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Torture of Iraqi prisoners

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13:32 / 06.05.04

Looking at things from ALL sides... what kind of war monger would be stupid enough to let these pictures get out in the first place? Now... back to rational thinking. This is seriously appalling, though we all knew it was happening from the getgo. At least the public has been made VISUALLY AWARE of this now, as opposed to a bunch of speculations. I think it's great that this hit the mainstream media. These images will remain in the minds of the masses for quite some time. Even the conservative republicans are embarassed by these actions. And people who could give a shit about politics are suddenly ashamed to be American. Utterly ashamed.

13:38 / 06.05.04

sleaze:

Absolutely. These photos could be decisive. But I'm not sure that Kerry can take advantage of this directly, without being accused of being unpatriotic. And that might allow Bush to defuse the issue at home, especially when the US media has been a touch reluctant in reporting the issue. But the story has so much momentum that...I don't know.

13:54 / 06.05.04

I think that donkey link is, well, going to make things very, very bad indeed over there. I mean, it's an old lady, it happened at Al Ghraib, and it was uncovered by a British envoy, not an American fact-finder.

It's one thing to strip a grown man naked, but to put a harness on an old lady and ride her... nothing says "widespread insurgency" and "open rebellion" like an old lady on all fours.

On the Rumsfeld thing, it's my understanding that Taguba's report detailing the abuse/torture (whatever you want to call it, Mr. Secretary) was out in February. Is that when steps were taken? Why is the story only coming out now?

And, Mr. Secretary, what exactly IS the deal with all the private contractors?

I think that might be the line of questioning that a resignation would hope to forestall or defuse.

15:12 / 06.05.04

Rush Limbaugh's incredible twisted take on this....

...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? ...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...

15:15 / 06.05.04

Has anyone got a link for Rumsfeld's diferentiation between abuse and torture ?

But yes, Grant those are exactly the questions I want to see put to the Defense secutary . I'd Love To have Jeremy Paxman shipped over especially to ask the questions...

17:05 / 06.05.04

From a transcript of the DoD briefing:

SEC. RUMSFELD: I think that -- 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.

SEC. RUMSFELD: I don't know if the -- 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.

15:19 / 07.05.04

Rumsfeld is now speaking - confirming that there are *other photos and videos* of abuse that he can only catagorise as 'inhumane' (he still seems to be avoiding the word'torture'). It would seem that unless all these pictures and videos feature those soldiers that have already been highlighted then this hole thing goes far beyond a few bad apples...

And on top of this The Red Cross are also stating that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners is widespread throughout American and British forces

15:27 / 07.05.04

Talking Points Memo is already using the "resignation" word, although he gives some reasons why that's not that likely to happen - main one involving the terms "currently at war" and "confirmation hearings" and "election year."

16:21 / 07.05.04

I can say that as a former member of the military those men should be whipped, I mean seriously now we look like a bunch of assholes to the rest of the world if not worse. If anything the perpetrators of the "abuse" should be sent to military prison. Whatever happened to a discipline among the troops. These guys need some form of punishment or hospital or justice or something, and here rumsfeld is trying to shrug it off? This war becomes more surreal as time goes on!

05:47 / 08.05.04

Is there anyone who's still proud to be an American?

08:12 / 08.05.04

Selected quotes from Rumsfeld discussion with congress.

Beyond abuse of prisoners, there are other photos that depict incidents of physical violence towards prisoners, acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman...

There are many more photographs and indeed some videos. Congress and the American people and the rest of the world need to know this...

So, what is the diference between acts that are ' blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman' and torture?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:29 / 08.05.04

Ah, y'see, Sleaze, when they do it, it's torture.

When we do it, it's a regrettable lapse in our standards of victors' magnanimity.

Kind of like showing photos of the dead, really. Only it takes place before the screaming stops.

19:13 / 08.05.04

I teach 19th century American literature, esp. African American lit, and so I regularly have to deal with lynching as a peculiarly American phenomenon in the classroom. I showed my class on Wednesday these pictures and juxtaposed them with lynching photos and postcards--you can see images of these photos/postcards online at the "Without Sanctuary" online museum. There's an eerie similarity. "This is not the America I know" says Bush. It is the America I have come to know. Our story has long been about the dehumanization and the humiliation of the vulnerable and the weak. White faces smiling at the camera, pointing to a naked brown body. This is a familiar picture in American history.

15:15 / 09.05.04

Incidentally, the "gang-rape" photos that Simplist posted on the second page *did* actually turn out to be stills from some fucked-up porn film. But I dread to think what's on Rumsfeld's "even worse" videos. I imagine the news media have already got hold of them, and he's worked out some sort of bargain to give him a few days to lessen the shock.

18:00 / 09.05.04

Watching Channel4 news at the moment and it would seem that some of those *other* photos have begun to surface... I haven't managed to track them down on the net yet but they are stills that apparently show before and after shots of a dog being used to savage a naked Iraqi detainee - seemingly as part of an interrogation. here is the story, but it doesn't include the pictures...

22:48 / 09.05.04

And with Rumsfeld admitting that their are so many other photos and videos the question has to be asked Is this abuse or is it policy?

01:17 / 10.05.04

Is it abuse or is it policy?

How many more people does it take to come forward and say "yes, we were told to do this by military intelligence"? Christ.

07:22 / 10.05.04

Empire Notes, which is consistently really good, has this quote from Rumsfeld's comments at the House Armed Services Committee hearing:

I wish I knew how you reach down into a criminal investigation when it is not just a criminal investigation, but it turns out to be something that is radioactive, something that has strategic impact in the world. And we don't have those procedures. They've never been designed.

We're functioning in a -- with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a war-time situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.

So to clarify, the problem is not, as some may have thought, a) that systematic torture is being practiced by the American military, or b) that the chain of command is so weak it's unable to stop soldiers from abusing prisoners, or even c) that a few bad apples are making the whole army look bad, but the unexpected d) that people are running around with digital cameras and the army doesn't get to decide who knows what anymore.

08:31 / 10.05.04

Here is the before image I mentioned yesterday from the channel 4 broadcast - I haven't seen the reported 'after' shot yet though - this photo is from The New Yorker...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

10:50 / 10.05.04

Fridge- yes, but...

at the risk of invoking Godwin...

isn't "only following orders" commonly known as The Nuremberg Defence?

Point is, YES, the higher-ups are fucking culpable. The people who tried to stop this shit getting out are culpable. And the people who did it- guess what? Fucking culpable.

Hey, call me Sherlock.

11:55 / 11.05.04

at the risk of invoking Godwin...

you know, honestly, fuck Godwin. Godwin's Law is based on the presumption that comparing something to Nazi Germany is always absurd hyperbole. when we have prison camps where people are tortured regularly but have no legal recourse, when we have a domestic propaganda machine going full blast 24/7 and eroding civil liberties, when our allies are essentially engaging in the warm-ups for ethnic cleansing in the Occupied Territories, and when we have a President leading us into wars out of a sense of God-given apocalyptic destiny... you know, maybe the comparisons aren't quite so absurd.

17:05 / 11.05.04

Not sure about the source, they could be stills from some fucked-up porn film, but you can bet they'll be spreading around anyway....

This turns out to have been a good call, as those now-notorious rape photos have seemingly been traced to a couple of U.S. and Hungarian porn websites. The one caveat about that report is that it's sourced to World Net Daily, a generally agenda-driven right-wing news service, which nevertheless sometimes does some very good investigative reporting. Salt grains and number thereof at your discretion.

Cheap. Easy. Cruel.

17:12 / 11.05.04

Now we are going to begin to hear of the retaliation for these atrocities. Here is the first I have heard of. More fuel to the fire. Just thinking about all this makes me ill.

17:43 / 11.05.04

you know, honestly, fuck Godwin. Godwin's Law is based on the presumption that comparing something to Nazi Germany is always absurd hyperbole.

Actually, the Nazi comparison would be entirely appropriate if someone were in fact herding millions of people into camps and systematically murdering them en masse. Short of that I agree that most Nazi comparisons are in fact hyperbolic at best, and tend to muddy rather than clarify a debate. Despite the appalling egregiousness of his behavior, Bush is not actually Nazi-like in any meaningful sense of the word.

Now, an argument of the "this is how Naziism began" variety could potentially hold more weight, but personally I don't forsee any believable outcome in which America engages in genuinely Nazi-like behavior of the sort described above. The fact is, Bush & Co. will be out of office in five years maximum, and even his preferred successor Jeb (who is by no means certain to be elected--2008 could as easily go to a Democrat, if it doesn't this time) is considerably saner and more palatable on a variety of levels.

At worst, I could see America evolving into something like a wealthier, more successful version of modern Russia, ie. a capitalist police state that treats enemies and internal dissenters fairly appallingly, but doesn't in fact engage in Nazi-level atrocities (ie. systematic slaughter of entire populations). Not to minimize how bad that would be, btw, it would be a disaster on many, many levels. But it still wouldn't qualify as Naziism.

18:02 / 11.05.04

Now, an argument of the "this is how Naziism began" variety could potentially hold more weight, but personally I don't forsee any believable outcome in which America engages in genuinely Nazi-like behavior of the sort described above.

i agree that i don't think organized genocide in the Nazi fashion is likely to happen anytime soon directly at American hands. however, i don't think that it's terribly unlikely that something reasonably comparable could occur in the Occupied Territories, and considering how much we bankroll Israel and how tight our military and political ties are there, i don't think we could claim any kind of real innocence there. i don't think it's out of the question that we will see ethnic cleansing on the West Bank and in Gaza within five years, and i don't think that the fact that we will have subcontracted out the genocide makes it any better.

At worst, I could see America evolving into something like a wealthier, more successful version of modern Russia, ie. a capitalist police state that treats enemies and internal dissenters fairly appallingly, but doesn't in fact engage in Nazi-level atrocities (ie. systematic slaughter of entire populations).

that's really not that different in many ways from Mussolini's Italy or Franco's Spain, which would still make us basically fascists, or neo-fascists of some kind. i will agree that there's still a leap from there to Auschwitz, but 1) that's not an unleapable leap, as i mentioned above and 2) the fact that we're in the ballpark where we can reasonably be splitting hairs as to which Axis power we're most like and that we're justifying being Mussolini solely by virtue of not being Hitler is enough to take Godwin's law off the table in most respects.

Godwin's Law, to me, is the kind of thinking that is really useful in pushing back dilution of the word "fascist" by morons who call the librarian a "fascist" for charging overdue fees or the police "fascists" when they come by and tell you to keep the noise down. i'm all for not making mountains out of molehills and reserving the "f-word" for times when it's really applicable, but, really, this is not a molehill and it really is applicable.

22:27 / 11.05.04

I agree, more or less. My real qualm about really any use of the Nazi analogy in political debate isn't so much that it's invariably inaccurate, but rather that it does tend to end any sort of reasonable discussion that might be likely to produce actual changes in anyone's thinking. The term is so loaded that it functions as an ad hominem even when the comparison is accurate, effectively polarizing (and thereby rendering ultimately useless) any debate into which it's imported. Better to leave analogies out altogether, IMO, and stick to concrete discussions of actual actions and their probable consequences, ie. rather than criticizing provisions of the Patriot Act by saying "the Nazis did this too!", take the time to detail precisely what the disadvantages of said provisions are and why, in real-world terms, they're a bad idea.

22:33 / 11.05.04

And the brutal and horrible reaction begins. Its almost like a logical conclusion to the terrible abuse, the cycle of grotesque violence continues to spiral...

beheading - from BBC News

Horrible crimes breed more terrible offspring...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

06:45 / 12.05.04

Just to clarify, I wasn't actually drawing comparisons with the Nazi regime... just that there's a precedent for "only following orders" being a bullshit excuse.

10:07 / 12.05.04

I'm rpetty sure I remember World War 2 resulting in no one ever getting to use the excuse again, on the grounds that it's really stupid. Wasn't that what Nuremburg concluded by prosecuting everyone?

And can anyone tell me what the lynched contractors from a while ago were contracted to do? I keep reading in papers people going "Well, they did it to our contractors, so why can't we do it back?" and screaming, sometimes in limited public, that they did it to the contractors because they did it first. If not in the direct, personal culpability sense (which i suspect they may well have done), but they certainly represent a system that's torturing these people, as well as everything else.

But no, I really can't be surprised by this. The idea that people who decided that murdering other people for money was the way they wanted their life to go, and then get sent off to kill people who, for the first time in a while, the government is at least trying to pretend may be guilty of something (is it just me, or have most wars been on some barely-tennable,-but-at-least-there line about human rights and peacekeeping?), and then turn out to be a bit mean is not shaking the foundations of my world view.

I don't think anyone can effectively call for Morgan's head on the photos though, can they? Given that, you know, we have way more evidence that we've been torturing people then the intelligence services had that Hussein had been stockpiling WMDs. That said, running fakes (even if they are reconstructions, which seems to be their new line: "faithful representations of an event" was, I believe, the quote) is spectacularly stupid, as it's neither added anything to the debate in this country (did it? Didn't most people hear America, think Everyone?) and is only going to provide a great big, tnesion-diffusing scapegoat to avoid actually doing something.

10:59 / 12.05.04

Don't know if people saw it, but there was an interesting piece in The Guardian this weekend about the use of these humilation techniques in training for British special forces (SAS etc). Apparently, they test people in with nakedness, humilation etc. over a period of 48 hours or so, so they are familar with them, and have a degree of resistance, if ever they get captured. I'm sure the training doesn't running to beating them to death (lightweights), but just more proof that this isn't a random abberation, few bad apples, but a specific technique used, taught and developed in the military. The miltray source interviewed stated that undergoing this training was sufficiently traumatic to give you a degree of empathy with any prisioners taken so Brit special forces would be unlikely to do it. Seems unlikely to me.

The thing I've been wondering in this instance is how can you be so f***ing stupid to have your photo taken while doing something like this (perhaps I should have been thinking "how can you do this at ALL" but this war sends your brain to new places) Robert Fisk, over in The Independent felt that the photography takes place simply to add a new layer to the humilation.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

11:38 / 12.05.04

Just heard this on the radio while shopping- Pte England's given her first interview, and yup, she was "only following orders".

21 fucking years old, man. This is horrible.

13:09 / 12.05.04

The thing I've been wondering in this instance is how can you be so f***ing stupid to have your photo taken while doing something like this (perhaps I should have been thinking "how can you do this at ALL" but this war sends your brain to new places) Robert Fisk, over in The Independent felt that the photography takes place simply to add a new layer to the humilation.

Possibly. I guess I assumed it was a form of trophy-taking: y'know, the technological equivalent of scalps or ear-necklaces.

14:16 / 12.05.04

I figured that it was a further sign of just how endemic such mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners had become – that the soldiers thought nothing of taking of photographs of abuse - it had become such an everyday occurence that they didn't see anything wrong with it.

Attempting to find out if this behaviour was deliberately santioned from on high (as opposed to being merely condoned by people on the ground) will be the difficult bit...

14:22 / 12.05.04

However this all plays out, I'll bet there's a widespread ban on digital cameras from now on...

Tryphena Absent

14:31 / 12.05.04

And people who could give a shit about politics are suddenly ashamed to be American. Utterly ashamed.

People should be ashamed of being American anyway- you have a federal government that attempts to ban abortion but a President who sent 150 people to Death Row in 12 months. You're led by a murderer, anyone who isn't already ashamed hasn't been paying enough attention.

Seriously, I've been reading this thread and I don't understand where the shock value is coming from. Iraqis are actively resisting the occupying force, of course they're being tortured. This isn't a game, it's a war and it's been started by a man happy to kill his own citizens. If there wasn't torture while he was head of state then there was never going to be torture ever again.

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