After viewing the new Iraq torture pictures and videos...
"I expected that these pictures would be very hard on the stomach lining and it was significantly worse than anything that I had anticipated." "Take the worse case and multiply it several times over,"
says US Senator Ron Wyden.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Malik73: *
After viewing the new Iraq torture pictures and videos...
"I expected that these pictures would be very hard on the stomach lining and it was significantly worse than anything that I had anticipated." "Take the worse case and multiply it several times over,"
says US Senator Ron Wyden.
[/QUOTE]
Shias and Sunnis must keep the chappal swinging and any terrorist/invader scum captured must be tried according to Sadrs law and convicted. Then Sadrs law must go in action, that is hang any invader or terrorist by its balls... The only problem is there are no balls
While the world condemns the evil and depravity to which these animals i.e. the US soldiers in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere have sunk to, thier families and friends are just making excuses for them.
***The photos of Iraqi detainees being humiliated can’t be argued with. But what about these soldiers behind them? Families and friends say there’s an explanation, others to blame, orders given. ***
(Excerpts from the article)
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go?
Issue of 2004-05-10
Posted 2004-05-01
There was evidence dating back to the Afghanistan war, the Ryder report said, that M.P.s had worked with intelligence operatives to “set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews”—a euphemism for breaking the will of prisoners. “Such actions generally run counter to the smooth operation of a detention facility, attempting to maintain its population in a compliant and docile state.” General Karpinski’s brigade, Ryder reported, “has not been directed to change its facility procedures to set the conditions for MI interrogations, nor participate in those interrogations.” Ryder called for the establishment of procedures to “define the role of military police soldiers . . .clearly separating the actions of the guards from those of the military intelligence personnel.” The officers running the war in Iraq were put on notice.
Ryder undercut his warning, however, by concluding that the situation had not yet reached a crisis point. Though some procedures were flawed, he said, he found “no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices.” His investigation was at best a failure and at worst a coverup.
Taguba, in his report, was polite but direct in refuting his fellow-general. “Unfortunately, many of the systemic problems that surfaced during [Ryder’s] assessment are the very same issues that are the subject of this investigation,” he wrote. “In fact, many of the abuses suffered by detainees occurred during, or near to, the time of that assessment.” The report continued, “Contrary to the findings of MG Ryder’s report, I find that personnel assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade were directed to change facility procedures to ‘set the conditions’ for MI interrogations.” Army intelligence officers, C.I.A. agents, and private contractors “actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses.”
Taguba backed up his assertion by citing evidence from sworn statements to Army C.I.D. investigators. Specialist Sabrina Harman, one of the accused M.P.s, testified that it was her job to keep detainees awake, including one hooded prisoner who was placed on a box with wires attached to his fingers, toes, and penis. She stated, “MI wanted to get them to talk. It is Graner and Frederick’s job to do things for MI and OGA to get these people to talk.”
General Taguba saved his harshest words for the military-intelligence officers and private contractors. He recommended that Colonel Thomas Pappas, the commander of one of the M.I. brigades, be reprimanded and receive non-judicial punishment, and that Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the former director of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, be relieved of duty and reprimanded. He further urged that a civilian contractor, Steven Stephanowicz, of CACI International, be fired from his Army job, reprimanded, and denied his security clearances for lying to the investigating team and allowing or ordering military policemen “who were not trained in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations by ‘setting conditions’ which were neither authorized” nor in accordance with Army regulations. “He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse,” Taguba wrote. He also recommended disciplinary action against a second CACI employee, John Israel. (A spokeswoman for CACI said that the company had “received no formal communication” from the Army about the matter.)
“I suspect,” Taguba concluded, that Pappas, Jordan, Stephanowicz, and Israel “were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib,” and strongly recommended immediate disciplinary action.
The problems inside the Army prison system in Iraq were not hidden from senior commanders. During Karpinski’s seven-month tour of duty, Taguba noted, there were at least a dozen officially reported incidents involving escapes, attempted escapes, and other serious security issues that were investigated by officers of the 800th M.P. Brigade. Some of the incidents had led to the killing or wounding of inmates and M.P.s, and resulted in a series of “lessons learned” inquiries within the brigade. Karpinski invariably approved the reports and signed orders calling for changes in day-to-day procedures. But Taguba found that she did not follow up, doing nothing to insure that the orders were carried out. Had she done so, he added, “cases of abuse may have been prevented.”
General Taguba further found that Abu Ghraib was filled beyond capacity, and that the M.P. guard force was significantly undermanned and short of resources. “This imbalance has contributed to the poor living conditions, escapes, and accountability lapses,” he wrote. There were gross differences, Taguba said, between the actual number of prisoners on hand and the number officially recorded. A lack of proper screening also meant that many innocent Iraqis were wrongly being detained—indefinitely, it seemed, in some cases. The Taguba study noted that more than sixty per cent of the civilian inmates at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be a threat to society, which should have enabled them to be released. Karpinski’s defense, Taguba said, was that her superior officers “routinely” rejected her recommendations regarding the release of such prisoners.
Karpinski was rarely seen at the prisons she was supposed to be running, Taguba wrote. He also found a wide range of administrative problems, including some that he considered “without precedent in my military career.” The soldiers, he added, were “poorly prepared and untrained . . . prior to deployment, at the mobilization site, upon arrival in theater, and throughout the mission.”
General Taguba spent more than four hours interviewing Karpinski, whom he described as extremely emotional: “What I found particularly disturbing in her testimony was her complete unwillingness to either understand or accept that many of the problems inherent in the 800th MP Brigade were caused or exacerbated by poor leadership and the refusal of her command to both establish and enforce basic standards and principles among its soldiers.”
Taguba recommended that Karpinski and seven brigade military-police officers and enlisted men be relieved of command and formally reprimanded. No criminal proceedings were suggested for Karpinski; apparently, the loss of promotion and the indignity of a public rebuke were seen as enough punishment.
After the story broke on CBS last week, the Pentagon announced that Major General Geoffrey Miller, the new head of the Iraqi prison system, had arrived in Baghdad and was on the job. He had been the commander of the Guantánamo Bay detention center. General Sanchez also authorized an investigation into possible wrongdoing by military and civilian interrogators.
As the international furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as a whole. Taguba’s report, however, amounts to an unsparing study of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture, was the priority.
The mistreatment at Abu Ghraib may have done little to further American intelligence, however. Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as a C.I.D. agent, told me that the use of force or humiliation with prisoners is invariably counterproductive. “They’ll tell you what you want to hear, truth or no truth,” Rowell said. “‘You can flog me until I tell you what I know you want me to say.’ You don’t get righteous information.”
Under the fourth Geneva convention, an occupying power can jail civilians who pose an “imperative” security threat, but it must establish a regular procedure for insuring that only civilians who remain a genuine security threat be kept imprisoned. Prisoners have the right to appeal any internment decision and have their cases reviewed. Human Rights Watch complained to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that civilians in Iraq remained in custody month after month with no charges brought against them. Abu Ghraib had become, in effect, another Guantánamo.
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*Originally posted by Stu: *
nice signature there BTW Malik, it sounds familiar for some reason.
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As spoon said what exactly is that supposed to mean??
Well put Stu. I understand completely...
Words in and of themselves mean nothing and prove nothing, but can delute their meaning when used indiscriminately.
This is a fight between good and evil. I have been saying this for a long time, now hopefully more and more people will see it for what it is.
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*Originally posted by Ohioguy: *
Well put Stu. I understand completely...
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Birds of a feather
Re: Who ordered 'shock and awe'? - The source of debauchery
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Originally posted by Malik73: *
*...the moral debauchery came down the chain of command from Washington
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Some nations are very sick but don't see that way... A chappal has proven to be quite a cure...
Talking about words. As this article says:-
**Dehumanizing language has deliberately been employed to describe all those who oppose the United States. **
The search for the "root causes" of the depravity and pure evil of the American war criminals in Iraq goes on...
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Imdad Ali: *
This is a fight between good and evil. I have been saying this for a long time, now hopefully more and more people will see it for what it is.
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YEs the gupshup community and world can quite clearly see the evilness of amerikka it is clear as daylight.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by ak47: *
YEs the gupshup community and world can quite clearly see the evilness of amerikka it is clear as daylight.
[/QUOTE]
You should make a film about it, or better yet a musical.
The picture clearly demonstrates the mindset of the American forces before the combat operation began; the US had intended to literally ‘screwEIraq from the very beginning. As the obscene pictures depicting sexual abuse, torture and execution of the Iraqi prisoners continues to surface it only confirms the scale of the horror, obscenity, deceit, arrogance and the sheer hypocrisy of this war!
Then the US has the gall to expect the Arabs and Muslims to condemn the human rights violation of Saddam Hussein regime but simultaneously expects the US forces to be excused for the same behaviour! Furthermore, one of the justifications for the carnage in Iraq was Saddam violation of human rights, but yet it was the US that has been doing the real violation and much more en masse!
Abu Gharib EA Product of the War on Terror
No WMD`S then the tune changed to, this war was about human rights and getting rid of saddam they said.
The problem with people who lie like the amerikkan government is that they have to make up 100 more lies to cover up thier original lie!
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by underthedome: *
You should make a film about it, or better yet a musical.
[/QUOTE]
Great idea, UTD. It can dehumanize Amerians with snappy Gershwin tunes filled with lyrics that prove them to be the evil characters in history that they are. It might not go over big in the US market but is sure to popular where resentment runs high.
sigh It gets worse and worse. This is how they allegedly treated one Iraqi, one human being… when it was time for Maghrib. The man was engaged, broke it off with his fiance - because “I felt I couldn’t get my dignity back”.
‘They abused me and stole my dignity’]('They abused me and stole my dignity' | World news | The Guardian)
…] When the evening call to prayer sounded at dusk, Mr al-Rawi was taken out of the cell. “They untied my hands and took off all my clothes, including my underwear,” he said.
He was then made to stand on a box with his hands on his hooded head. “I stood like this for an hour, or an hour and a quarter,” he said. “Then some American soldiers came and they were laughing and some were beating me. They were beating me on my back and my legs. They were beating and laughing,” he said.
“I couldn’t bear it and then I fell from the box against the wall and then on to the ground.” At this point they removed his hood. “They were talking and then one of them started to urinate on me. Then they started to drop cold water on me.”
Well, might as well post the other articles.
1,800 new pictures add to US disgust, Dan Glaister and Julian Borger, The Guardian, 13 May 2004
Emasculating Arabia, Jonathan Raban, The Guardian, 13 May 2004
How ironic…
Torture worse than under Saddam, says victim
Former Abu Ghraib inmate describes torture by US troops and his horror at photographs showing him naked and humiliated
[thumb=H]0,124389,008090_9385776.JPG[/thumb]
TWO weeks ago Saddam Salah al-Rawi was watching television with his mother at their home in Rawa, western Iraq, when a photograph flashed up on the screen. It was the picture that outraged the Islamic world, the apotheosis of Muslim humiliation — Lynndie England, cigarette in mouth, pointing at the genitals of naked and hooded Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison.
“My mother asked me, ‘Did they torture you like that when you were in Abu Ghraib?’ ” Mr al-Rawi, 29, said. “I told her, ‘No — not like that’. Then I went to my room, closed the door and began to cry. I wished I was dead when I saw that picture.”
Mr al-Rawi said that he was the second in that line of naked prisoners. In testimony he gave to the Human Rights Organisation for Iraq yesterday, backed by documentary evidence and a wealth of detail, he challenged the Pentagon’s claim that the guards at the centre of the abuse allegations were acting on their own initiative, and described a regime in which torture, including electrocution, beating and rape, was an integral part of interrogation procedure.
A former member of Saddam Hussein’s elite Special Republican Guard, Mr al- Rawi was imprisoned in 1999 for three years in Abu Ghraib for insulting Saddam’s rule during an argument with a security official.
After his release, he said, he became a civilian driver. On November 29 last year, he was arrested in Baghdad by Iraqi police as a suspected insurgent and passed to the Americans. On December 1 he was transferred to Abu Ghraib, Tier 1A, the high-security wing for suspected insurgents.
“My tragedy started there,” he stated. He was registered as prisoner 200144, and dragged to Cell 42. The beatings began as soon as he had been hooded and issued his orange prison overalls.
That first evening, just after sunset prayers, he was taken into the hallway of Tier 1A, stripped and made to stand on a wicker box for more than an hour, hands on his head. A group of American soldiers then began jeering and beating him. Among them were men whose names he later grew to recognise.
“Abu Hamed was the Egyptian interpreter,” Mr al-Rawi said, pointing to another of the infamous photographs in which a fat uniformed soldier points to a tangle of naked prisoners. “He was even worse than the Americans.”
**Mr al-Rawi said that he was kicked and punched until he collapsed. A soldier urinated on him. **
He had his hood removed. The guards around him included Lynndie England, who he can identify by face but not by name; a second female soldier; and three men, whom he names as “Nicolae”, “Sergeant Pear” and “Sergeant Joiner”.
Mr al-Rawi spent nearly three months in Tier 1A. After the first two days of beating and humiliation, he was put in solitary confinement in a cell known as “the press”. It had no windows. For 16 days, 23 hours a day, he said, he was manacled naked in a sitting position by his feet and hands to a barred grille by the door. A stereo system blasted music at him non-stop to keep him awake, and the light was permanently on. One hour was allowed for eating and sleeping.
He said that he was returned to Cell 42 for a further three months, and subjected to intensive interrogation for up to four hours at a time. He said that it was led by a man he names as “Carlos”, who was accompanied by two women, “Sergeant Chris” and “Mrs Liz”.
Occasionally other men were present, including a military intelligence officer with a small beard named “Steven”.
**The torture included beatings, sleep deprivation and electrocution, and he believes it was authorised by “Steven”.
“They doused me with cold water and made me stand in front of the freezing air- conditioning. Then they strapped me to a metal chair. They touched me with a rod all over my body that shocked me until I collapsed, urinating.” **
In classic good-cop, bad-cop style, the women would offer him cigarettes and wash his face between interrogations. Mr al-Rawi was so broken that he admitted to anything.
“‘Are you an Ansar al-Islam supporter?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘Are you part of Muhammad’s Army?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘Are you with al-Zarqawi and al-Qaeda?’ ‘I’m his driver!’ I just wanted them to leave me alone and stop the torture. I wanted them to shoot me.”
**Mr al-Rawi, who said that he was threatened with sodomy, claims to have seen an intelligence officer named “Schneider” rape a girl from Basra in the corridor of Tier 1A. He also accuses “Nicolae” of a double rape. **
Broken both psychologically and physically, his jaw infected from two teeth smashed in an interrogation, Mr al-Rawi was eventually taken to hospital in Abu Ghraib, and released on March 28. His release form states that no further investigation into his case is required.
Persuaded by a cousin to give his testimony to the Human Rights Organisation, Mr al-Rawi is succinct comparing his experiences of Abu Ghraib under Saddam Hussein’s and American control.
**“I have been tortured by both sides. Saddam’s torture was 1 per cent of the American’s 100 per cent,” he said.
“I spent three years in the prison under Saddam. When released I was psychologically OK — I forgot it all. I spent four months in Abu Ghraib under the Americans. I shout in my sleep. My engagement has fallen through. I can’t marry because of my state of mind.
“I’m upset, depressed. I want the guilty soldiers tried so that the torture for those arrested after me is stopped.”**
just makes it clear abt to whome we ‘owe our allegiance’
:disgust:
*“I have been tortured by both sides. Saddam’s torture was 1 per cent of the American’s 100 per cent,” he said. *
Is it any wonder then that US lawmakers are now saying that the latest pictures/videos of American's torturing Iraqi's are 10 times worse than those published so far.