First of all, I am appalled and deeply disgusted at the way some people think they’re so right about something they have the right of killing and maiming others. This applies to the soldiers involved in this undignified behavior, to their superiors, to the terrorists (both with and without uniforms), and to whoever has commited atrocities while attempting to claim a moral high ground. Whoever has ordered and carried out these barbaric acts of torture deserves to be exposed, and punished appropriately. Some of the soldiers involved claimed they were “doing the right thing”, because they had been “ordered” to do so by their superiors. Well, guess what… that’s exactly what several Nazis said at the Nuremberg Trials!
I’m not judging the Coalition forces as a whole, of course, but this is precisely the kind of thing that makes Iraqis see them as an invading force, and no better than Saddam. I’m not even going to rant about the real motives for the invasion in the first place… I’m just saying that the Coalition forces cannot keep claiming the moral high ground while these situations continue to take place. Even if some soldiers get stressed, or carried away, thinking they’re doing their countries a service, nothing justifies the torture and humiliation of prisoners. Whoever has ordered and carried out these actions is obviously sick and inhuman. If the current administration manages to identify and properly punish those responsible, then it may yet gain a certain degree of respectability in the region. If instead they stage a cover-up or don’t investigate this thoroughly, to the last consequences, the citizens of Iraq will have real reasons to turn against the Coalition.
As for those who go around kidnapping and killing Westerners, they have nothing to gain from those actions. The people who do those things while claiming to fight a holy war are obviously either hypocrites, insane or both.
As far as intolerance is concerned, however, both sides are at fault. Many people in the Muslim world seem prejudiced against the Western nations, but we can’t forget that every time there’s a major terrorist attack, innocent civilians are often harassed by ignorant and intolerant fools, just because they happen to have an Arabic look, or just because they’re Muslims.
>The photographs were beginning to circulate about a month ago. CBS had time to make this report, then delayed it for two more weeks after that. That amounts to about a month of not releasing the photos.
Ok, thanks for the information. It sounds like then that CBS delayed it to prevent rioting or the death of others over it; not like they were in bed with the military industrial complex (although I’m sure some would debate that).
also the information that the administration was aware is also telling.
And that is precisely the reason why [this car is off limits to all passengers] they will not argue that if/when they are brought to trial, the Nuremberg trials created a precedent for this sort of thing. I believe soldiers are actually required to disobey their orders if they are obviously immoral.
Oh, and this is an interesting theory about the relation between these two events.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/stakelbeck200405120831.asp
It’s entirely possible that the murder would have happened even without the abuse scandal; the terrorists have many other grievances, both real and imagined. That isn’t the point, and anyway no one except the terrorists was ever claiming that the murder was justified by the abuse scandal, so the article is an insubstantial attack on opponents that don’t even exist. The significance of the abuse scandal is that it taints all our rhetoric about “democracy” and “human rights,” which was hot air to begin with, regardless of what terrorists think about it. And the assertion that the prison abuse was an “aberration” is a flat-out lie, since evidence shows that it was systematically encouraged (and even recommended in one of the previous investigations, by one General Miller).
Yeah, I think they are required to disobey “unlawful” orders. But that’s a really vague term, especially since the whole war is “unlawful” to begin with.
That is correct, military personnel only have to follow lawful orders. There is even paperwork about that.
So true Info. However, here’s my two cents. Rumsfeld is an ass who gets a boner off of war and these soldiers should get their comeuppance. I don’t care hearing some backwater specialist bitch trying to defend herself after pictures of her with a tethered Iraqi or her pointing to a bunch of naked prisoners. She should get what she deserves. I’m pissed about this because a.) this makes the military even more immoral and unattractive, b.) now the Iraqi/Arab people are even more pissed at us, despite the “apologies” from Bush, Rummy, and I think even Blair, c.) the UK, our best friend in Europe and sometimes a mediator between us and mainland Europe, was also joined the fun with abusing prisoners, d.) that poor man Berg got his head sliced off, and e.) now Bush looks like a douche, but when has he not?
When good old American life, liberty and the pursuit for happiness is forced upon a foreign country by way of an illegal, unprovoked and armed entry, what good can possibly come out of it? It seems that not only does the current U.S. government think that they know what’s best for the United States, but also what’s best for a foreign country in the middle-east. Nothing like ethnocentric views like “Well, Saddam is bad, so American democracy will be a hundred times better, no matter what the cost and bloodshed it will take to reach it!” to justify a war in one’s mind!
It wasn’t about Saddam, it was about weapons of mass destruction. Iraq was a greta danger to America and the world. It is clear that Iraq had WMDs…Al Queda just hid them well.[/sarcasm]
IMO, the entire reason GW started this is because Saddam had a plot to assassinate the elder Bush years ago. And oil.
I don’t know if any of you ladies/gents have seen it yet, but on CNN they just talked about one of the 9/11 hijackers, Massaoui (sp?). He got arrested a few days before 9/11, and was gonna fly a plane into something or other. Anyway, David Berg’s email address was one of his contacts.
I think there’s more to this story than any of us know.
And SK, I’m not downplaying any loss of life, Iraqi or American. Like I said, both the decapitation and the POW abuse are horrid and without excuse.
I think perhaps people are getting the impression I’m a Bush fan, which I’m definately not.
As for Rumsfield, it’ll take a while, but he’ll get his.
Rumsfeld doesn’t have any friends right now besides the White House. Republicans in Congress and the military want him to resign. Problem is, they’re not sure how it would effect Bush’s poll numbers.
Rumsfeld’s policies to run the military like a corporation(decreasing troop numbers, relying more on special forces, enlisting a lot more private contractors) were met with a lot of resistance by the leadership of the military, and have caused problems other than interrogation abuse. The way in which we invaded Iraq is to blame for the Iraqis’ not liking us - because Rumsfeld ignored advice from Defense intelligence that we would need somewhere around 500,000 troops to police the country after the fall of Hussein’s government, we weren’t able to control rampant looting and chaos in the weeks following the fall of Hussein, thus right off the bat ordinary Iraqis lost faith in the ability of the U.S. to govern the country. We’re still having trouble keeping security under control.
How much of the blame does Rumsfeld have for the prisoner abuse? Well, he did three things that led to it. First, he created a special category of prisoner called ‘detainees’ that were not to receive the same rights as the ‘war prisoner’ category does under the Geneva conventions. Second, he employed private contractors to carry out interrogations; these contractors were not held accountable to the same protocol and human rights standards that regular troops were. Most likely, the soldiers who did the abusing at Abu Graib were taught the techniques they used by private contractor interrogation specialists. See, the private contractor companies train people who know how to use psychological torture, and Rumsfeld employed them to help interrogate prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. The different humiliation techniques that were detailed in the photos are well-known humiliation tactics that have been used in places like South America; those soldiers did not invent those ideas themselves. Third, “US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a secret program that encouraged interrogation methods used at Abu Ghraib prison, where Iraqi prisoners were abused”. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040515/pl_afp/iraq_us_prisoners_040515225639&e=2
As for why this war was fought: The answer is that we wanted to add Iraqi oil supplies to the marketplace and put a goverment in power that would not cooperate with Opec; we wanted a military base to intimidate other countries in the region into cooperating with U.S. foreign policy, possibly attacking them if necessary; and a third loose reason is that we think that this will somehow start a larger political transformation in the rest of the Mideast.
Curtis summed it up nicely. Now if only that would show up on CNN.