Printable View
John McCain in 08!Quote:
Originally posted by Grange
I was watching the hearings during my lunch break and I am sorry to say that other than John Mckane (sp?) I could tell without looking what party the senator asking questions was affiliated with.:(
Never thought I'd see the day I agreed with Ann Coulter, but she does make a good point.;)Quote:
women are too vicious
How about Kerry/McCain '04.;) I would definitely consider voting for him, but would need to find out where he stands on the environmental issues.Quote:
Originally posted by SummitCo 1776
John McCain in 08!
Quote:
Originally posted by char
Please tell me you aren't really using that as an excuse.
huh? no I'm not making any excuses for these people. I'm just saying that what happened amounts to humilitaion and hazing. Unlike what was going on in the prison a year and a half ago. Which could be characterized as mutilation, torture, and killing.
not exactly the same thing.
Don't worry boys, anyone with half a brain knows better than to judge a whole population by the actions of a few, especially when those few happen to be their elected representatives.
Canadians have been busted for the similar activities in the not too distant past.
"If you want to see the true dregs of humanity, go to the prison at the changing of the guard"-Mark Twain
Probably not a firing synapse amongst the whole lot of those prison guards. Making Irag safe for democracy. What a load of hooey. It's always been about their oil and always will be, otherwise nobody would give a crap about what's going on there. Dubya, Cheney=texas oilmen, Irag=buttload of oil. Nah, there can't be any correlation there. ANYONE but dubya in '04!!!!!!!
Torture brought you by the army of the country who just recently said they didn't want to be exposed to being brought to an international court on war crimes, ever. Isn't that amazing?
drC
The international prison that the Hague would send anyone to would be a luxury resort compared to where these fuckwits are going: Ft. Leavenworth Prison, KS.Quote:
Originally posted by Dr. Crash
Torture brought you by the army of the country who just recently said they didn't want to be exposed to being brought to an international court on war crimes, ever. Isn't that amazing?
drC
unbelievable..
http://wwwimage.cbsnews.com/images/2...mage615939.jpg
Appalling and sickening.
Rumsfeld: "It's gonna get even worse."
Unbelievable.
Song's been rattling around in my head for almost a week now:
Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
FUCK YOU!!!, YOU FUCKING FUCK FUCKERS! PRIVATE TO FUCKING PRESIDENT GREAT FUCKING FUCK OFF JOB! A TASMANIAN DICK DANCE OF TITANIC PROPORTIONS AND WE JUST FUCKING WARMING UP FOR THE MAIN ACT!
Ughhh. War. I feel bad for everybody involved. I feel bad for the prisoners. I feel bad for our servicemen that weren't party to this. I even feel bad for those that committed these acts. A military largely filled with poor minorities. Kids who have very few options for work and to better themselves without risking their lives. I've seen them come home for visits. Proud families that barely speak English so excited to see their loved one come home and do something with their lives.
Last week I had beers with 12 illegal immigrants in the alley behind my house. Our conversation was broken at times, but it lasted for hours and was very philosophical. Miguel, is a father of 4. His family lives in Mexico and he sends back whatever money he can to help his family. For 4 years he stood on a corner next to a 7-11 in LA hoping to pick-up any work he could to survive (a construction prostitute if you will). He now has a full-time job working on sprinkler systems. He is sad. Genuinely struggling day to day. His father is dying back home, but since 9-11 he hasn't been able to go home and visit. He can't risk getting caught and losing the income he provides for his family. So he stays and he works and mourns. He talked at great length about his wife. He told me how he'd serenade her even though his singing was poor. He works hard. He's gone before I get up in the morning and he doesn't get back until I've been home for several hours. He asked me about "American night clubs" he wanted to know if they "were like they are in the movies". He was so excited when he asked. I felt guilty for being born here. I felt guilty for having everything I did. It's pure chance that I was given the things I was. It's easy to look around and be dissatisfied, but it's also easy to look around and find countless outsiders dying to have what we have.
I abhor war. I hate what it does to people. I hate the leader that put them there, but I love what I have and I know everything I have wasn’t solely carried upon my back. I hate to judge the soldiers involved. One minute you’re dodging bullets the next minute you’re playing the role of humanitarian to those same people firing weapons at you. The bad guy isn’t wearing a uniform.
These actions are completely inexcusable, but I have a hard time blaming the soldiers. I blame the people that put them in this horrible situation. I think every soldier involved should be severely reprimanded, but just like my situation that I didn’t create alone I realize their situation wasn’t something they created alone. They were put in a tough situation and they broke. The tragedy would never have happened were they at home where they belong.
Having lived expat for some years. I was in a misguided teen-way, ashamed to be a yank.
The recent embarrassing and illegal decisions of our countries' leaders have given me a personal reason (among many) to exorcise my right to work towards their replacement. I will endeavor to change the direction of our leadership. I fully and respectfully support the military operations we are committed to, but I disagree with the direction our Country has gone.
I will never be ashamed to be an American .
Our country is great, but there are a huge number without global awareness or sympathy. I do believe in rapid and brutal justice. I do believe in right and wrong. I do believe in the law of man and NEVER THE LAW OF AN IMAGINARY GOD.
When will we learn to leave the religious idiocy where it belongs? Completely away and independant of the government of people.
Devoutly religious politicians=superstitious and dangerous morons in positions of authority
Hey, Rush said these pictures were just taken out of context.:rolleyes:Quote:
Read it again, morons, he knows what he's talking about.Quote:
Originally posted by ArmchairExtreme
Having lived expat for some years. I was in a misguided teen-way, ashamed to be a yank.
The recent embarrassing and illegal decisions of our countries' leaders have given me a personal reason (among many) to exorcise my right to work towards their replacement. I will endeavor to change the direction of our leadership. I fully and respectfully support the military operations we are committed to, but I disagree with the direction our Country has gone.
I will never be ashamed to be an American .
Our country is great, but there are a huge number without global awareness or sympathy. I do believe in rapid and brutal justice. I do believe in right and wrong. I do believe in the law of man and NEVER THE LAW OF AN IMAGINARY GOD.
When will we learn to leave the religious idiocy where it belongs? Completely away and independant of the government of people.
Devoutly religious politicians=superstitious and dangerous morons in positions of authority
edit: I think he means "exercise"
This is a "Crusade" ACE so step out of the way with your atheistic beliefs! Bush consults a "higher father" on Iraq, not his real father, who knew better than to march on Baghdad. The war is just because everyone is given a right to freedom "by God." This is a man who sends out troops to fight theocracy and religious fanatics who would have a theocracy at home if given the option--as long as it would be a Christian theocracy. What a piece of work the shrub is.
Punishing these soldiers is not nearly enough--apparently, these kids may not have been schooled in the Geneva Convention at all. Whatever happened to the "buck stops here?" I am so depressed over the long-term implications of the abuse and the way the adminstation continues to take a defiant stand (oh yeah, shrub apologized to the King of Jordan, bravo :rolleyes: ) that I am not even angry about this anymore. If Bush had immediately fired all those responsible, from rummy on down, there might have been a glimmer of hope. If he had the intelligence and curiousity required to actually lead this country (remember those who said it wasn't important to have a brilliant president because he can always deligate responsibilities to his dream team?) there might be some hope. If shrub had concentrated more on being contrite and not on having his operatives try to silence Ted Koppel, 60 minutes, and Michael Moore, there might be some hope. Now the only hope is for us to run this obtuse, tone-deaf, moronic, arrogant, idiotic asshole out of office.
But really it's too late. Osama is getting exactly what he always wanted. This incident is the ultimate Al Queda recruiting tool.
Alot of the important things about bringing shame on our mission in Iraq, injustice of war, chain of command, etc. has been said so I'll throw some of my other thoughts into the fold:
- John McCain was a POW, he should be the one telling Rumsfeld to hit the unemployment line, not Teddy Kennedy.
- Where are the comparisons to life in US prisons? How about to that black man who was sodomized (nearly to death) with a broomstick by NYC police a few years ago?
- Who were these soldiers going to show these pictures to? Why take pictures?
- I come from a Navy family, I know about honor and code and duty; I'm sure these soldiers were taught as well. How did this fail here or where is their honor?
- Do acts like this stem from the mindset of "connnect Saddam to 9/11 however you can," "WMDs if you find them or not," and "The Geneva convention isn't for terrorists," "Iraqi's fighting their occupiers are insurgents, not patriots"
This makes me so mad, so sad, so frustrated, and so scared.
To the opener of this thread...
You have every right to be ashamed for these indivuduals' actions. They are reprehensible in every way, and I sincerely hope to see them prosecuted in an international war crimes trial, not merely an Article 32 Courts Martial. The United States has willingly taken up the cross to lead the world; and since the Geneva Conventions are the draft that the world agreed upon for prisoner treatment, the US needs to embody those conventions directly.
What these guys have done is indeed sickening. As far as their cries that they were under orders, I think that's reminiscent of 1945 at Nuremburg - numerous Nazi soldiers claimed that they were merely under orders when they performed war crimes. And they were still held accountable for their actions. These soldiers have claimed that they didn't know about the Geneva conventions, and I call bullshit - law of armed conflict and geneva convention material is briefed at the most basic level (basic training for starters). Even if they weren't experts on those they should have had a clue that this was wrong. Gee, there are cameras present...how will this look on film? That's basic common sense right there. And could what they were doing possibly be wrong or construed that way? Finally, these soldiers not only had the right, but the responsibility to refuse any orders believed to be illegal or immoral. And they were negligent on their responsibilities there as well.
I think this is on par with My Lai. I find it incredulous that their commander, the reservist female brigadier general, is parading around the morning talk-show circuit with her retinue of lawyers, and not a damned thing has been done to her yet. She was directly responsible for the goings-on, and in my opinion she should be stripped of her commission, both for her current conduct but also for her loss of control of her command. And the investigations and prosecutions should just walk right up the line from there.
finally, as for PFC Lindy England and her boyfriend, they're DONE. The majority of the images have been described as a sadistic and almost sexual intercourse between her and her boyfriend, and they've been at the root of most of it. So most of the issues are likely to fall on them. Also, the UCMJ has some funny rules in relation to sexual intercourse, and what is defined as legal. For example, oral sex is defined as sodomy, a crime; and any sort of extramarital intercourse is also a crime, married or not. Usually those rules aren't enforced unless the service is looking to fuck over the individual they're prosecuting (anybody remember Army Capt. James Yee's adultery charges?). In this case, PFC England is now home, pregnant with her boyfriend's child. Technically their intercourse was illegal, both in the marriage context and also in the deployed-in-the-field context (typically a general order is issued in field locations barring any kind of intercourse or affection), and now she's home unable to complete the assigned deployment due to willful violations of the laws and orders. Oh man, they're hosed.
I realize that their sexual conduct isn't the issue here, but I'm pointing out to look for those charges to be attached along with the war crimes accusations. If they're there, you all will know why.
Good article from the Globe and Mail
By MARGARET WENTE
Tuesday, May 11, 2004 - Page A23
The tide has turned for the U.S. adventure in Iraq, and it's going out fast. The prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib (why didn't they raze the thing last May?) and elsewhere have the Pentagon and White House utterly on the defensive. More awful images and stories will leak out for months to come. The U.S. administration has no idea how to manage this catastrophe, and there's no way they can regain the moral high ground.
Even the war's most stalwart supporters are in despair. They're demanding a brand-new Iraq strategy, fast. But what might it be? It's incorrect to say that the old strategy isn't working, because there is no old strategy. They're making it up as they go along. People want Donald Rumsfeld fired, because somebody up high should take the fall.
But then what? It's not as if there's someone in the wings with a better idea.
The underlying story of the abuses is starting to become clear. Last fall, the insurgents sharply stepped up their attacks on diplomats, police stations and U.S. soldiers. Out of fear, many Iraqis sympathetic to the Americans stopped helping them. The U.S. military was increasingly desperate for information on the insurgency, and under enormous pressure to check it.
So they started arresting more people, and prison guards were instructed to soften them up -- in ways we have now seen -- for interrogations that clearly on occasion became brutal.
It's popular to argue that the pornography of Abu Ghraib is the inevitable product of military culture and military values. As one writer put it in this paper yesterday, "Abuse is predictable in any group that defines masculinity through power, strength, and aggression." Other people argue that the abuses simply expose the soldiers' racist attitudes toward Arabs and Muslims.
Both those views are rubbish. Most of the soldiers in Iraq have been doing an amazing job under awful circumstances, rebuilding schools, getting oil refineries up and running, delivering food to mosques on feast days and trying to be as sensitive as possible. In battle, they have taken enormous care to avoid civilian casualties. The soldiers I met there -- including a few military intelligence officers who are appalled at what happened -- were smart, disciplined, principled and deeply idealistic. The greatest tragedy of Abu Ghraib is that it negates all the good they've done.
The Washington Post's Jim Hoagland nails the problem: The management of empire and of extended occupation has become impossibly complex.
My guess is that no amount of planning could have done much to offset the chaos of postwar Iraq. People are now accusing the U.S. administration of willful negligence for not putting Iraqis in charge of the prisons. But imagine for a minute the howls of outrage if they had -- and how we would have liked the Iraqi-style treatment of detainees.
If I were Mr. and Mrs. Suburbia, I'd be having a severe case of empire-fatigue by now. They wrote a cheque for $87-billion, and the people they liberated hate them more than ever. Abu Ghraib isn't Grozny (but, hey, it doesn't matter what the Russians do). It's not My Lai either. None of this matters. What matters is that it is impossible for America's conduct to be perfect. And every time something goes wrong -- as it will -- people are going to holler war crimes, and sometimes they'll be right.
If I were Mr. and Mrs. Suburbia, I'd be saying to hell with it. Once they do that, the game is over.
The irony is that one of the war's aims is a clear success. The Iraqis really are better off now. In the north, the Kurds are happy as clams. There are no floods of refugees (as alarmists predicted) because the two conditions that create refugees -- starvation and genocide -- are absent. Most Iraqis are better off, and they know it. They think the future will be better than the present, and they're probably right. Whatever regime they wind up with a year or five years from now will, in all likelihood, be better than Saddam.
The war was good for the Iraqis. It's turned out to be very, very bad for the United States, and probably for the rest of us, too.
I suspect Americans will be so fed up with Iraq that they'll have no stomach for foreign entanglements for a long time to come, no matter how just the cause. What's the chance of intervention when the next Rwanda comes along? Even less than last time.
Mr. and Mrs. Suburbia won't give a damn about the moral high ground. The moral high ground has turned out to be a costly pain in the ass.
Jetter, on par with My Lai?? Psychological abuse is comparable to the systematic killing of innocent women and children? riiiiiight.
where was the outrage for the prisoner abuse going on in Iraq before we deposed Hussein??? Those prisoners just disappeared never to be heard from again. They'd be lucky to be paraded around in women's panties. The electrodes were real 15 months ago.
I am in full agreement that these MP's should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. their damage to the coalition's mission in Iraq is extensive. I don't think you need to have the Geneva Accords in your back pocket to treat humans correctly. But know this, these were not petty thieves or looters. They were people that shot at and killed coalition forces, were caught with weapons caches, making bombs, with bomb ingredients.
so when we start using terms such as atrocity, please refer to a history book. Minor hazing and psychological torture does not even begin to compare.
I don't know of any psychologist or psychoanalyst who, given the details of what went on, would be surprised by these actions.
Back in the '70s and earlier, before they were deemed unethical, many a famous experiment was conducted in order to understand how "ordinary" people respond to positions of power over others. Specifically, experiments where the subjects were randomly assigned positions of prison guards and prisoners exemplified just how base our human instincts are. Left to their own devices, the "prison guards" soon partook in humiliating the "prisoners" by way of making them strip to nakedness and simulate various degrading behaviours. The experiment, meant to last two weeks, was cancelled after just one.
Likewise experiments involving "teachers" giving electrical shocks to "students" demonstrated how much people are willing to dish out when under orders from an authority figure.
Sure, point the finger at the perpetrators, think to yourself how wrong they are, but don't forget to look at the bigger picture and blame the ones who put them there in the first place. From what I can gather, that place was a breeding ground for this type of behaviour. Without proper guidelines, without moral supervision, it is a lot easier than one might think to lose touch with reality and not grasp the severity of what you are doing.
Sick and ashamed and happy (and will probably always be that way),
d.
Mr G's got a point.
As bad as it is, it doesn't compare with feeding people feet first into a plastic shredding machine which is how Uday got his jollies.
I think that you're right about this, but then I agree strongly with Jetter in that The CO of the prision is absolutely responsible for what went on under her command and should be the first person to face court martial.Quote:
Originally posted by gincognito
Sure, point the finger at the perpetrators, think to yourself how wrong they are, but don't forget to look at the bigger picture and blame the ones who put them there in the first place. From what I can gather, that place was a breeding ground for this type of behaviour. Without proper guidelines, without moral supervision, it is a lot easier than one might think to lose touch with reality and not grasp the severity of what you are doing.
I would accept more excuse for the "system" and less (were it possible to have less than none) for the individuals, had not the International Red Cross and Amnesty International, among others, been reporting these kinds of abuses since March of last year.
It also isn't surprising that this occurred for another reason - the general abuses of power we tolerate in a war that we would not tolerate in our own communities.
We have prohibited free speech and free assembly in Iraq, even to the point of firing on protestors.
We have prohibited the right to associate, and banned certain political parties.
We have detained "suspected insurgents", denied them right to counsel or the right to face their accused, without proferring charges of any kind. Now, some estimates are that 70 to 90 percent of those detained may not have been involved in any insurgency. In perhaps the worst abuse, to our sensibilities, we have detained an American citizen on american soil for 9 months without charging him or allowing him access to a lawyer. The Administration recently argued before the Supreme Court that they should have the right to detain him as long as needed.
How many other rights that we take for granted will we take from them? Or have taken? I doubt that this scandal would have been acknowledged by the administration had there not been photos.
Is it surprising that individual soldiers in Iraq should feel free to violate whatever "rights" a prisoner might have?
Is it any wonder that there now IS a link between al Quada and Iraq, as Iraqis flock to the al Quada banner? This aspect of the problem is much worse than you might think. The weekly intellegence analysis that comes across my desk reported a major surge in al Quada recruitment startying several months ago. The administration, of course, is downplaying that due to its negative spin on the Iraq problem.
Here's a link to all the pics:
http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/iraqis_tortured/
Also, check out the front page for more reasons to be pissed!