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Abu Ghraib: How does a fish smell? Fom the head. The sick heads of our leaders
First, the facts. You want to see the pictures and get the context? Here are the sources:
Warning: Seriously ugly stuff here. If you're easily nauseated, think twice before viewing.
Abu Ghraib: The Sequel.
Why haven't you seen these before? Well, first the government argued in court that these images violated the prisoners' "privacy rights." Then it claimed they'd fuel the insurgency and endanger our soldiers. In September, federal District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled: "Terrorists do not need pretexts for their barbarism." The government has appealed that ruling.
What do we see and read here? Beatings. Torture. Even killings. From" Salon:
Much of the evidence against the detainees [at Guantanamo] is weak. One prisoner at Guantanamo, for example, has made accusations against more than 60 of his fellow inmates; that's more than 10 percent of Guantanamo's entire prison population. The veracity of this prisoner's accusations is in doubt after a Syrian prisoner, Mohammed al-Tumani, 19, who was arrested in Pakistan, flatly denied to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal that he'd attended the jihadist training camp that the tribunal record said he did.
Tumani's denial was bolstered by his American "personal representative," one of the U.S. military officers--not lawyers--who are tasked with helping prisoners navigate the tribunals. Tumani's enterprising representative looked at the classified evidence against the Syrian youth and found that just one man--the aforementioned accuser--had placed Tumani at the terrorist training camp. And he had placed Tumani there three months before the teenager had even entered Afghanistan. The curious U.S. officer pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp.
The tribunal declared Tumani an enemy combatant anyway.
And who's to blame? Well, we're working our way up to two dog handlers. At this rate, we'll indict an officer in 2010. And find it was Rumsfeld's policy all along in, say, 2020.
Meanwhile, we continue to guarantee that we will lose this war (if we haven't already).
Two seconds of thought will tell you that all we are doing at Abu Ghraib is running a college--innocents enter, insurgents leave. Wouldn't it be that way for you? What, after all, is more radicalizing than a mock-drowning experience when you committed no crime?
But we don't care that we're creating insurgents by the thousands. Because we're not playing for "hearts and minds" in Iraq. We're playing "kill the enemy"--a wrongheaded game that the wily insurgents have turned into a crazy version of Whack a Mole. If the people who were running our government were not complete fools, they would open the prison gates, give each detainee a written apology and $100,000--and blow the place up.
Now that would send a message.
Instead, we send another. Sexual degradation of Iraqi men--fine with us. Torturing boys to make their fathers confess? No problem. As deed. As policy.
I don't know why more people don't care. Maybe they do but feel powerless--our government does have an anti-Viagra effect on its citizens. My dark suspicion is that all the Bible-thumping on the right only makes believers more fixated on sex, and that their obsessions become twisted, sick, and violent. And that our soldiers act this out. As deed. As policy.
There is no surer way to lose a guerrilla war than to consistently increase the number of people who hate you. Then the only solution is "kill 'em all." One gets the feeling that wouldn't bother LC--and the Christian Right--at all.
Kill for peace. Die for love. Abu Ghraib and "Brokeback." Two sides of an American coin. Both deeply tragic.
Warning: Seriously ugly stuff here. If you're easily nauseated, think twice before viewing.
Abu Ghraib: The Sequel.
Why haven't you seen these before? Well, first the government argued in court that these images violated the prisoners' "privacy rights." Then it claimed they'd fuel the insurgency and endanger our soldiers. In September, federal District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled: "Terrorists do not need pretexts for their barbarism." The government has appealed that ruling.
What do we see and read here? Beatings. Torture. Even killings. From" Salon:
The DVD containing the material includes a June 6, 2004, CID investigationThe photographs we are showing represent a small fraction of these visual
report written by Special Agent James E. Seigmund. That report includes the
following summary of the material included: "A review of all the computer media
submitted to this office revealed a total of 1,325 images of suspected detainee
abuse, 93 video files of suspected detainee abuse, 660 images of adult
pornography, 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees, 29 images of soldiers
in simulated sexual acts, 20 images of a soldier with a Swastika drawn between
his eyes, 37 images of Military Working dogs being used in abuse of detainees
and 125 images of questionable acts."
materials. None, as far as we know, have been published elsewhere. They include:
a naked, handcuffed prisoner in a contorted position; a dead prisoner who had
been severely beaten; a prisoner apparently sodomizing himself with an object;
and a naked, hooded prisoner standing next to an American officer who is blandly
writing a report against a wall. Other photographs depict a bloody cell.
The DVD also includes photographs of guards threatening Iraqi prisoners withAnd it's not just Abu Ghraib. These techniques were first used at Guantanamo. From a new report on that scandal:
dogs, homemade videotapes depicting hooded prisoners being forced to masturbate,
and a video showing a mentally disturbed prisoner smashing his head against a
door. Oddly, the material also includes numerous photographs of slaughtered
animals and mundane images of soldiers traveling around Iraq.
The report says that the use of excessive force during transportation,One commonality of both prisons: Most of the prisoners are totally innocent. They just had the bad fortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. From The National Journal:
force-feeding through nasal tubes during hunger strikes and shackling, chaining
and hooding of prisoners, placing them in solitary confinement, subjecting them
naked to severe temperatures and threatening them with dogs amounted to
torture.
Much of the evidence against the detainees [at Guantanamo] is weak. One prisoner at Guantanamo, for example, has made accusations against more than 60 of his fellow inmates; that's more than 10 percent of Guantanamo's entire prison population. The veracity of this prisoner's accusations is in doubt after a Syrian prisoner, Mohammed al-Tumani, 19, who was arrested in Pakistan, flatly denied to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal that he'd attended the jihadist training camp that the tribunal record said he did.
Tumani's denial was bolstered by his American "personal representative," one of the U.S. military officers--not lawyers--who are tasked with helping prisoners navigate the tribunals. Tumani's enterprising representative looked at the classified evidence against the Syrian youth and found that just one man--the aforementioned accuser--had placed Tumani at the terrorist training camp. And he had placed Tumani there three months before the teenager had even entered Afghanistan. The curious U.S. officer pulled the classified file of the accuser, saw that he had accused 60 men, and, suddenly skeptical, pulled the files of every detainee the accuser had placed at the one training camp. None of the men had been in Afghanistan at the time the accuser said he saw them at the camp.
The tribunal declared Tumani an enemy combatant anyway.
And who's to blame? Well, we're working our way up to two dog handlers. At this rate, we'll indict an officer in 2010. And find it was Rumsfeld's policy all along in, say, 2020.
Meanwhile, we continue to guarantee that we will lose this war (if we haven't already).
Two seconds of thought will tell you that all we are doing at Abu Ghraib is running a college--innocents enter, insurgents leave. Wouldn't it be that way for you? What, after all, is more radicalizing than a mock-drowning experience when you committed no crime?
But we don't care that we're creating insurgents by the thousands. Because we're not playing for "hearts and minds" in Iraq. We're playing "kill the enemy"--a wrongheaded game that the wily insurgents have turned into a crazy version of Whack a Mole. If the people who were running our government were not complete fools, they would open the prison gates, give each detainee a written apology and $100,000--and blow the place up.
Now that would send a message.
Instead, we send another. Sexual degradation of Iraqi men--fine with us. Torturing boys to make their fathers confess? No problem. As deed. As policy.
I don't know why more people don't care. Maybe they do but feel powerless--our government does have an anti-Viagra effect on its citizens. My dark suspicion is that all the Bible-thumping on the right only makes believers more fixated on sex, and that their obsessions become twisted, sick, and violent. And that our soldiers act this out. As deed. As policy.
There is no surer way to lose a guerrilla war than to consistently increase the number of people who hate you. Then the only solution is "kill 'em all." One gets the feeling that wouldn't bother LC--and the Christian Right--at all.
Kill for peace. Die for love. Abu Ghraib and "Brokeback." Two sides of an American coin. Both deeply tragic.
