Reply #126: STANDUPGUY - I WILL NOW DEBUNK YOUR CONCEPT INSTANTLY!!!! [View All]

The * admin would have never even responded to this (and indeed they tried to supress it) were it not for images:

"Both the President and his Pentagon chief claimed to be "shocked" or "disgusted" by the forms a torture system took – by its look. Yes, they had been informed of what had happened at Abu Ghraib prison, but those, after all, were just words, months of words. The difference was the images on television and in the press. "We saw the pictures," said the President. "It is the photographs that gives one the vivid realization of what actually took place," said his secretary of defense. "Words don't do it. The words that there were abuses, that it was cruel, that it was inhumane, all of which is true, that it was blatant, you read that and it's one thing. You see the photographs and you get a sense of it, and you cannot help but be outraged."

That is in itself a kind of confession, if you consider it for a moment. You cannot help but be outraged. All those previous months from mid-January 2004 on, when he and his president assumedly only knew about the "words" (grim enough certainly in General Taguba's report), when they were, in the pungent phrase of Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, "apprised orally," our secretary of defense and our President could evidently "help but be outraged." And that tells us a great deal.

They could, it seems, practice "deniability" not only on us but on themselves. Human beings are as capable of this as they are of turning into animals and torturing other human beings. But whatever deceptions they may have practiced on themselves, the simple fact is that the penal system they set up was a torture system.

The Bush administration, while speaking loudly of bringing its version of democracy to the Middle East, was also eager, as Adam Hochschild wrote for Tomdispatch many months ago, to bring the developing "age of human rights" to a speedy end in the pursuit of what former CIA director and enthusiastic neocon James Woolsey liked to call "World War IV," which was imagined, like the Cold War, as a many decades long slog to victory in which only the toughest, those willing to wield brute power and commit the most difficult acts, would survive."

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18645