demonize our own country for the sake of politics and rhetoric....we're the bad guys. No matter what.

I hope you're (in the general sense again) not planning to vote for John Kerry either. Isn't he the one who testified to repeatedly DOING things that are worse than the pictures that have come out now? He's said he took part in burning villages, killing people and mutilating them. Oh but wait...that's fine because he came back from the war and condemned it all publicly. Flushed the entire US Military down the drain because of the actions of a few...that sounds familiar.

[zap]

Twitch, I can't speak for everyone on this thread, and I would ask you to re-read what I posted on the last page. To re-iterate, and make it shorter, our military is professional, our military (as you know) has a chain of command. Those soldiers that tortured those Iraqi civilians were clearly in the wrong, and one horrible outcome of all of this is the damage American credibility has suffered due to this. I do think that credibility might be somewhat resorted if Rumsfield VOLUNTARILY resigned. However, that man has so much hubris, he would never do that, even though it WOULD serve our best interests! He knew about this since January, yet he let it continue. That is wrong, any way you look at it.

It sickens me to see images of Iraqi civillians dancing with joy over the bodies of dead Americans....but I have enough sense to recognize that those people feel powerless, and they probably see that as a way to "get back at" America for bombing the crap out of thier country for the past 10+ years. While I DO NOT THINK WE ARE THE "BAD GUY", I do understand , at least in part, Iraqi frustration with America. My country is GREAT! I am generally proud to be American, but by all accounts, once we decided to go into that country, for whatever reason, we ought to have had better plans, more $$$ and greater resolve to do the job right.

Twitch, just so you know, I am very grateful to the American military. I am accutely aware that American soldiers are there to protect MY "liberal", hippy, athiest, lesbian ass from all those dangers out there. However, MY taxes also go to pay for this military, and as a citizen and taxpayer, I have the right to say NO! This adventure was ill-concieved, and is being conducted in the WRONG way!

[Eve11]

Twich I think the point people are trying to make is not to blame every single person in the military, say that the entire system is depraved, etc, but to posit that this may NOT be just an isolated incident by just "a few people". And that the reason it may be more widespread and more common than we want to believe is in part due to attitudes and policies instantiated from the top, plus an administration's refusal to believe that its own personnel were capable of such acts and denouncement of whistle-blowing as anti-war rhetoric.

So no, I personally am not holding every person in the military responsible for these horrible acts, nor everyone in the country, nor the entire administration. And if you look back in the thread I really think your only beef on that issue is probably with NN. I know people in the military and I know they are honorable and good people, and those in Iraq now are risking their lives to help that country. But the sad fact is, these tortures did occur, soldiers have been heavy-handed in making arrests (here it is a matter of training and safety and they are also hindered by lack of knowing the culture or the language: basically we've got a big sledgehammer for a tool when we really need a paring knife), and while the administration did not necessarily condone these actions, it seems like they really did close their eyes to the situation until the photographs and irrefutable evidence came out. So, yes, in this case they had the power to stop it, months ago. I don't blame them for 9/11 which was perpetrated by terrorists and which it seems was much more a case of hindsight being 20/20, but in this case these actions were committed by their charges, under their watch, and they should have been monitoring the situation much better than they did.

It is not a broad condemnation of everyone in the military to say, "This should have been taken more seriously," and to hold those in charge of overseeing military action responsible.

I don't hold the entire Iraqi population responsible for Falluja. I do however have to put some responsibility on the newspapers and Mosques who railed against Americans, blamed them for insurgent's bombings and encouraged retailiation. That was the action of Iraqi leaders. I guess I'm one of the ilk who believe that yes, we did a good thing by going to war and ousting Saddam Hussein, but the administration has really made a lot of crucially bad decisions in the aftermath that have now put them in difficult situations.

[Third EYe]

Interesting that not one person has yet said that what Michael Moore wrote to his "friends" was wrong. One person even thinks what Moore wrote isn't has bad as what Rush said.

I'm sick about what Moore is conveying to people, because there are many mindless followers who hang on his every word. I wasn't going to post this in the thread directly, but I beleive I have to. I dare someone to defend it.

From Michael Moore's April 14th letter

"The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win"

Should Michael Moore stop making movies?

[mfa96]

Shouldn't our military be above the "frat boy" mentality? To say that the iraqis did bad things so we can, is juvenille at best. It was wrong when they committed atrocities, and it's wrong when we do. End of sentence, and end of discussion. As Mom always said, "Two wrongs don't make a right" (But two Wrights make an airplane).

We have the best trained, best equipped military in the world, right? Then let them act as professionals as they are supposed to be. Unfortuantely, from what I heard, the soldiers responsible for the prisoners were stationed at the prison without proper training. They were a reserve unit. (This is from what i heard yesterday at Rumsfeld's testimony). This is a problem of the soldiers who committed this torute- which is inexcuseable, and of the brass who put them there without proper training. The whole army is not to blame- there are thousands of soldiers putting there lives on the line in a way and a place I don't want to be. Whether the war is justufied or not, we are there now, and need to finish what was started to not leave things worse than when we got there.

The problem with Rush is that he has a lot of people who will listen blindly- same as with Moore. I like Moore- and his movies (as I have said in other posts), but feel he is way out of line in what he said about the "Minutemen". Now, why can't those who listen to Rush regularly, just admit, that what he said about the "frat boys" is way out of line too? (There you go 3rd I, someone has said it- and someone who loves Cracker the Corporate Crime Busting Chicken).

As for Kerry and his war atrocities, can someone post a reputable link to that? I have hear that he saw them, but never committed them himself.

[zap]

I followed the link Third EYe, and read the letter. I like Moore, he is like Voltaire I think. As far as thinking of Iraqi rebels as "minutemen", well....so what? It IS their country, and in a very weird way, that is democracy in motion! Those people could NOT rise up against Hussein, because he was such a total dictator. They can rise up against us because so far we are a democracy. It is all a frelled up mess.

I too would like to see evidence that John Kerry committed war crimes. If he reallt did, then he should be convicted of those war crimes! Im not one of those who would say "Bush sucks, he's a criminal, convict him, but Kerry is a liberal, so I blindly love him as he is above reproach" No, I have morals. When this election rolls around, I really do not know what I am going to do. Vote my conscious? Or vote for who I think will "beat Bush"? Gods, this is making me sick in my heart.

[stellar]

"The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win"

Should Michael Moore stop making movies?

No. And Rush Limbaugh shouldn't stop talking on the radio. Censorship is always bad.

Rush's statement is much worse. It takes a passive stance on Nazi tactics taken by a few MPs, CIA agents and contractors. Those tactics are historically evil and only work to compromise the work that the miliatary, CIA and security forces are doing now.

The war is over. The peace will take a long, long time and it is counterproductive to give the people there the notion that the Americans are employing Nazi tactics. If they need to blow off a little steam, put a Pantera album in and bang your head... don't mock human beings and don't beat people to death.

[zap]

Well, seek and ye shall find, as the saying goes. I did the obligatory google search, and this is the first thing I found. This is all making me sad yall. I dont know what the fuck we are going to do.

Portion of John Kerry remarks on NBC's "Meet the Press" May 6, 2001:


MR. RUSSERT: You mentioned you're a military guy. There's been a lot of
discussion about Bob Kerrey, your former Democratic colleague in the
Senate, about his talking about his anguish about what happened in Vietnam.
You were on this program 30 years ago as a leader of the Vietnam Veterans
Against the War. And we went back and have an audiotape of that and some
still photos. And your comments are particularly timely in this
overall discussion of Bob Kerrey. And I'd like for you to listen to
those with our audience and then try to put that war into some
context:


(Audiotape, April 18, 1971):


MR. CROSBY NOYES (Washington Evening Star): Mr. Kerry, you said at one time or
another that you think our policies in Vietnam are tantamount to genocide
and that the responsibility lies at all chains of command over there. Do
you consider that you personally as a Naval officer committed atrocities in
Vietnam or crimes punishable by law in this country?


KERRY: There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that,
yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other
soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire
zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50 calibre
machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only
weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the
burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of
this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this is ordered as a
matter of written established policy by the government of the United States
from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men
who designed the free fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed
off the air raid strike areas, I think these men, by the letter of the law,
the same letter of the law that tried Lieutenant Calley, are war criminals.


(End audiotape)


MR. RUSSERT: Thirty years later, you stand by that?


SEN. KERRY: I don't stand by the genocide. I think those were the words of
an angry young man. We did not try to do that. But I do stand by the
description-I don't even believe there is a purpose served in the word "war
criminal." I really don't. But I stand by the rest of what happened over
there, Tim.


I mean, you know, we-it was-I mean, we've got to put this war in its right
perspective and time helps us do that. I believe very deeply that it was a
noble effort to begin with. I signed up. I volunteered. I wanted to go over
there and I wanted to win. It was a noble effort to try to make a country
democratic; to try to carry our principles and values to another part of
the world. But we misjudged history. We misjudged our own country. We
misjudged our strategy. And we fell into a dark place. All of us. And
I think we learned that over time. And I hope the contribution that
some of us made as veterans was to come back and help people
understand that.


I think our soldiers served as nobly, on the whole, as in any war, and
people need to understand that. There were great sacrifices, great
contributions. And they came back to a country that didn't thank the
veteran, that didn't-I mean, everything that the veteran gained in the
ensuing years, Agent Orange recognition, post-Vietnam stress syndrome
recognition, the extension of the G.I. Bill, you know, improvement of
the V.A. hospitals, all came from Vietnam veterans themselves
fighting for it. Indeed, even the memorial in Washington came from
that.


MR. RUSSERT: By your own comments, Bob Kerrey was not alone in doing the
things that he did.


SEN. KERRY: Oh, of course, not. And not only that, we, the government of
our country, ran an assassination program. I mean, Bill Colby has
acknowledged it. We had the Phoenix Program, where they actually went into
villages to eliminate the civilian infrastructure of the Vietcong. Now, you
couldn't tell the difference in many cases who they were. And countless
veterans testified 30 years ago to that reality. And I think-look,
there's no excusing shooting children in cold blood, or women, and
killing them in cold blood. There isn't, under any circumstances. But
we're not asking, you know, nor is Bob Kerrey saying, "Excuse us for
what we did." We're asking people to try to
understand the context and forgiveness. And I think the nation needs to
understand what the nation put its young in a position to do, and
move on and take those lessons and apply them to the future.


MR. RUSSERT: The folks who oversaw the war, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon,
Henry Kissinger, you do not now 30 years later consider them war criminals?


SEN. KERRY: No, I think we did things that were tantamount that certainly
violated the laws of war, but I think it was the natural consequence of the
Cold War itself. People made decisions based on their perceptions of the
world at that time. They were in error. They were judgments of error. But I
think no purpose is served now by going down that road. I think, you know,
the rhetoric of youth and of anger can be redeemed by the acts that we put in
place after time to try to move us beyond that. And I think there are great
lessons to learn from it. But we would serve no purpose with that now. But
we have to be honest about the mistakes we made. We don't have legitimacy
in the world, Tim, if we go to other countries, in Bosnia or China or
anywhere else, and not say, "You know, we made some terrible mistakes."


And that honesty, that lack of a sense of honesty is part of what is
driving people's anger toward the United States today. That's why we have
the vote in the U.N. That's why people-our allies, too-are disturbed by
this defense posture. You can't abrogate the ABM treaty and move forward on
your own to build this defense in a way that threatens the perceptions of
security people have. And if you build a defense system, Tim, that
can do what they say at the outside, which is change mutual assured
destruction, you have invited a potential adversary to build, build,
build, to find a way around it. The lesson of the Cold War is, you do
not make this planet safer by moving
unilaterally into a place of new weapons. Every single advance in weaponry
through the Cold War was matched by one side or the other, and that's why
we put the ABM treaty in place, and that's why we need to proceed very
cautiously and very thoughtfully.


MR. RUSSERT: John Kerry, we thank you for your views.


SEN. KERRY: Thank you.

[Muaadeeb]

true enough grinner, but how can anyone in thier right mind call these things anything but torture? We are supposed to be the "good guys"! We were supposed to be liberating those people, freeing them from EXACTLY this type of abuse! You did not actually say very much with this statement grinner, but it implies that you agree with Limbaugh?

If American soldiers feel they must turn to torture and rape of prisoners of war, then they are the same as the terrorists we seem so desperate to eliminate from the world. I would rather be proud of America's military, and I understand that a very small percentage of American soldiers engaged in these abuses, but they HAD to have realized on SOME level how much harm this would create.


.00004 % of the american military was involved in this situation. They are not reflective of the american forces at large.

My question is....Where was the outrage when the militia dragged 4 americans through the streets and hung them from an Iraqi bridge 3 weeks ago?

The people involed in this incident are under investigate and will be punished for what they did. I do think we should keep the event in perspective of everything else that is going on.

[vacantlook]

My question is....Where was the outrage when the militia dragged 4 americans through the streets and hung them from an Iraqi bridge 3 weeks ago?

I remember plenty of people throughout the media as well as individuals I spoke with being totally disgusted with it, so it wasn't as if it was something totally ignored. Plenty of people had a problem with it and still do have a problem with it.

Part of why there is a lot of people having a sizable problem with the abuse of the prisoners is that we like to think that we're incapable of doing bad things. It's the bad Iraqis that killed the four Americans, so for many people it's not as suprising that it would happen since they see those anti-American Iraqi people as being bad people: bad behavior is then expected from them. But our people are supposed to be good American citizens, so when it turns out that some Americans have done bad things, then it's more threatening because that source of bad behavior is now from within instead of from outside.

[zap]

.00004 % of the american military was involved in this situation. They are not reflective of the american forces at large.

My question is....Where was the outrage when the militia dragged 4 americans through the streets and hung them from an Iraqi bridge 3 weeks ago?

The people involed in this incident are under investigate and will be punished for what they did. I do think we should keep the event in perspective of everything else that is going on.


Since you quoted me, I will reply to you. If you carefully read all my responses to this thread, you will understand my point of view on the subject. HOWEVER, I will say ONCE MORE that our military is composed of professional soldiers, sent to Iraq to overthrow a dictatorship that inflicted torture on its own citizens. Apparently SOME of our soldiers decided the best way to demonstrate the America is NOT evil was to rape and torture Iraqi citizens. You want to defend THAT, then you go right ahead. The rest of the world, PARTICULARLY the Muslim world sees this as validation for thier hatred.

I agree that we do need to keep this in perspective. The perspective that torture and rape is NEVER ACCEPTABLE no matter who, when, where, by whom, to whom.

[divinedaydreams]

I think the reason I feel more outrage over our treatment of others then their treatment of us is...

A. I was not expecting US forces to be welcomed with open arms. I didn't believe the original opinion that this war would be quick. I also knew that there is always someone out there trying to fight change of any sort. The people fighting us over there feel there very culture is under attack. I'm not saying what they are doing is right but its all they have. I understand why they did what they did. I wish we had some way of making everyone happy but there isn't one. I feel for every American who has died over there and their families. I have a brother who wants to go over there and a husband who has been there. Either one of them could be called in again and die. It scares me but I won't blame the entire Arab world for it. We don't get to see the faces of the average citizen there who is happy to have change. Who have hope for something better. The average citizen may have the same views of us as we have of them.

B. We are supposed to be the GOOD guys. If I think the war is wrong or not has nothing to do with it. We're there and I expect that we would conduct our selves as the good guys. I don't blame the entire military for the actions of a few but I don't think the 7 people charged are solely responsible. First you don't send underquailfied troops in with no one watching them. Second when you get wind of something you investigate and make changes immediatly. Third you don't put a general in charge after the fact who made statements supporting what was done. Yep a general said that MPs should help soften up prisoners even though they have no training on how to do that without violating prisoner rights. All of this is not what was brought forth right away with we are so sorry. NO we are finding stuff out as we go which makes it all seem like a cover up. Someone like Rumsfield should have come forward and spoke to the nation about this laid everything out including what they were doing to correct the situation.

Now I know a lot of this is based on my own experience (limited of course) and my feelings towards the war and the PTB. I don't like Bush or Rumsfield which does color my opinion. I can't not support the military after the years my family and I have spent serving in it. I do think the military is a fine organization, that may need some changing, and is still needed.

Alright I think I'm done for now. Oh what Moore is a jerk in the major way. Like I said before stuff like this on either side of the line is wrong. To encourage the death of your own citizens is anti american. I feel there is a big difference between understanding a way and encouraging it.

[Jul]

I don't want to get involved in the discussion in any way other than to say that I'm horrified that these things happened and that the individuals involved are punished, but while swinging through the blogosphere today, I saw this entry at the blog of an Iraqi doctor that lives in Baghdad regarding this situation... it seems one of his friends did a one month stint at the Abu Gharib Prison while the Americans have been in charge and he posts the interview he did with his friend:

http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/archives/2004_05_01_iraqthemodel_archive.html#1084027326132 55085

[divinedaydreams]

Interesting read thanks Jul. I truly hope that its all true and that the average Iraq citizen views these things with the same inlightment. AKA nothing and nobody is perfect but we can all learn from mistakes made and the way they are dealt with.

[Muaadeeb]

Since you quoted me, I will reply to you. If you carefully read all my responses to this thread, you will understand my point of view on the subject. HOWEVER, I will say ONCE MORE that our military is composed of professional soldiers, sent to Iraq to overthrow a dictatorship that inflicted torture on its own citizens. Apparently SOME of our soldiers decided the best way to demonstrate the America is NOT evil was to rape and torture Iraqi citizens. You want to defend THAT, then you go right ahead. The rest of the world, PARTICULARLY the Muslim world sees this as validation for thier hatred.

I agree that we do need to keep this in perspective. The perspective that torture and rape is NEVER ACCEPTABLE no matter who, when, where, by whom, to whom.


Please do not make personal attacks against me. I am not defending any bad behavior. I concurred the ones whom have done this thing are being punished.

[waltersgirl]

administrative warning to all, directed at no one in particular. play nice in the sandbox or the sandbox gets emptied.

[Third EYe]

Thanks Jul, good read.

[zap]

Please do not make personal attacks against me. I am not defending any bad behavior. I concurred the ones whom have done this thing are being punished.

Please read your PM from me.

[waltersgirl]

from mullings.com (http://mullings.com).

Abu Ghraib

Monday May 10, 2004



I am now officially sick-and-tired of the self-serving and largely uninformed hand-wringing about the goings on at Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad. As someone who has actually been on the grounds of Abu Ghraib prison, let me explain a few things.

First of all, there is no excuse for what a few soldiers did; but there is also no reason to make this into the moral equivalent of the Black Plague.

It should be pointed out that the prisoners at Abu Ghraib are not Boy Scouts rounded up for jaywalking. These are bad guys who either blew up or shot a coalition member; or were caught assembling an explosive device; or were caught in a place where the makings of explosive devices were found; or were caught with a cache of weapons. See the pattern here?

In short they were trying to kill me and others like me. And if they succeeded in doing that, they were going to come over here and try to kill you.

Ugly thought? You bet. But that is the kind of prisoner being held in the terrorist section at Abu Ghraib.

The Roar du Jour from those who want to get into this story by beating their chests over how terrible it all is, keep telling us that this has damaged American credibility in the Middle East.

Let's look at that.

First, lots of Arabs don't like us in the first place. Those Arabs will not like us any less for this incident.

That dislike has nothing to do with our cultural insensitivities. It has to do with America's refusal to allow those same Arabs, many of whom have been bankrolling the Palestinian terrorists for decades, to wipe the State of Israel off the face of the Earth they way they have wiped it off the face of their maps.

Second, those who claim that the Abu Ghraib situation will poison the well of American goodwill for decades, are really the ones who are under rating Arabs. They have to believe that all Arabs will assign the actions of perhaps a couple of dozen soldiers to the 280 million Americans who have pledged to help the Iraqis attain security, independence, and prosperity.

Those making that claim must, therefore, believe that all Arabs have the intellectual capacity of a frog (a real frog, not a French person) and the emotional development of a three-year-old (a real three-year-old, not a French person).

Finally, our friends on the Left are so very, very concerned about how foreigners (read, Europeans) will see us.

I don't care what the French, the Germans, or the Spaniards think about us. The French and the Germans are up to their elbows in the fraud and theft of billions of dollars in what is called the Oil-for-Food Program but which was really the Oil-for-Palaces Program.

It will be interesting to see if the intellectual elites on the Upper West Side of Manhattan are as upset with their vacation buddies in the Paris 16th as they are with Secretary Rumsfeld when it becomes clear that their pals were fully engaged in the systematic depravation of the people of Iraq.

Very often doing the right thing is also the hard thing. The easy thing is to close your eyes to evil; or to make a bargain with the devil.

You cannot stop doing the right thing because it is hard, or because of what those who would make a deal with the enemy in an attempt to rent their own safety, might think about what you.

The actions of a few soldiers in Abu Ghraib were wrong. But we cannot allow the spotlight currently shining on them to cast a shadow over the other 135,000 soldiers who are in Iraq doing their jobs professionally, properly, and with honor.

--END --
Copyright © 2004 Richard A. Galen

[trubador]

:aok: WG!

[divinedaydreams]

Here's one for you.


======================

Red Cross: Iraq Abuse Widespread, Routine

1 hour, 39 minutes ago

By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS, Associated Press Writer

GENEVA - Up to 90 percent of Iraqi detainees were arrested "by mistake," according to coalition intelligence officers cited in a Red Cross report disclosed Monday. It also says U.S. officers mistreated inmates at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison by keeping them naked in dark, empty cells.


AP Photo


Reuters
Slideshow: Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners





Latest headlines:
· All Quiet On the House Side
washingtonpost.com - 3 minutes ago
· Mistreatment Of Detainees Went Beyond Guards' Abuse
washingtonpost.com - 3 minutes ago
· Dutch soldier dies in Iraqi attack
AFP - 16 minutes ago
Special Coverage





Abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers was widespread and routine, the report finds — contrary to President Bush (news - web sites)'s contention that the mistreatment "was the wrongdoing of a few."


While many detainees were quickly released, high-ranking officials in Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s government, including those listed on the U.S. military's deck of cards, were held for months in solitary confinement.


Red Cross delegates saw U.S. military intelligence officers mistreating prisoners under interrogation at Abu Ghraib and collected allegations of abuse at more than 10 other detention facilities, including the military intelligence section at Camp Cropper at Baghdad International Airport and the Tikrit holding area, according to the report.


The 24-page document cites abuses — some "tantamount to torture" — including brutality, hooding, humiliation and threats of "imminent execution."


"These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information and other forms of cooperation from persons who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an 'intelligence value.'"


High-ranking officials were singled out for special treatment, according to the report, which the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed as authentic after it was published by The Wall Street Journal on Monday.


"Since June 2003 over a hundred 'high value detainees' have been held for nearly 23 hours a day in strict solitary confinement in small concrete cells devoid of daylight," says the report. "Their continued internment several months after their arrest in strict solitary confinement constituted a serious violation of the third and fourth Geneva Conventions."


It did not say who the detainees were, but an official who discussed the report with the Red Cross told The Associated Press they include some of the 55 top officials in Saddam's regime named in the deck of cards given to troops.


The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said detainees held at Baghdad International Airport include many of the 44 "deck of cards" suspects already captured. It was not clear if Saddam was at the airport, but the Red Cross has said it visited him in coalition detention somewhere in Iraq (news - web sites) last month.


The high-value detainees were deprived of any contact with other inmates, "guards, family members (except through Red Cross messages) and the rest of the outside world," the report says.


Those whose investigations were near an end were said to be allowed to exercise together outside the cells for 20 minutes twice a day.


The report says some coalition military intelligence officers estimated "between 70 percent and 90 percent" of the detainees in Iraq "had been arrested by mistake. They also attributed the brutality of some arrests to the lack of proper supervision of battle group units."


The agency said arrests tended to follow a pattern.


"Authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property," the report says.


"Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people," it says. "Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles."


It was unclear what the Red Cross meant by "mistake." However, many Iraqis have claimed U.S. forces arrested them because of misunderstandings, bogus claims by personal enemies, mistaken identity or simply for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.





One former detainee who claims he was abused, Haider Sabbar Abed, said he was arrested in July when the driver of the car he was in was unable to produce proper papers at a U.S. checkpoint. He was not released until April 15.

In one operation, U.S. special operations troops detained nearly the entire male population of the village of Habbariyah, ranging in age from 81 to 13, apparently to prevent terrorists from slipping across the border from Saudi Arabia. The 79 men were held for weeks.

Language problems sometimes led to detainees' "being slapped, roughed up, pushed around or pushed to the ground," according to the Red Cross report. "A failure to understand or a misunderstanding of orders given in English was construed by guards as resistance or disobedience."

The report says that in coalition prisons "ICRC delegates directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to secure the cooperation" of the inmates "with their interrogators." The delegates saw detainees kept "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness."

"Upon witnessing such cases, the ICRC interrupted its visits and requested an explanation from the authorities," the report says. "The military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation explained that this practice was 'part of the process.'"

This apparently meant detainees were progressively given clothing, bedding, lighting and other items in exchange for cooperation, it says.

The report says the Red Cross found evidence supporting prisoners' allegations of other forms of abuse during arrest, initial detention and interrogation — including burns, bruises and other injuries.

Once detainees were moved to regular prison facilities, the abuses typically stopped, it says.

The report also cites widespread abuse of power and ill-treatment by Iraqi law enforcement officers under the coalition, including extorting money from people in their custody by threatening to hand them over to coalition authorities. Under the Geneva Conventions, the coalition is responsible for the Iraqi officers' behavior, the report says.

The Red Cross has emphasized that the report was only a summary of its repeated attempts in person and in writing from March to November 2003 to get U.S. officials to stop abuses. Those earlier interventions by the Red Cross far preceded the Pentagon (news - web sites)'s decision to investigate after a low-ranking U.S. soldier stepped forward in January.

The Geneva-based organization gave its report to coalition forces in February. The prisoner abuse erupted into an international scandal in recent days after the publication of disturbing photographs from Abu Ghraib.

The Red Cross said it wanted to keep the report confidential because it saw U.S. officials making progress in responding to their complaints. Still, the American reaction was far slower than that of British officials, according to the report.

It says the Red Cross informed the commander of British forces in April 2003 of "ill-treatment" by military intelligence personnel in interrogating Iraqis at Umm Qasr in southern Iraq. "This intervention had the immediate effect to stop the systematic use of hoods and flexi-cuffs in the interrogation section of Umm Qasr."

___

Associated Press correspondent Robert H. Reid contributed to this report from Baghdad.


=================================

Now I understand that Intellegence people were under a lot of pressure to get results. My thing is where the pressure came from aka the White House. So I still hold the higher ups responsible.

[LadyCrais]

CHAIN OF COMMAND
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster at Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-17
Posted 2004-05-09
In his devastating report on conditions at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, Major General Antonio M. Taguba singled out only three military men for praise. One of them, Master-at-Arms William J. Kimbro, a Navy dog handler, should be commended, Taguba wrote, because he “knew his duties and refused to participate in improper interrogations despite significant pressure from the MI”—military intelligence—“personnel at Abu Ghraib.” Elsewhere in the report it became clear what Kimbro would not do: American soldiers, Taguba said, used “military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.”

Taguba’s report was triggered by a soldier’s decision to give Army investigators photographs of the sexual humiliation and abuse of prisoners. These images were first broadcast on “60 Minutes II” on April 28th. Seven enlisted members of the 372nd Military Police Company of the 320th Military Police Battalion, an Army reserve unit, are now facing prosecution, and six officers have been reprimanded. Last week, I was given another set of digital photographs, which had been in the possession of a member of the 320th. According to a time sequence embedded in the digital files, the photographs were taken by two different cameras over a twelve-minute period on the evening of December 12, 2003, two months after the military-police unit was assigned to Abu Ghraib.

An Iraqi prisoner and American military dog handlers. Other photographs show the Iraqi on the ground, bleeding.
One of the new photographs shows a young soldier, wearing a dark jacket over his uniform and smiling into the camera, in the corridor of the jail. In the background are two Army dog handlers, in full camouflage combat gear, restraining two German shepherds. The dogs are barking at a man who is partly obscured from the camera’s view by the smiling soldier. Another image shows that the man, an Iraqi prisoner, is naked. His hands are clasped behind his neck and he is leaning against the door to a cell, contorted with terror, as the dogs bark a few feet away. Other photographs show the dogs straining at their leashes and snarling at the prisoner. In another, taken a few minutes later, the Iraqi is lying on the ground, writhing in pain, with a soldier sitting on top of him, knee pressed to his back. Blood is streaming from the inmate’s leg. Another photograph is a closeup of the naked prisoner, from his waist to his ankles, lying on the floor. On his right thigh is what appears to be a bite or a deep scratch. There is another, larger wound on his left leg, covered in blood.

There is at least one other report of violence involving American soldiers, an Army dog, and Iraqi citizens, but it was not in Abu Ghraib. Cliff Kindy, a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a church-supported group that has been monitoring the situation in Iraq, told me that last November G.I.s unleashed a military dog on a group of civilians during a sweep in Ramadi, about thirty miles west of Fallujah. At first, Kindy told me, “the soldiers went house to house, and arrested thirty people.” (One of them was Saad al-Khashab, an attorney with the Organization for Human Rights in Iraq, who told Kindy about the incident.) While the thirty detainees were being handcuffed and laid on the ground, a firefight broke out nearby; when it ended, the Iraqis were shoved into a house. Khashab told Kindy that the American soldiers then “turned the dog loose inside the house, and several people were bitten.” (The Defense Department said that it was unable to comment about the incident before The New Yorker went to press.)

When I asked retired Major General Charles Hines, who was commandant of the Army’s military-police school during a twenty-eight-year career in military law enforcement, about these reports, he reacted with dismay. “Turning a dog loose in a room of people? Loosing dogs on prisoners of war? I’ve never heard of it, and it would never have been tolerated,” Hines said. He added that trained police dogs have long been a presence in Army prisons, where they are used for sniffing out narcotics and other contraband among the prisoners, and, occasionally, for riot control. But, he said, “I would never have authorized it for interrogating or coercing prisoners. If I had, I’d have been put in jail or kicked out of the Army.”
The International Red Cross and human-rights groups have repeatedly complained during the past year about the American military’s treatment of Iraqi prisoners, with little success. In one case, disclosed last month by the Denver Post, three Army soldiers from a military-intelligence battalion were accused of assaulting a female Iraqi inmate at Abu Ghraib. After an administrative review, the three were fined “at least five hundred dollars and demoted in rank,” the newspaper said.

Army commanders had a different response when, on January 13th, a military policeman presented Army investigators with a computer disk containing graphic photographs. The images were being swapped from computer to computer throughout the 320th Battalion. The Army’s senior commanders immediately understood they had a problem—a looming political and public-relations disaster that would taint America and damage the war effort.

One of the first soldiers to be questioned was Ivan Frederick, the M.P. sergeant who was in charge of a night shift at Abu Ghraib. Frederick, who has been ordered to face a court-martial in Iraq for his role in the abuse, kept a running diary that began with a knock on his door by agents of the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division (C.I.D.) at two-thirty in the morning on January 14th. “I was escorted . . . to the front door of our building, out of sight from my room,” Frederick wrote, “while . . . two unidentified males stayed in my room. ‘Are they searching my room?’” He was told yes. Frederick later formally agreed to permit the agents to search for cameras, computers, and storage devices.

On January 16th, three days after the Army received the pictures, Central Command issued a blandly worded, five-sentence press release about an investigation into the mistreatment of prisoners. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that it was then that he learned of the allegations. At some point soon afterward, Rumsfeld informed President Bush. On January 19th, Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the officer in charge of American forces in Iraq, ordered a secret investigation into Abu Ghraib. Two weeks later, General Taguba was ordered to conduct his inquiry. He submitted his report on February 26th. By then, according to testimony before the Senate last week by General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, people “inside our building” had discussed the photographs. Myers, by his own account, had still not read the Taguba report or seen the photographs, yet he knew enough about the abuses to persuade “60 Minutes II” to delay its story.

At a Pentagon news conference last week, Rumsfeld and Marine General Peter Pace, the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted that the investigation into Abu Ghraib had moved routinely through the chain of command. If the Army had been slow, it was because of built-in safeguards. Pace told the journalists, “It’s important to know that as investigations are completed they come up the chain of command in a very systematic way. So that the individual who reports in writing [sends it] up to the next level commander. But he or she takes time, a week or two weeks, three weeks, whatever it takes, to read all of the documentation, get legal advice [and] make the decisions that are appropriate at his or her level. . . . That way everyone’s rights are protected and we have the opportunity systematically to take a look at the entire process.”

In interviews, however, retired and active-duty officers and Pentagon officials said that the system had not worked. Knowledge of the nature of the abuses—and especially the politically toxic photographs—had been severely, and unusually, restricted. “Everybody I’ve talked to said, ‘We just didn’t know’—not even in the J.C.S.,” one well-informed former intelligence official told me, emphasizing that he was referring to senior officials with whom such allegations would normally be shared. “I haven’t talked to anybody on the inside who knew—nowhere. It’s got them scratching their heads.” A senior Pentagon official said that many of the senior generals in the Army were similarly out of the loop on the Abu Ghraib allegations.

Within the Pentagon, there was a spate of fingerpointing last week. One top general complained to a colleague that the commanders in Iraq should have taken C4, a powerful explosive, and blown up Abu Ghraib last spring, with all of its “emotional baggage”—the prison was known for its brutality under Saddam Hussein—instead of turning it into an American facility. “This is beyond the pale in terms of lack of command attention,” a retired major general told me, speaking of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. “Where were the flag officers? And I’m not just talking about a one-star,” he added, referring to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commander at Abu Ghraib who was relieved of duty. “This was a huge leadership failure.”

The Pentagon official told me that many senior generals believe that, along with the civilians in Rumsfeld’s office, General Sanchez and General John Abizaid, who is in charge of the Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, had done their best to keep the issue quiet in the first months of the year. The official chain of command flows from General Sanchez, in Iraq, to Abizaid, and on to Rumsfeld and President Bush. “You’ve got to match action, or nonaction, with interests,” the Pentagon official said. “What is the motive for not being forthcoming? They foresaw major diplomatic problems.”

Secrecy and wishful thinking, the Pentagon official said, are defining characteristics of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, and shaped its response to the reports from Abu Ghraib. “They always want to delay the release of bad news—in the hope that something good will break,” he said. The habit of procrastination in the face of bad news led to disconnects between Rumsfeld and the Army staff officers who were assigned to planning for troop requirements in Iraq. A year ago, the Pentagon official told me, when it became clear that the Army would have to call up more reserve units to deal with the insurgency, “we had call-up orders that languished for thirty or forty days in the office of the Secretary of Defense.” Rumsfeld’s staff always seemed to be waiting for something to turn up—for the problem to take care of itself, without any additional troops. The official explained, “They were hoping that they wouldn’t have to make a decision.” The delay meant that soldiers in some units about to be deployed had only a few days to prepare wills and deal with other family and financial issues.

The same deliberate indifference to bad news was evident in the past year, the Pentagon official said, when the Army conducted a series of elaborate war games. Planners would present best-case, moderate-case, and worst-case scenarios, in an effort to assess where the Iraq war was headed and to estimate future troop needs. In every case, the number of troops actually required exceeded the worst-case analysis. Nevertheless, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and civilian officials in the Pentagon continued to insist that future planning be based on the most optimistic scenario. “The optimistic estimate was that at this point in time”—mid-2004—“the U.S. Army would need only a handful of combat brigades in Iraq,” the Pentagon official said. “There are nearly twenty now, with the international coalition drying up. They were wildly off the mark.” The official added, “From the beginning, the Army community was saying that the projections and estimates were unrealistic.” Now, he said, “we’re struggling to maintain a hundred and thirty-five thousand troops while allowing soldiers enough time back home.”



In his news conference last Tuesday, Rumsfeld, when asked whether he thought the photographs and stories from Abu Ghraib were a setback for American policy in Iraq, still seemed to be in denial. “Oh, I’m not one for instant history,” he responded. By Friday, however, with some members of Congress and with editorials calling for his resignation, Rumsfeld testified at length before House and Senate committees and apologized for what he said was “fundamentally un-American” wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. He also warned that more, and even uglier, disclosures were to come. Rumsfeld said that he had not actually looked at any of the Abu Ghraib photographs until some of them appeared in press accounts, and hadn’t reviewed the Army’s copies until the day before. When he did, they were “hard to believe,” he said. “There are other photos that depict . . . acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman.” Later, he said, “It’s going to get still more terrible, I’m afraid.” Rumsfeld added, “I failed to recognize how important it was.”

NBC News later quoted U.S. military officials as saying that the unreleased photographs showed American soldiers “severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner, and ‘acting inappropriately with a dead body.’ The officials said there also was a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.”

No amount of apologetic testimony or political spin last week could mask the fact that, since the attacks of September 11th, President Bush and his top aides have seen themselves as engaged in a war against terrorism in which the old rules did not apply. In the privacy of his office, Rumsfeld chafed over what he saw as the reluctance of senior Pentagon generals and admirals to act aggressively. By mid-2002, he and his senior aides were exchanging secret memorandums on modifying the culture of the military leaders and finding ways to encourage them “to take greater risks.” One memo spoke derisively of the generals in the Pentagon, and said, “Our prerequisite of perfection for ‘actionable intelligence’ has paralyzed us. We must accept that we may have to take action before every question can be answered.” The Defense Secretary was told that he should “break the ‘belt-and-suspenders’ mindset within today’s military . . . we ‘over-plan’ for every contingency. . . . We must be willing to accept the risks.” With operations involving the death of foreign enemies, the memo went on, the planning should not be carried out in the Pentagon: “The result will be decision by committee.”

The Pentagon’s impatience with military protocol extended to questions about the treatment of prisoners caught in the course of its military operations. Soon after 9/11, as the war on terror got under way, Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly made public his disdain for the Geneva conventions. Complaints about America’s treatment of prisoners, Rumsfeld said in early 2002, amounted to “isolated pockets of international hyperventilation.”

The effort to determine what happened at Abu Ghraib has evolved into a sprawling set of related investigations, some of them hastily put together, including inquiries into twenty-five suspicious deaths. Investigators have become increasingly concerned with the role played not only by military and intelligence officials but also by C.I.A. agents and private-contract employees. In a statement, the C.I.A. acknowledged that its Inspector General had an investigation under way into abuses at Abu Ghraib, which extended to the death of a prisoner. A source familiar with one of the investigations told me that the victim was the man whose photograph, which shows his battered body packed in ice, has circulated around the world. A Justice Department prosecutor has been assigned to the case. The source also told me that an Army intelligence operative and a judge advocate general were seeking, through their lawyers, to negotiate immunity from prosecution in return for testimony.

The relationship between military policing and intelligence forces inside the Army prison system reached a turning point last fall in response to the insurgency against the Coalition Provisional Authority. “This is a fight for intelligence,” Brigadier General Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Division, told a reporter at a Baghdad press briefing in November. “Do I have enough soldiers? The answer is absolutely yes. The larger issue is, how do I use them and on what basis? And the answer to that is intelligence . . . to try to figure out how to take all this human intelligence as it comes in to us [and] turn it into something that’s actionable.” The Army prison system would now be asked to play its part.

Two months earlier, Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the task force in charge of the prison at Guantánamo, had brought a team of experts to Iraq to review the Army program. His recommendation was radical: that Army prisons be geared, first and foremost, to interrogations and the gathering of information needed for the war effort. “Detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation . . . to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence,” Miller wrote. The military police on guard duty at the prisons should make support of military intelligence a priority.

General Sanchez agreed, and on November 19th his headquarters issued an order formally giving the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade tactical control over the prison. General Taguba fearlessly took issue with the Sanchez orders, which, he wrote in his report, “effectively made an MI Officer, rather than an MP officer, responsible for the MP units conducting detainee operations at that facility. This is not doctrinally sound due to the different missions and agenda assigned to each of these respective specialties.”

Taguba also criticized Miller’s report, noting that “the intelligence value of detainees held at . . . Guantánamo is different than that of the detainees/internees held at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq. . . . There are a large number of Iraqi criminals held at Abu Ghraib. These are not believed to be international terrorists or members of Al Qaeda.” Taguba noted that Miller’s recommendations “appear to be in conflict” with other studies and with Army regulations that call for military-police units to have control of the prison system. By placing military-intelligence operatives in control instead, Miller’s recommendations and Sanchez’s change in policy undoubtedly played a role in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. General Taguba concluded that certain military-intelligence officers and civilian contractors at Abu Ghraib were “either directly or indirectly responsible” for the abuses, and urged that they be subjected to disciplinary action.

In late March, before the Abu Ghraib scandal became publicly known, Geoffrey Miller was transferred from Guantánamo and named head of prison operations in Iraq. “We have changed this—trust us,” Miller told reporters in early May. “There were errors made. We have corrected those. We will make sure that they do not happen again.”

Military-intelligence personnel assigned to Abu Ghraib repeatedly wore “sterile,” or unmarked, uniforms or civilian clothes while on duty. “You couldn’t tell them apart,” the source familiar with the investigation said. The blurring of identities and organizations meant that it was impossible for the prisoners, or, significantly, the military policemen on duty, to know who was doing what to whom, and who had the authority to give orders. Civilian employees at the prison were not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but they were bound by civilian law—though it is unclear whether American or Iraqi law would apply.

One of the employees involved in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, according to the Taguba report, was Steven Stefanowicz, a civilian working for CACI International, a Virginia-based company. Private companies like CACI and Titan Corp. could pay salaries of well over a hundred thousand dollars for the dangerous work in Iraq, far more than the Army pays, and were permitted, as never before in U.S. military history, to handle sensitive jobs. (In a briefing last week, General Miller confirmed that Stefanowicz had been reassigned to administrative duties. A CACI spokeswoman declined to comment on any employee in Iraq, citing safety concerns, but said that the company still had not heard anything directly from the government about Stefanowicz.)

Stefanowicz and his colleagues conducted most, if not all, of their interrogations in the Abu Ghraib facilities known to the soldiers as the Wood Building and the Steel Building. The interrogation centers were rarely visited by the M.P.s, a source familiar with the investigation said. The most important prisoners—the suspected insurgency members deemed to be High Value Detainees—were housed at Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, but the pressure on soldiers to accede to requests from military intelligence was felt throughout the system.

Not everybody went along. A company captain in a military-police unit in Baghdad told me last week that he was approached by a junior intelligence officer who requested that his M.P.s keep a group of detainees awake around the clock until they began talking. “I said, ‘No, we will not do that,’” the captain said. “The M.I. commander comes to me and says, ‘What is the problem? We’re stressed, and all we are asking you to do is to keep them awake.’ I ask, ‘How? You’ve received training on that, but my soldiers don’t know how to do it. And when you ask an eighteen-year-old kid to keep someone awake, and he doesn’t know how to do it, he’s going to get creative.’” The M.I. officer took the request to the captain’s commander, but, the captain said, “he backed me up.

“It’s all about people. The M.P.s at Abu Ghraib were failed by their commanders—both low-ranking and high,” the captain said. “The system is broken—no doubt about it. But the Army is made up of people, and we’ve got to depend on them to do the right thing.”

In his report, Taguba strongly suggested that there was a link between the interrogation process in Afghanistan and the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A few months after General Miller’s report, Taguba wrote, General Sanchez, apparently troubled by reports of wrongdoing in Army jails in Iraq, asked Army Provost Marshal Donald Ryder, a major general, to carry out a study of military prisons. In the resulting study, which is still classified, Ryder identified a conflict between military policing and military intelligence dating back to the Afghan war. He wrote, “Recent intelligence collection in support of Operation Enduring Freedom posited a template whereby military police actively set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews.”

One of the most prominent prisoners of the Afghan war was John Walker Lindh, the twenty-one-year-old Californian who was captured in December, 2001. Lindh was accused of training with Al Qaeda terrorists and conspiring to kill Americans. A few days after his arrest, according to a federal-court affidavit filed by his attorney, James Brosnahan, a group of armed American soldiers “blindfolded Mr. Lindh, and took several pictures of Mr. Lindh and themselves with Mr. Lindh. In one, the soldiers scrawled ‘shithead’ across Mr. Lindh’s blindfold and posed with him. . . . Another told Mr. Lindh that he was ‘going to hang’ for his actions and that after he was dead, the soldiers would sell the photographs and give the money to a Christian organization.” Some of the photographs later made their way to the American media. Lindh was later stripped naked, bound to a stretcher with duct tape, and placed in a windowless shipping container. Once again, the affidavit said, “military personnel photographed Mr. Lindh as he lay on the stretcher.” On July 15, 2002, Lindh agreed to plead guilty to carrying a gun while serving in the Taliban and received a twenty-year jail term. During that process, Brosnahan told me, “the Department of Defense insisted that we state that there was ‘no deliberate’ mistreatment of John.” His client agreed to do so, but, the attorney noted, “Against that, you have that photograph of a naked John on that stretcher.”

The photographing of prisoners, both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, seems to have been not random but, rather, part of the dehumanizing interrogation process. The Times published an interview last week with Hayder Sabbar Abd, who claimed, convincingly, to be one of the mistreated Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib photographs. Abd told Ian Fisher, the Times reporter, that his ordeal had been recorded, almost constantly, by cameras, which added to his humiliation. He remembered how the camera flashed repeatedly as soldiers told to him to masturbate and beat him when he refused.

One lingering mystery is how Ryder could have conducted his review last fall, in the midst of the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, without managing to catch it. (Ryder told a Pentagon press briefing last week that his trip to Iraq “was not an inspection or an investigation. . . . It was an assessment.”) In his report to Sanchez, Ryder flatly declared that “there were no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices.” Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as an agent of the C.I.D., told me that Ryder was in a bureaucratic bind. The Army had revised its command structure last fall, and Ryder, as provost marshal, was now the commanding general of all military-police units as well as of the C.I.D. He was, in essence, being asked to investigate himself. “What Ryder should have done was set up a C.I.D. task force headed by an 0-6”—full colonel—“with fifteen agents, and begin interviewing everybody and taking sworn statements,” Rowell said. “He had to answer questions about the prisons in September, when Sanchez asked for an assessment.” At the time, Rowell added, the Army prison system was unprepared for the demands the insurgency placed on it. “Ryder was a man in a no-win situation,” Rowell said. “As provost marshal, if he’d turned a C.I.D. task force loose, he could be in harm’s way—because he’s also boss of the military police. He was being eaten alive.”

Ryder may have protected himself, but Taguba did not. “He’s not regarded as a hero in some circles in the Pentagon,” a retired Army major general said of Taguba. “He’s the guy who blew the whistle, and the Army will pay the price for his integrity. The leadership does not like to have people make bad news public.”

[stellar]

LadyCrais, you are truly the Queen of the Long Post.

As for those who deplore the acts but qualify them by saying that the prisoners were bad people anyway... they don't get it. This isn't an act against a human being, but an act indifferent to humanity and human dignity in general - on both sides. It's just as disturbing to me to see the prisoners being abused as it is to see another human being standing over the heap in joy... it's a flaw to think yourself that superior.

[Mrelia]

If these abuses (not only in the prison, but elsewhere too) have been going on for so long, is it possible that the the killing and subsequent mutilation of those 4 Americans may have been, in part, retaliation?

As I've said before, it really doesn't matter if it was a small portion of our military that was involved...they've endangered every one of our troops and quite possibly many civilians as well.

I'm just waiting to hear the words, "I was just following orders."
The same kind of people who abuse those in their power are the sort to try and blame others for their actions. They disgust me just as much as the people who would give those commands.

[grinner]

If these abuses (not only in the prison, but elsewhere too) have been going on for so long, is it possible that the the killing and subsequent mutilation of those 4 Americans may have been, in part, retaliation?


no. Not even close. For so long??? We've been there... a year? These actions of Terror have been occuring for years against Non-Muslims. These Militant Islamist are only looking for power... and they use intimidation to get it. The actions like the desecration of civilians are being done to intimidate the US population into thinking that it is in their best interests to leave the middle East to themselves. Once we do that... if we were to do that... then these bullies and thugs will go the next step... and start doing these actions on US soil... oh wait... that happened.

[Darth Buddha]

Hey, this fellow is an apologist for his own drug use. A self righteous ass about any prosecution for his situation (anybody with half a brain would have been penitent, but not this bandejo). And now a defender of violations fot he Geneva Convention. Lovely fellow.

He doesn't scare me, but the number of folks who find his brand of hatemongering, his tactics of starting witha true statement and then piling on innuendos, slander, and lies, and now his endorsement of military atrocities that were most likely to be systemic and not just a "few bad applies"... now that scares me.

He is as objectionable as the asses who said Tillman got his just desserts in Afganistan. He is a vile as those who root for higher U.S. death counts abroad to "teach Bush a lesson". And yet we have so many here willing to defend him so often.

Those who support such a hatemongering neo-fascist are themselves accomplice to neo-fascist hatemongering. The difference between "ditto heads" and Brown Shirts is only one of degree, not of kind.... "Brown Shirts Lite".

To those who are offended? Be offended.

Those who chose a banner carrier like that offend the hell out of me and many like me... no less than THEY would be offended if I defended anti-Tillman, anti-troops statements myself. Those who can see the ill of those hypothetical positions and not see the ills of Rush, are truly a danger to this Republic, the American way of life, and American values of being ethical and above board in our actions.

[Mrelia]

For so long??? We've been there... a year? These actions of Terror have been occuring for years against Non-Muslims. These Militant Islamist are only looking for power... and they use intimidation to get it. The actions like the desecration of civilians are being done to intimidate the US population into thinking that it is in their best interests to leave the middle East to themselves. Once we do that... if we were to do that... then these bullies and thugs will go the next step... and start doing these actions on US soil... oh wait... that happened.

What I mean is that these incidents are not all recent and appear to have been known to people outside of the prison. Just a year or not, the attacks of foreign civilians have been concurrent and may have been influenced by "word on the street."

I am in no way suggesting that we should abandon the Middle East. I understand that terrorists seek to keep situations unstable for their own benefit. (Witness all the crap in the "Holy Land.")

I feel that mistreating prisoners, no matter what their crime, is wrong. Doing so, taking pictures and distributing the evidence is incredibly STUPID. Some members of our military have handed the terrorist organizations a lovely recruitment package on a silver platter all wrapped up with a big shiny bow.

In a conflict such as the "War on Terror", that is as much about public relations as military action, you have to adhere to a high standard of conduct or be seen as just another bully to fight.

[grinner]

are you talking about Rush?

[Mrelia]

Hey, my post didn't post!

OK, now it did...the poor server must just be tired.

[grinner]

What I mean is that these incidents are not all recent and appear to have been known to people outside of the prison. Just a year or not, the attacks of foreign civilians have been concurrent and may have been influenced by "word on the street."
If you find out who was spreading the 'word on the street' it was those people who were/are actively seeking to gain power... the Mullahs and Radicals that want to control the population. A democratic society will be highly resistent to these Radicals wishes and desires... so any form of democracy must be eliminated. YES what occured in this prison is wrong. HOWEVER, it was only a minority of the US/UK/Allied troops that were doing this. There is evidence that the majority of the actions taken against the Allied troops were actually planned out BEFORE the Fall of Iraq/Saddam.

[Mrelia]

If you find out who was spreading the 'word on the street' it was those people who were/are actively seeking to gain power... the Mullahs and Radicals that want to control the population. A democratic society will be highly resistent to these Radicals wishes and desires... so any form of democracy must be eliminated.

That's why it's so frustrating to have given them this leverage.

YES what occured in this prison is wrong. HOWEVER, it was only a minority of the US/UK/Allied troops that were doing this.

I'm sure, too, that militants and terrorists are in the minority. But they've sure caused a lot of trouble for the rest of their people.

There is evidence that the majority of the actions taken against the Allied troops were actually planned out BEFORE the Fall of Iraq/Saddam.

It's easier to get folks to take part in your plans if they've got something to be angry about.

Looking at all of the posts in this thread, I don't think we're on opposite sides on this g. We're just examining different parts of the cycle of cause and effect.

[grinner]

I know... I just wanted to get all sides out.

[grinner]

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/news/05112004_iraq_missingman.html
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&u=/ap/20040511/ap_on_re_mi_ea/egypt_iraq_american_beheaded_3&printer=1

and what was his crime???

[Johnsgirl727]

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/news/05112004_iraq_missingman.html
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&u=/ap/20040511/ap_on_re_mi_ea/egypt_iraq_american_beheaded_3&printer=1

and what was his crime???
It's a shame that this will barely make a ripple in the media. I doubt we'll see the same amount rage and anger directed at these terrorists that we have had directed towards our military. None of the mistreated prisoners were killed in the prison by American soldiers, but these terrorists behead this guy in "retaliation".

We know that after an investigation, those soldiers that mistreated those prisoners will be punished, as they should be. Too bad the family of this man who was beheaded won't be able to say the same.

[grinner]

Actually a couple of the prisoners were killed... but supposedly they were either attempting to injure/kill a guard or were being seditious.

[Johnsgirl727]

Actually a couple of the prisoners were killed... but supposedly they were either attempting to injure/kill a guard or were being seditious.
Then definetely self defense, which wouldn't compare to hacking off someone's head.

[Third EYe]

I'm starting to think I want to visit there now.

[Stormhorse]

Low-ranking scapegoat review:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04125/310768.stm

[Third EYe]

I heard about this guy earlier today. He wrote to dems, and they ignored him. Interesting...

About the animals, I'm sorry...I mean the lifeforms lower than animals that beheaded an American, well, I'm sure that Berg wishes he had been humiliated right about now, I know his parents do.

[stellar]

Dem who?

The reasons that those men who killed Mr. Berg had for killing him are unfathomable to the human mind. Animals is an appropriate description.

[LadyCrais]

Stellar - The ultra long post (and this one) are a very tiny fraction of what I've read on this whole situation. Just sharing, on the off chance that some of those with their heads still in the sand so deeply that their toes are barely showing might come up for air and get a grip on reality soon.

Grinner - While we may not yet know whether it's 30 or 80% of the prisoners that are innocent bystanders swept up by incompetence, it is quite well documented that a very large population of people innocent of everything save being Iraqi is imprisoned, and their very innocence and therefore lack of information to share is the reason WHY they are being tortured.

And you can absolutely count on there having been a reason why the US demanded that the UN pass a resolution absolving them of any and all war crimes before they ever set foot in the country. Rumsfeld has been ridiculing and maneuvering around the rules of the Geneva Convention for a very, very long time.

For anyone whose mind it crosses to give a damn, there have been massive civilian casualties, not a few of which have been intentional. Hundreds, with their resulting mass graves (oh no, we wouldn't kill civilians in numbers enough for mass graves!), in Falujah because a few madmen strung up 4 of ours. Gee, I just can't conceive of why the Iraqis might be a tad put out by that, not to mention the hubris and hypocracy to claim we have just a few bad apples torturing them while we've been killing them wholesale and painting them with the same broadstroke colors of their few madmen.

Robert Higgs: 'The crimes at Abu Ghraib are not the worst'
Posted on Tuesday, May 11 @ 10:03:20 EDT

By Robert Higgs, Independent Institute

Recent days have been hectic ones for the Supreme Rulers in Washington, D.C. President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have ceased their accustomed swaggering, put on their most somber faces, and issued one apology after another for the mistreatment of prisoners by U.S. soldiers and mercenaries at Abu Ghraib prison. Although the government had known about these disgusting, sadistic, and idiotic amusements for a long time, Rumsfeld kept a close hold on the information, the better to brush it under the official rug. (We know that the government knew, because the International Committee for the Red Cross, which made several inspections of the prisons in Iraq, confirms that long ago it "told the Americans that what was going on at Abu Ghraib is reprehensible.")

Once the photos got out, of course, more than one kind of hell broke loose, and now the government's top dogs all have their tails tucked shamefully between their legs. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham warned reporters after Rumsfeld's Senate interrogation on May 7 that "there's more to come" and "we're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges" against U.S. soldiers and civilian employees in Iraq.

Although Bush says that he is sorry for "the terrible and horrible acts," and Rumsfeld says that he takes "full responsibility," the president continues to express confidence in his defense secretary, and the secretary says that he has no intention to step down. Which is to say, neither of these men foresees bearing any real personal cost whatsoever, aside from the momentary embarrassment, the political discomposure, and the time expended in spinning the issue for Congress and the public. Meanwhile the administration is working overtime to pin the blame on some low-level patsies so that everybody can get on with campaigning for Bush's reelection.

Although no principle stands higher in military doctrine than that the commander bears full responsibility for the actions of his subordinates, neither of these two top military commanders has the decency to resign--not just on account of the prison disclosures, of course, but also on account of the plethora of actions by which they have abused their constitutional powers and brought everlasting shame upon the United States--and nobody is in a position to dismiss them except the spineless Congress, whose members would sooner cut off their arms and legs than impeach Bush for his war crimes.

And make no mistake: plenty of war crimes have been, and continue to be, committed for which these men, along with many other civilian and military agents of the government, bear full responsibility. After all, in violation of the rule the Allies enforced against the Nazis at the post-World War II Nuremburg Trials, they chose to launch an aggressive, unprovoked, and unnecessary war against the Iraqi people, and during the past year they have undertaken to impose U.S. domination on the conquered people by rampant military violence. That many Iraqis have fought back against their occupiers in no way justifies U.S. actions. Everyone has a right of self-defense. What would you do if your country had been occupied by murderous and sadistic foreign troops?

The worst U.S. crimes in Iraq have received far less press than the photos of U.S. soldiers having fun and games with the prisoners at Abu Ghraib--not that the prisoners were anything but terrified by these vile amusements--but the truly terrible crimes have not gone totally unreported, especially in the news media outside the United States.

Last May 11, one of the thousands of such stories somehow made its way into the New York Times. It told how on April 5, 2003, a home in Basra had been hit by a U.S. bomb that exploded and killed ten members of Abed Hassan Hamoodi's extended family. British military officials said they had received reports that General Ali Hassan al-Majid--the notorious "Chemical Ali"--was in the neighborhood. Of course, the attack, which demolished a number of houses and killed twenty-three of their occupants, failed to kill al-Majid. (In the phrase "military intelligence," emphasis should always be placed on the word "military.") But one of the bombs brought an end to most members of Hamoodi's family.

"Ammar Muhammad was not yet 2 when his grandfather pulled him from the rubble and tried to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but his mouth was full of dust and he died." Seventy-two-year-old Hamoodi declared that he considered the destruction of his home and the killings of his family members to constitute a war crime, and he asked rhetorically: "How would President Bush feel if he had to dig his daughters from out of the rubble?"

How indeed?

U.S. forces have expended thousands of cluster munitions in Iraq, often in heavily populated places. (In the Karbala-Hillah area alone, U.S. teams had destroyed by late August last year more than 31,000 unexploded bomblets "that landed on fields, homes, factories and roads . . . many were in populated areas on Karbala's outskirts.") The toll among children, whose natural curiosity draws them to the interesting-looking bomblets, has been heavy.

Khalid Tamimi and four other members of his family were walking on a footpath in Baghdad when his brother, seven-year-old Haithem, spotted something interesting, picked it up and examined it, then threw it down. The bomblet's explosion killed Haithem and his nine-year-old cousin, Nora, and seriously wounded Khalid, as well as the children's mothers, Amal and Mayasa.

Last year the whole world learned about Ali Ismail Abbas, the twelve-year-old boy who was sleeping in his home in Baghdad when a U.S. missile struck and the explosion tore off both his arms and killed his parents and his brother. His heartrending photo appeared in news media around the world, as did reports of his anguished cries for help in getting his arms back.

Recently, the ferocious U.S. attacks on Fallujah have yielded hundreds of additional casualties among the innocent. There, as in many other places in Iraq, U.S. troops have fired recklessly and without adequate regard for the thousands of civilians they thereby placed in mortal jeopardy. "I'm sitting at the funeral of my only son, who was killed because of the U.S. Marines' harsh manner in dealing with civilians," Abbas Abdullah told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. "They shot him in the head, and he died instantly."

In the White House Rose Garden on April 30, President Bush, displaying his usual keen sensitivity, blustered as he often has on the campaign trail that because of the U.S. invasion "there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq." The president made this claim even as the whole world's press was featuring photos of the U.S. torture chambers at Abu Ghraib and reporting worse crimes against Iraqi detainees there and elsewhere, including rape and murder.

Moreover, mass graves have been filling up for weeks at Fallujah, for the most part with noncombatants. According to Dahr Jamail's report in The Nation, "two soccer fields in Fallujah have been converted to graveyards." Jamail also reported that "the Americans have bombed one hospital, and, numerous sources told us, were sniping at people who attempted to enter and exit the other major medical facility." Snipers also shot ambulances braving the dangerous streets to bring the wounded to makeshift places of medical assistance.

Along a quiet residential street in Fallujah, nine-year-old Rahad Septi and other children were playing hide-and-seek when the pilot of a U.S. A-10 aircraft dropped a bomb there. Rahad, "little flower" to her father Juma Septi, was killed along with ten other children, and twelve other children were wounded. Three adults also were killed. Jamal Abbas was driving his taxi when the bomb fell. He found his eleven-year-old niece Arij Haki with "the top half of her head . . . blown off." After half an hour of searching amid the devastation, Abbas found his daughter, eleven-year-old Miad Jamal Abbas, "her body bloody and ripped." She died later at the hospital. "There was no military activity in this area," said Saad Ibrahim, whose father Hussein was killed in his nearby shop by the same bomb blast. "There was no shooting. This is not a military camp. These are houses with children playing in the street."

When Daham Kassim, his wife Gufran Ibed Kassim, and their four children tried to escape the hell of U.S. bombing in their neighborhood in Nasiriyah, they stopped on the outskirts of the city at a military checkpoint, where, without warning, U.S. tank crews blasted their car with machine-gun fire, killing three of the children and wounding all the other occupants of the car. U.S. troops, humanitarian as ever, then took the three survivors of the attack to a field hospital, treated their wounds, and let them rest in beds. On the third night, however, the troops expelled them from the hospital to make room for wounded U.S. soldiers. As Kassim relates the story: "They carried us like dogs, out into the cold, without shelter, or a blanket. It was the days of the sandstorms and freezing at night. And I heard [five-year-old] Zainab crying: 'Papa, Papa, I am cold, I am cold.' Then she went silent. Completely silent. . . . My arms were broken. I could not lift or hold her. . . . We had to sit there, and listen to her die."

In Nasiriyah, only Kadem Hashem and his youngest daughter survived when a U.S. missile struck their house. His wife Salima, five of their children, and six other family members who happened to be in the house at the time were killed. Finding a photograph in the debris of his house, Hashem told reporter Ed Vulliamy of The Observer: "This was my middle daughter, Hamadi. I found her burnt to death by that doorway, she had shrunk to about a metre tall." His one surviving daughter, Bedour, described now as "what remains of a beautiful girl," lies on the floor of a relative's house. "She is shrivelled and petrified like a dead cat. Her skin is like scorched parchment folded over her bones. Unable to move, she appears as if in some troubled coma, but opens her eyes, with difficulty, to issue an indecipherable cry like a wounded animal." Hashem dug a mass grave for his family in a nearby holy city. "I collected them all and put them in a single grave at Najaf; my money was burnt, too, and I couldn't afford to bury them separately."

To my knowledge, neither President Bush, nor Vice President Dick Cheney, nor Secretary of State Colin Powell, nor Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, nor Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, nor Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, nor Richard Perle (who has worked for decades at the highest levels both inside and outside the government to bring about the present horrors in Iraq)--not a single one of them has apologized to any of the victims identified in the foregoing accounts.

What the U.S. government did at Abu Ghraib was bad, but what it did to Ammar Muhammad, to Haithem Tamimi, to Ali Ismail Abbas, to Abbas Abdullah's son, to Rahad Septi, to Arij Haki, to Miad Jamal Abbas, to Zainab Kassim, and to Bedour Hashem was far far worse.

Their stories are but a very few of the tens of thousands that might be told if more complete information were available to provide the details associated with the gruesome statistics on deaths and injuries among the Iraqi population. Relatively few of the people slain were "terrorists," Baathists, or even insurgents. Most were noncombatants; thousands were women, children, and elderly people. The military euphemism for these deaths is "collateral damage," but they are actually murders. After all, they did not happen by accident; in the circumstances, they were as predictable as the sun's rising in the east. By choosing to engage in the kinds of military actions that made these deaths inevitable, the U.S. government thereby chose to cause these deaths. The claim that they were not intended has no substance whatsoever.

Bush and Rumsfeld have been busy with apologies this past week, to be sure, and the prison hijinks at Abu Ghraib certainly cry out for apologies, as well as for a great deal of additional effort to restrain the sadists and sexual psychopaths among the U.S. troops in Iraq and to bring some measure of justice to those who have been wronged. Yet this whole mess, its powerful symbolism notwithstanding, has constituted a gigantic distraction from the truly monstrous crimes committed, and still being committed daily, by U.S. forces in Iraq.

Saddam Hussein now languishes in U.S. custody; his government has been overthrown; no weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq, and therefore "disarming" the Iraqis of such weapons proved unnecessary. In short, the declared U.S. mission has long since been accomplished fully. Why then does the U.S. government persist in slaughtering the Iraqi people?

And be sure to tune in to CBS on Wed, 05/12/04 for one soldier's views.

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http://news.excite.com/top/article/id/402079|top|05-11-2004::20:25|reuters.html
CBS to Air U.S. Soldier's Video Diary of Iraq Abuse

May 11, 8:20 pm ET

By Giles Elgood
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An American soldier's video diary showing her disdain for Iraqi detainees who died in her charge is to be broadcast by a U.S. network on Wednesday in a further escalation of the prisoner abuse scandal that has shaken the Bush administration and provoked world outrage.

CBS, which two weeks ago broadcast the first pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, said on Tuesday its "60 Minutes II" program would show video footage depicting conditions there and at another U.S.-run prison in southern Iraq called Camp Bucca.

Photographs of Iraqi prisoners being sexually humiliated, threatened by dogs and piled into pyramids as grinning American soldiers look on have been published round the world, dealing a major setback to U.S. attempts to stabilize Iraq.

The Pentagon has said that it has more pictures and video of abuse that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has warned may be even more shocking.

An Islamic Web site said on Tuesday that an American civilian, Nick Berg from Philadelphia, had been beheaded by an al Qaeda leader in Iraq in revenge for the "Satanic degradation" of Iraqi prisoners.


CBS said the home video did not show scenes of abuse but included comments by the soldier, whose name was not revealed to protect her identity, that make clear her dislike for the camp and the prisoners under her control.

"I hate it here," she said on the tape. "I want to come home. I want to be a civilian again. We actually shot two prisoners today. One got shot in the chest for swinging a pole against our people on the feed team. One got shot in the arm. We don't know if the one we shot in the chest is dead yet."

In her video, the soldier described the hazards of Camp Bucca. "This is a sand viper," she said. "One bite will kill you in six hours. We've already had two prisoners die of it, but who cares? That's two less for me to worry about."

The soldier said about three prisoners broke out of the camp every week, but they did not try to escape when she was on duty.

"It's 'cause they are scared of me," she said. "I actually got in trouble the other day because I was throwing rocks at them."

CBS said another soldier spoke of a chaotic situation at Camp Bucca with a dangerously low ratio of guards to prisoners.

Tim Canjar, who was discharged from the military for abusing Iraqi prisoners, said that during one disturbance "at one point, it was me and another soldier guarding. I was watching 535 prisoners on my side ... The prisoners started hitting us."

Fellow soldier Lisa Girman, who was discharged with Canjar, said commanders ignored the problems at Camp Bucca.

She complained of "the ignorance of the chain of command not to listen to the person who was actually on the front line."

Girman's and Canjar's families tried to draw attention to the problems at Camp Bucca last year. They called Rumsfeld's office repeatedly and talked to his staff, but got no response, CBS said. Their letters to the White House and two senators were also unanswered.

Girman and Canjar, and a third soldier, Scott McKenzie, were discharged for punching and kicking Iraqi prisoners. They have vowed to appeal the decision and want the U.S. Congress to investigate.