^ And all this is being done in the name of bringing liberation and freedom to the Iraqis. One has to wonder whether the Iraqis are better off now or under Saddam.
now americans are necrophiles too? that is just sick…what next?..actually i cant think of any thing more sicker than necrophilia..so there is no NEXT…they have done it all…
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by ehsan: *
If all this is happeneing in prisons where there is some form of access available, imagine what will be happening in Guantanamo Bay. Shame on the so called liberators and champions of human rights.
[/QUOTE]
Exactly
All those people who supported the illegal bombing and occupation of iraq should hang there heads in shame!
Even commentators on television and in newspapers who where pro war all the way are making public apologies saying they where so wrong.
I am finding the news of these abuses totally sickening by the day, with news of young girls raped in prison by US armed forces and handcuffed prisoners bitten and attacked by dogs, i don`t know how anyone can be proud to be amerikkan or british with this abuse associated with them it is a total shame!
**
Actually i read somewhere that there are now more prisoners trapped in prisons scattered all over Iraq under American and British occupation, than there were under Saddam Hussein.
In a dictatorship, you expect this type of stuff and you are not surprised by it because dictatorships have lost 100% of all moral credibility. You don’t expect this from the government that proclaims itself to be the high and mighty protector of human rights and freedom. This is the freedom that the world is now seeing - it is freedom to crawl naked on the ground with a leash around your neck. :k: It is freedom to cower naked while a dog is a few feet away from you ready to bite you :k: Yes, yes, this is freedom in the American and British style. :k:
^ yes the pics were posted in Image gallery. Shor Sharaba huwa, guppies started getting really sensitive and finally the whole thread was removed.
I remember some guppies after seeing the pics mentioned about how they will go to sleep after seeing the pics.
It was very disturbing.
Very disturbing.
Very.
Oh God
I heard the maximum peanalty that guy will get is one year in prison plus being discharged from duty with bad conduct, etc
I am like ONE YEAR!
ONE YEAR IN PRISON!!!
covers her eyes
This is just so ......
“Actually i read somewhere that there are now more prisoners trapped in prisons scattered all over Iraq under American and British occupation, than there were under Saddam Hussein.”
Very untrue.
"As many as 4000 prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib Prison in 1984. At least 122 male prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib prison in February/ March 2000. A further 23 political prisoners were executed there in October 2001.
The facility occupies 280 acres with over 4 kilometers of security perimeter and 24 guard towers. The prison is composed of five distinct compound each surrounded by guard towers and high walls. Built by British contractors in the 1960s, Abu Ghraib is a virtual city within a city. The political section of Abu Ghraib was divided into “open” and “closed” wings. The closed wing housed only Shi’ites. The open wing held all other varieties of real or suspected activists. The “closed” wing was so named because its inmates – at least until 1989 – were permitted no visitors or outside contact. Cells measured approximately four meters by four meters and held an average of 40 persons.
As of 2001 Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, may have held as many as 15,000 persons, many of who were subject to torture. Hundreds of Fayli (Shi’a) Kurds and other citizens of Iranian origin, who had disappeared in the early 1980’s during the Iran-Iraq war, reportedly were being held incommunicado at the Abu Ghurayb prison. Such persons have been detained without charge for close to 2 decades in extremely harsh conditions. Many of the detainees were used as subjects in the country’s outlawed experimental chemical and biological weapons programs.
As of early 2002 the Iraqi government reported to the US that sum of 12.2 million Iraqi dinars had been earmarked for the construction of six prison blocks, four in the Abu Ghraib prison and two in the governorate of Babil prison, to accommodate 7,200 prisoners. The work had already begun. Ongoing construction activity, apparent as of mid-November 2002, suggests that Iraqi regime was planning for an increase in prison population either due to increased represssion or an increase in anti-governmental activity. Four new prison compounds appear to be in the early stages of construction. The foundation and footings are either being dug or concrete has been poured.
Saddam Hussein declared an unprecedented amnesty to thank the Iraqi people for their “unanimity” in the referendum of October 2002, which extended his powers for another 7years. The “full and complete amnesty” applied to any Iraqi imprisoned or arrested for political or other reason but reportedly murderers on a death row will be released only with consent of the victims’ families. Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), the state’s supreme authority, issued an amnesty to all prisoners in Iraq"
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by Ohioguy: *
**Very untrue. ...]*
[/QUOTE]
i'll try to find the source where i read it but i don't think i will succeed because i have read too many news articles regarding this issue and would be hard-pressed to remember the exact source. It was less than five days ago, i'm pretty certain. Anyways i'll try to find the source and post it here IF i do.
Nelson Mandela yesterday spoke out against “terrible abuses” by American and UK forces in Iraq, in a speech marking the 10th anniversary of his inauguration as South Africa’s first black president.
**“We watch as two of the leading democracies, two leading nations of the free world, get involved in a war that the United Nations did not sanction,” Mr Mandela said to a joint session of parliament in Cape Town.
“We look on with horror as reports surface of terrible abuses against the dignity of human beings held captive by invading forces in their own country.”**
The Nobel laureate and former president was an outspoken opponent of last year’s US-led invasion of Iraq.
In the lead-up to the war, he said US President George W. Bush “cannot think properly” and accused him of “wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust”.
“We see how the powerful countries - all of them democracies - manipulate multilateral bodies to the great disadvantage of the poorer developing nations,” he said yesterday. “There is enough reason for cynicism and despair.”
Well this is not the source i was thinking of, but i read this today. She is a former prisoner at the Abu Ghraib prison, during Saddam Hussein’s reign.
In the following two sentences, she is talking about the current period, not that of the previous government.
muslims see each other as brothers and sisters, the damage the US and British coalition have done is...very very dangerous, moreso its all to themselves,
they should be very afraid.
all i can say to console myself is what Allah (swa) says, that when they reach the peak of their arrogance, thats when they will fall,
and god, how im waiting for them to fall - as probably thousands of other muslims worldwide are.
seemed relevant to recent discussion:
Abu Ghraib and after
By Khalid Hasan
One thing that must be recognised and saluted before
all else is that the Abu Ghraib torture and
humiliation of Iraqi prisoners was exposed by Seymour
Hersh in the New Yorker and by an American network on
the celebrated CBS news programme 60 Minutes II. It
has been newspapers such as the New York Times and
Washington Post which have given big billing to the
story and which have thrown their letters columns
open, the Times more than the others, for readers to
express their outrage.
Had it been left to the Bush administration, the world
may never have heard about Abu Ghraib. So this is what
a free press is all about. This shattering episode
took me back to the days of Gen Yahya Khan and the
military crackdown against the people of East Pakistan
in March 1971 that led to the birth of Bangladesh nine
months later. I was, at the time, a reporter on The
Pakistan Times in Lahore and though we all knew what
was going on in East Pakistan, we were not allowed to
write about it. The mood among the ‘zinda
dillan-e-Lahore’ was not one of compassion or concern
for their countrymen a thousand miles to the east, but
one of regret that the Bengalis were not being
punished hard enough for their ‘Hindu ways and
customs’.
The late ZA Suleri, who prided himself on being a
lieutenant of the Quaid and a keeper of Pakistan’s
‘ideology,’ was writing incendiary editorials
denouncing the ‘separatists and enemies of Pakistan’.
To his lasting honour, the only man who stood up for
the East Pakistanis in Lahore was the great Abdulla
Malik who told a meeting of students at the
Engineering University, “Hum Bangladesh ke mazloom
awam ke saath hain” (We are one with the people of
Bangladesh who are being subjected to atrocities). For
this ‘anti-state’ declaration, he was charged under
martial law and sentenced.
The only Pakistani journalist who was able to write
about the atrocities in East Pakistan was the late
Tony Mescrehnas, but not for the Pakistani newspaper
he worked for in Karachi but the Sunday Times in
London. He was denounced as a traitor. He told me in
London years later, “I was the only Pakistani patriot
in 1971.” It is 33 years since that chapter of shame
closed with the breakup of the country, but to this
day, no Pakistani writer or journalist has had the
decency to transcribe a full and honest account of the
rape of Golden Bengal.
The apology that we owe to Abdulla Malik’s ‘mazloom
awam’ has not been made. What Gen. Musharraf once said
about letting bygones be bygones is not enough. While
The Pakistan Times was controlled by the
government-appointed National Press Trust, there was
nothing to stop the non-Trust papers from bringing the
truth about East Pakistan to their readers. Why did
they fail to do so? I bring this up because before we
begin to lecture the world on human rights, we should
examine our own sorry record and apologise for it.
Governments are always slow to own up when bad things
happen. The Bush administration had been aware of the
Abu Ghraib incidents since at least February when the
army completed its inquiry. Even Congress was not
informed and it is up in arms because of that.
However, had it not been for the American press, the
story might not have seen the light of day. The
outrage felt by many here I found best reflected in
what Philip Kennicott of Washington Post wrote. He
said among the ‘corrosive lies’ a nation at war tells
itself is that the ‘glory’ belongs to the country but
the failures are those of a few individuals. The
administration, he pointed out, has called Abu Ghraib
an aberration. But the regret in official Washington,
he added, is not so much at what happened but that
America’s image has been besmirched.
“The problem,” he wrote, “it seems, isn’t so much the
abuse of the prisoners … the problem is our
reputation. Our soldiers’ reputation. Our national
self-image. These photos, we insist, are not us. But
these photos are us. Yes, they are the acts of
individuals, but armies are made up of individuals.
Nations are made up of individuals … No matter how
many people are held directly accountable for these
crimes, we are, collectively, responsible for what
these individuals have done … These photos show us
what we may become as occupation continues, anger and
resentment grows and costs spiral. These pictures are
pictures of colonial behaviour, the demeaning of
occupied people, the insult to local tradition, the
humiliation of the vanquished.”
It is not too late for a Pakistani to write like this
about what we did in East Pakistan in 1971.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_9-5-2004_pg3_7
United States annual report on human rights postponed any guess why?
UNITED NATIONS: According to a joke circulating in Washington political circles, former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s notorious torture chamber in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad - once held up as a symbol of barbarity - was never shut down.
A signboard outside the prison chamber now reads: “Under New Management”. US management, that is. The extent of the US administration’s embarrassment following the publication of photos showing torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib is evident in the fact that Washington has postponed the release of the State Department’s annual report on human rights abuses worldwide.
The official reasons for the eleventh hour postponement have not been disclosed. The report usually takes aim at virtually every country, most in the developing world, for human rights excesses while excluding US abuses from its pages.
The question now being asked is: can Washington afford to take a holier-than-thou attitude when it beats up the rest of the world every year in the annual report?
Even the ‘New York Times’ admitted in its editorial on Friday that “the United States has been humiliated to a point where government officials could not release this year’s international human rights report this week for fear of being scoffed at by the rest of the world.”
“Internationally, there is little US credibility on human rights issues,” says Phyllis Bennis of the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington. She attributes the lack of US credibility to two primary factors: “the blatantly political motives of human rights criticisms (largely ignoring abuses in US “client states” like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and especially protecting Israel from the consequences of its human rights violations), and because of US denials in the past of its own human rights abuses”.
The harrowing images of US soldiers brutalizing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners - aired worldwide starting last week - have triggered outrage not only in the Middle East but throughout the world.
The photographs and television images include those of young Iraqis stripped naked and forced to pile up in a pyramid formation, while US soldiers grin at the hideous spectacle.
According to published reports, Iraqi detainees were also beaten up, tortured, threatened with rape and victimized by ferocious guard dogs. Dead bodies are now being exhumed in Iraq to ascertain the cause of death at the hands of soldiers or interrogators from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The United States, which actively participates in an annual ritual of “bashing” countries like Iran, Cuba, Syria, North Korea, Sudan and Myanmar at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva and at the General Assembly sessions in New York, has lost its moral authority to point an accusing finger at miscreants when it has problems in its own backyard, say diplomats from developing nations.
United States delays its Annual Human Rights Abuses report any guess why?
Hmmm so the Annual human rights abuses report the whole world gets to see from the Amerikkkans is delayed this year what a surprise not!
because guess what the no 1 abuser this year is yep you guessed it Globocops themselves the United states!
note how the Islamist gets dragged into this too. incredible how it almost sounds like Abu Ghraib was an assertion of women's rights over the twisted, evil, oppression that the Islamist thrives on.
Abu Ghraib as Symbol
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 7, 2004; Page A33
On Sept. 11, 2001, America awoke to the great jihad, wondering: What is this about? We have come to agree on the obvious answers: religion, ideology, political power and territory. But there is one fundamental issue at stake that dares not speak its name. This war is also about -- deeply about -- sex.
For the jihadists, at stake in the war against the infidels is the control of women. Western freedom means the end of women's mastery by men, and the end of dictatorial clerical control over all aspects of sexuality -- in dress, behavior, education, the arts.
Taliban rule in Afghanistan was the model of what the jihadists want to impose upon the world. The case the jihadists make against freedom is that wherever it goes, especially the United States and Europe, it brings sexual license and corruption, decadence and depravity.
The appeal of this fear can be seen in the Arab world's closest encounter with modernity: Israel. Israeli women are by far the most liberated of any in that part of the world. For decades, the Arab press has responded with lurid stories of Israeli sexual corruption.
The most famous example occurred in the late 1990s, when Egyptian newspapers claimed that chewing gum Israel was selling in Egypt was laced with sexual hormones that aroused insatiable lust in young Arab women. Palestinian officials later followed with charges that Israeli chewing gum was a Zionist plot for turning Palestinian women into prostitutes, and "completely destroying the genetic system of young boys" to boot.
Which is why the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.
That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe -- and that cynical secular regimes such as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their populations and deflect their anger and frustrations. Through this lens, Abu Ghraib is an "I told you so" played out in an Arab capital, recorded on film.
Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women. They prize their traditional prerogatives that allow them to keep their women barefoot in the kitchen as illiterate economic and sexual slaves. For the men, that is a pretty good deal -- one threatened by the West with its twin doctrines of equality and sexual liberation.
It is no accident that jihadists around the world are overwhelmingly male. It is very rare to find a female suicide bomber. And when you do, as with the young woman who blew herself up in Gaza, killing four others in January, it turns out that she herself was a victim of sexual subjugation -- a wife accused of adultery, marked for death, who decided to die a martyr rather than a pariah. But die she must.
Which is what made one aspect of the Abu Ghraib horrors even more incendiary -- the pictures of female U.S. soldiers mocking, humiliating and dominating naked and abused Arab men. One could not have designed a more symbolic representation of the Islamist warning about where Western freedom ultimately leads than yesterday's Washington Post photo of a uniformed American woman holding a naked Arab man on a leash.
Let's be clear. The things we have learned so far about Abu Ghraib are not, by far, the worst atrocities committed in war. Indeed, they pale in comparison with what Arab insurgents have done to captured Westerners, and what Saddam Hussein did to his own people.
The American offenders should surely be judged by our standards, not by others. By our standards, these were egregious violations of human rights and human dignity. They must be punished seriously. They do not, however, reflect the ethos of the U.S. military, which has performed with remarkable grace and courage in Iraq, or of U.S. society.
The photographs suggest otherwise. Which is why the abuse at Abu Ghraib is so inflammatory and, for us and our cause, so damaging. It reenacted the most deeply psychologically charged -- and most deeply buried -- aspect of the entire war on terrorism, exactly as Osama bin Laden would have scripted it.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
Rush Limbaugh.. probably the most famous pro-republican radio show host.
Shamed into silence
Maybe the Mods would want to merge this with the existing thread by Ehsan Bhai. i opened it as a new thread only because it deals specifically with female prisoners, not males. The female detainees bear a double ordeal, as the article’s title itself highlights. i don’t know what to say about this. It’s every woman’s worst nightmare.
Please, please, please, don’t you guys use this to score political points. Just think - God Forbid, if it was your mother, your daughter, your sister, your wife. Retain some dignity in your responses whatever your political inclinations.
A Double Ordeal for Female Prisoners, Yahoo News, 11 May 2004
BAGHDAD — One woman told her attorney she was forced to disrobe in front of male prison guards. After much coaxing, another woman described how she was raped by U.S. soldiers. Then she fainted.
A U.S. Army report on abuses at Abu Ghraib prison documented one case of an American guard sexually abusing a female detainee, and a Pentagon spokesman said Monday that 1,200 unreleased images of abuse at Abu Ghraib included “inappropriate behavior of a sexual nature.”
Whether it was one or numerous cases of rape, **many Iraqis believe that sexual abuse of women in U.S.-run jails was rampant. As a result, female prisoners face grave prospects after they are released: denial, ostracism or even death.
A woman who is raped brings shame on her family in the Islamic world. In many cases, rape victims have been killed by their relatives to salvage family honor, although there is no evidence this has happened to women who have been prisoners in Iraq**. [At least not yet]
“It is like being sentenced to death,” said Sheik Mohammed Bashar Faydhi, a senior cleric based at Baghdad’s largest Sunni mosque.
Some Iraqi women said they were struggling to come to terms with the alleged abuses of female detainees at Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-controlled lockups. Few female inmates will talk about it. Their lawyers lower their voices when the subject of rape comes up.
“I hope it’s not true, because were it to be true, it is just too horrible to imagine,” said Rajaa Habib Khuzaai, an obstetrician who is one of three women on the Iraqi Governing Council. This week, Khuzaai was allowed access to a detention center housing women — a privilege rarely granted to outsiders before the scandal.
But female lawyers who visited the prison in March said their clients provided accounts of abuse and humiliation. To enter the prison west of Baghdad, the attorneys waded through dirt and coils of barbed wire, and waited for hours. Inside, they met with nine female detainees — four of whom, they said, had not been charged with any crime. U.S. military officials said at the time that there were 10 or 11 women being held at Abu Ghraib.
One lawyer, Sahra Janabi, said her clients found it difficult to talk about their experiences in prison. Seemingly minor actions by U.S. soldiers, such as removing a woman’s head scarf, represented a violation to these Muslim women.
A prison translator was present in the meetings and took notes, Janabi said. “We could not talk freely,” she said. “The women were devastated. They broke down crying.” According to Janabi, only one prisoner, a middle-aged owner of a cigarette stand, would speak openly, and said she did not care if the guards punished her. She told the lawyers that she had been forced to disrobe in front of male guards, an action that an Iraqi translator found so disgraceful he turned his head away in embarrassment.
Janabi and her colleagues said many women who had been detained are wives or relatives of senior Baath Party officials or of suspected insurgents. U.S. Army officials have acknowledged detaining women in hopes of persuading male relatives to provide information. The lawyers said interrogators sometimes threatened to kill detainees.
Dozens of people — lawyers, Iraqi officials, Iraqi and foreign human rights activists — have sought access to the prisons during the last year with minimal success. Stories of physical and sexual torture were rampant for much of that time. Iraqi officials and lawyers say U.S. military and governmental secrecy created a climate that allowed abuses. Women represented a small percentage of about 40,000 detainees processed by U.S. authorities.
**Once the women are freed, a new trauma begins, Iraqis say.
Khuzaai, the Governing Council member, said most female detainees cannot talk about what they’ve been through. They and their families try to pretend nothing ever happened, she said.
Another lawyer, Amul Swadi, said her client fainted before providing further details of being raped and knifed by U.S. soldiers.
Five former detainees described to their lawyers having been beaten. But they did not say they had been raped. **
“They are very ashamed,” Janabi said. "They say, ‘We can’t tell you. We have families. We cannot speak about what happened.’ "
In Iraq, silence may be their best protection.
Faydhi, the cleric, said an Iraqi man cannot acknowledge having had a female relative in prison. The shame, he said, is bad enough if the woman was in an Iraqi jail. To have been taken by the Americans compounds the humiliation. Her life may be in danger especially if the woman is from a large, prominent tribe, he said, and her family believes she has been raped, Faydhi said.
Faydhi, an official with Iraq’s Board of Islamic Clergy and a professor at the Islamic University, said a man will be discouraged from killing his female relative who has been released from prison if he seeks permission of an imam to restore the family’s honor. But the cleric also said imams have limited ability to prevent this kind of murder.
“I would remind him that she is a victim, and ask, how can we victimize her even more? I would tell him to keep it secret, but that if word gets out, I would try to convince him that she should be seen as a patriotic symbol,” Faydhi said. “But it is really difficult to convince an Iraqi to think in such a manner.”
Khuzaai said the stigma would be unbearable.
“Like any woman who is raped, there is the mental, psychological breakdown and everything that is related to the self,” she said. “But then there’s the family and society. If a rape has happened, a family will never talk about it, not to the public, and maybe not even among themselves.”
I'm so angry that words fail me.
Nadia, what is your level of confidence that ALL of these occurances will be investigated, and that all appropriate levels of responsible authorities will be judged and punished as needed?
im guessing most of us would either be shamed or angered into a very impotent silence.
condemnation OG?