General suggests Iraq abuses at jail were encouraged

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/international/middleeast/02ABUS.html

WASHINGTON, May 1 — The Army Reserve general whose military police officers were photographed as they mistreated Iraqi prisoners said Saturday that she had been "sickened" by the pictures and had known nothing about the sexual humiliation and other abuse until weeks later.

But the officer, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski of the 800th Military Police Brigade, said the special high-security cellblock at the Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, where the abuses took place had been under the tight control of a separate group of military intelligence officers who had so far avoided any public blame.

In her first public comments about the brutality — which drew wide attention and condemnation after photographs documenting it were broadcast Wednesday night by CBS News — General Karpinski said that while the reservists involved were "bad people" and deserved punishment, she suspected they were acting with the encouragement, if not at the direction, of military intelligence units that ran the special cellblock used for interrogation.

Speaking in a telephone interview from her home in South Carolina, the general said military commanders in Iraq were trying to shift the blame exclusively to her and the reservists.

"We're disposable," she said of the military's attitude toward reservists. "Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame? They want to put this on the M.P.'s and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it's not going to go away."
<snip>

She said repeatedly in the interview that she was not defending the actions of the reservists who took part in the brutality, who were part of her command. She said that when she was first presented with the photographs of the abuse in January, they "sickened me."

"I put my head down because I really thought I was going to throw up," she said. "It was awful. My immediate reaction was: These are bad people, because their faces revealed how much pleasure they felt at this."
<more>

And for some info on the scope of the potential abuse:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/jail-a22.shtml

18,000 Iraqis detained being help illegally

it's true.

Beats jumbo shrimp any day.

"anything goes." There is no more regard for civil rights, human rights, prisoner of war rights, the US Constitution, the World Court. The message has been sent loud and clear (by our illegal, unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation to begin with) that our soldiers could engage in any kind of behavior they want to. This nation would stand behind you. Now where do you think they get that idea?

1. Iraq invasion
2. Gitmo
3. Cheney energy commission
4. Lying about Medicare and bribing people to vote for it.
5. ENRON
6. Showing Uday and Qusay photos and Saddams photos
7. Aerial bombing civilian neighborhoods
8. 'You are either with us or against us"
....you ad the rest.

BushSpeak. BushThink. He is responsible.


Is it time for him to focus on gay marriage again?

That's where the buck stops. That's where the buck is supposed to stop. In Japan, the highest-ranking person takes the fall. That's the honorable thing. There is no honor here. As they say - no honor among thieves.

Maybe call that "point 0".

You are right.

<But she said she did not visit Cellblock 1A, in keeping with the wishes of military intelligence officers who, she said, worried that unnecessary visits might interfere with their interrogations of Iraqis.>

drip, drip, drip.....every hour a tad more info. :eyes:

to the internecine fight. May it lead to the truth.

There is no unit cohesion anymore. The U.S. military is a motley combination of reservists, active duty and mercenaries.

The three different groups don't have much in common with one another other than wanting to stay alive while "in theater." I don't blame the reserve general for ratting out the MIs and contractors here. She'd better watch her back, though.

She has very little to lose.

.

I have no proof of this only a hunch.

The Courts Martial will certainly lay the blame. As long as the press gets some kind of access. I can't believe they are going to shut up that civilian attorney.

The US government employed corporate security contractors, who supplied mercenaries skilled in human degradation and torture, to train US Troops.

But keep posting your insights about the military, Tinoire.

Very informative, thanks-

The CIA is so entrenched in Military Intel that only an act of God could get them out of there. You'd have to totally restructure the entire DOD to change that. All they do is go through palliative motions, restructure, reshuffle and make grand announcements but nothing ever really changes.

6 little reservists didn't dream up those horrors, deliberately calculated to humiliate the entire Arab people, on their own.

The other thing is, ask yourself why the powers that be are so willing to toss a Brigadier General out along with the 6 lower-ranking Reservists. Normally, they'll toss out a few Senior NCOs and a Captain. But a Brigadier General would only be tossed out to protect much bigger fish & stem a much bigger scandal.

Check these out. I expect more in the coming weeks...

Thank you for the opportunity to research. I take this so much for granted that it didn't cross my mind there could be any doubt of this.

This is going to get real ugly and real soon because no one wants to be the fall guy for something as disgusting to the world as this. We should probably start taking bets as to whom they'll toss out next ;)

====

The naming of Maj. Gen. George Fay, of the Army Intelligence and Security Command, to review the methods and procedures used in questioning Iraqi prisoners represents a widening of the probe into conditions at Abu Ghraib, a prison 25 miles outside of Baghdad that was notorious for torture and executions under the government of former president Saddam Hussein.

A spokesman for the CIA said Saturday that its inspector general is working with the Pentagon to determine if the CIA was involved in the abuses, which have drawn international attention.

"We are opposed to abusing prisoners in Iraq, and we have found no direct evidence connecting CIA personnel with incidents" of abuse, the spokesman said.

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/nation/8572404.htm


====

Maj.-Gen. Taguba said soldiers were directed to "set the conditions" for military intelligence interrogations. Army intelligence officers, CIA agents and private contractors "actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favourable interrogation of witnesses," he reported, according to The New Yorker.

http://www.canada.com/ottawa/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=b2a25288-04a2-4fd9-bebd-6cbf325a9374

---

<snip>

The suggestion by Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski that the reservists acted at the behest of military intelligence officers appears largely supported in a still-classified Army report on prison conditions in Iraq that documented many of the worst abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, including the sexual humiliation of prisoners.

The New Yorker magazine said in its new edition that the report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba found that reservist military police at the prison were urged by Army military officers and CIA agents to “set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses.”

<snip>

In a phone interview from her home in South Carolina in which she offered her first public comments about the growing international furor over the abuse of the Iraq detainees, Karpinski said the special high-security cellblock at Abu Ghraib had been under the direct control of Army intelligence officers, not the reservists under her command.


She said that while the reservists involved in the abuses were “bad people” who deserved punishment, she suspected that they were acting with the encouragement, if not at the direction, of military intelligence units that ran the special cellblock used for interrogation. She said that CIA employees often joined in the interrogations at the prison, although she said she did not know if they had unrestricted access to the cellblock.

<snip>

She estimated that the floor space of the two-story cellblock was only about 60 feet by 20 feet, and that military intelligence officers were in and out of the cellblock “24 hours a day,” often to escort prisoners to and from an interrogation center away from the prison cells.


“They were in there at 2 in the morning, they were there at 4 in the afternoon,” said Karpinski, who arrived in Iraq last June and was the only woman to hold a command in the war zone. “This was no 9-to-5 job.”


She said that CIA employees often participated in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, one of Iraq’s most notorious prisons during the rule of Saddam Hussein.

<snip>

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?section=WORLD&oid=50186


====
===

The following is an excerpt from FOX News Sunday, May 2, 2004.


CHRIS WALLACE, HOST, FOX NEWS SUNDAY: Well, one year and one day after President Bush declared the end of major combat in Iraq, we are joined now by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers.

<snip>

WALLACE: All right. Let's talk about something a lot less happy, and those are those terrible pictures that we all saw this week of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. We have some of the pictures on the screen.

The U.S. military brought charges in March against six soldiers, but there are press accounts today of an internal Army report that alleges that it went a lot higher than just six Army Reservists, that military intelligence officers and CIA agents urged the troops of the prison, quote, "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses."

General, that Army report was completed back in February. Is it true?

MYERS: It's working its way to me. I have not seen it yet. Setting physical and mental conditions for interrogation, by itself, obviously that's something you do. But one thing we don't do is we don't torture.

It's interesting that the folks that turned the people in that we saw, the perpetrators of those acts that we see in the pictures, were soldiers, actually.

<snip>

WALLACE: Well, I want to ask you about that last point. If you find that anyone higher up in the chain of command in the Army reservists who are in control of that prison, or any of these military intelligence officers or CIA agents were involved in encouraging specifically these kinds of abuses, will they also face criminal charges?

MYERS: This is unacceptable behavior, and we don't — I mean, the American people get it. We get it. You look at the pictures, you know this is not something that anybody would condone, no matter what your interrogation objectives were.

And clearly, we have very high standards in the Department of Defense, perhaps the highest of any organization in the world, and we police ourselves very well, I think. This is unacceptable behavior.

<snip>

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,118766,00.html

I'm interested in "WHO" ordered the perps to do it.

Seeing that Wolf and Rumy visited the prison during that time.

The order, whether it was CIA or private contractors had to come from somewhere.

These things were all studied and thought out in advance. Plus we got quite a few last minute pointers from our friends the Israelis when we sent officers down there to study Jenin-style tactics and train.

No one person sat and dreamed up this horrific scenario and ordered its implementation. This information is contained in manuals based on in-depth area studies of the culture. All any agent has to do is flip through encyclopedic reference manuals and use his imagination from there.

No orders + Standard practice -> plausible deniability.

We'll never find orders signed by Tenet or Rumsefeld or any of them saying "do this, try this". It's all left to the agents imagination after his/her research in carefully compiled manuals listing the taboos of the culture.

This is why 17 MI NCOs and Officers were whisked out of there before this 7 were tossed to the wolves. The CIA, DIA and other agencies we won't mention just vanish for a while.. The might eventually single out a few people, even CIA people (you know, some slug they don't really like anyway) and make them new fall guys but the problem is the entire culture, their entire SOP. There are no orders because this is all standard, accepted practice.

Just like the Nazis... It was all "understood" and no specific orders given which is why they felt safe enough when it came to being tried. Never had they imagined that people would convene a special court and write new laws to fry their ass.

Everybody's following orders but no one's ever really giving them. The only order on record was is Hitler's Bush's & Blair's order to "Do what it takes".

"We stand firm," he declared. "We will do what it takes to win this struggle. We will not yield. We will not back down

If we ever find who gave the order, I'll be shocked. Really shocked.

Think Nuremburg Trial, where the blame is rightfully placed.

Crimes against Humanity are THAT BIG!

I've been making that point all week.

Bush can exemt himself and US soldiers from War Crimes Tribunals- ain't gonna work.

As soon as they can go after us, they will and the world will write whatever laws, create whatever courts it takes to hang their sorry necks.

Sometimes the finger-pointing can backfire. So now they're pinning the entire blame on General Karpinski. I read on another thread that she considered herself a "scapegoat". Well, let's hope she doesn't go down without a fight. Let's hope she names names.

That's the problem with using people as targets: when they have nothing to lose, they talk.

I'm willing to bet money that mercenaries will come up.

First, you had Chip Frederick passing the buck along to Karpinski. Now she's pointing the finger at some civilian contractors. When we find out who they are, they will also attempt to pass the buck. Those of us paying attention will get more and more of the real story.

about outsourcing interrogation duties to civilian contractors, in order to
dodge the military's rules against torture.

but I can't remember the other one.

WTF???
~snip~
Questions over the role that private U.S. companies played at the prison probably will renew debate in the United States over the use of military contractors in Iraq.

In an effort to cut costs, the Pentagon has increasingly promoted the use of private contractors to perform a variety of roles traditionally carried out by troops.

Private companies in Iraq perform tasks ranging from cooking meals and delivering mail to protecting U.S. civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III.

At Abu Ghraib, CACI conducted interrogations and a second U.S. company, San Diego-based Titan Corp., provided interpreters, industry and military sources said.
~snip~
lots more:
http://www.sanmateocountytimes.com/Stories/0,1413,87~11268~2120878,00.html

Let's see thieves fall out. Let's give 'em whistles to blow. Let's hear it.

I was under the impression she was more of an MP, and as such, occasionally in charge of certain MI units (an arrangement in the Reserves which I frankly never understood).

Was she herself MI or MP who had been in charge of MI? This makes a difference because MI has a way of telling MPs, regardless of rank, that they have "no need to know" and the MPs in charge have absolutely no recourse.

There's something really rotten brewing. I wonder how much sleep Tenet is getting these days ;)

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact

....

The 372nd’s abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine—a fact of Army life that the soldiers felt no need to hide. On April 9th, at an Article 32 hearing (the military equivalent of a grand jury) in the case against Sergeant Frederick, at Camp Victory, near Baghdad, one of the witnesses, Specialist Matthew Wisdom, an M.P., told the courtroom what happened when he and other soldiers delivered seven prisoners, hooded and bound, to the so-called “hard site” at Abu Ghraib—seven tiers of cells where the inmates who were considered the most dangerous were housed. The men had been accused of starting a riot in another section of the prison. Wisdom said:

SFC Snider grabbed my prisoner and threw him into a pile. . . . I do not think it was right to put them in a pile. I saw SSG Frederic, SGT Davis and CPL Graner walking around the pile hitting the prisoners. I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its ribcage. The prisoner was no danger to SSG Frederick. . . . I left after that.


When he returned later, Wisdom testified:

I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open. I thought I should just get out of there. I didn’t think it was right . . . I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.” I heard PFC England shout out, “He’s getting hard.”

Wisdom testified that he told his superiors what had happened, and assumed that “the issue was taken care of.” He said, “I just didn’t want to be part of anything that looked criminal.”

The abuses became public because of the outrage of Specialist Joseph M. Darby, an M.P. whose role emerged during the Article 32 hearing against Chip Frederick. A government witness, Special Agent Scott Bobeck, who is a member of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, or C.I.D., told the court, according to an abridged transcript made available to me, “The investigation started after SPC Darby . . . got a CD from CPL Graner. . . . He came across pictures of naked detainees.” Bobeck said that Darby had “initially put an anonymous letter under our door, then he later came forward and gave a sworn statement. He felt very bad about it and thought it was very wrong.”

Questioned further, the Army investigator said that Frederick and his colleagues had not been given any “training guidelines” that he was aware of. The M.P.s in the 372nd had been assigned to routine traffic and police duties upon their arrival in Iraq, in the spring of 2003. In October of 2003, the 372nd was ordered to prison-guard duty at Abu Ghraib. Frederick, at thirty-seven, was far older than his colleagues, and was a natural leader; he had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of Corrections. Bobeck explained:

What I got is that SSG Frederick and CPL Graner were road M.P.s and were put in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things were supposed to be run.


Bobeck also testified that witnesses had said that Frederick, on one occasion, “had punched a detainee in the chest so hard that the detainee almost went into cardiac arrest.”

At the Article 32 hearing, the Army informed Frederick and his attorneys, Captain Robert Shuck, an Army lawyer, and Gary Myers, a civilian, that two dozen witnesses they had sought, including General Karpinski and all of Frederick’s co-defendants, would not appear. Some had been excused after exercising their Fifth Amendment right; others were deemed to be too far away from the courtroom. “The purpose of an Article 32 hearing is for us to engage witnesses and discover facts,” Gary Myers told me. “We ended up with a c.i.d. agent and no alleged victims to examine.” After the hearing, the presiding investigative officer ruled that there was sufficient evidence to convene a court-martial against Frederick.

Myers, who was one of the military defense attorneys in the My Lai prosecutions of the nineteen-seventies, told me that his client’s defense will be that he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in particular, the directions of military intelligence. He said, “Do you really think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk was to have them walk around nude?”

In letters and e-mails to family members, Frederick repeatedly noted that the military-intelligence teams, which included C.I.A. officers and linguists and interrogation specialists from private defense contractors, were the dominant force inside Abu Ghraib. In a letter written in January, he said:

I questioned some of the things that I saw . . . such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell—and the answer I got was, “This is how military intelligence (MI) wants it done.” . . . . MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days.


The military-intelligence officers have “encouraged and told us, ‘Great job,’ they were now getting positive results and information,” Frederick wrote. “CID has been present when the military working dogs were used to intimidate prisoners at MI’s request.” At one point, Frederick told his family, he pulled aside his superior officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Phillabaum, the commander of the 320th M.P. Battalion, and asked about the mistreatment of prisoners. “His reply was ‘Don’t worry about it.’”
<snip>>

The mistreatment at Abu Ghraib may have done little to further American intelligence....the use of force or humiliation with prisoners is invariably counterproductive.
<more>

"I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open."

Not "his mouth open" - "its mouth open".

"I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its ribcage"

is indicative of the mindset of these monsters. Agreed, this one sentence speaks volumes. "It" leaped right off the page.

instead of the lame "suggests"!

What can we expect from a newspaper that was among the strongest cheerleaders for this war!

.

They were encouraged to do the tortures and humiliation of the prisoners.

This story is far from over and gaining legs quickly.

How much you want to bet the MI guys were under direct pressure from Ashcroft to find out some links between Saddam and Osama and 911.

- the search for a connection. That and pursuing the Chalabi revenge agenda.

Bush/Cheney would like nothing better than another attack on American soil as an excuse to justify nuking Iraq and declaring ML. If this atrocity has been going on since last Sept., no wonder Ridge was so vocal about the high terror threat level during the holidays.

Bush/Cheney's minions were busy lighting the fuse.

what is the chain of command? Serious question, I have no idea.

talked about this when Blair was in the states a few weeks ago.

immediately to condemn rather than try and buy time with alleged and etc. And have their surrogates out saying the photos are fake and etc.

They reported it up the chain of command all the way to Bush and Blair. That would explain the meeting between Bush and Blair.

I am sure they have been busy directing the paper shredding themselves. But here is the 64 thousand dollar question.

What if any crimes took place after they knew. This would make them complicit would it not?

This isn't like some marines going trigger happy in the field; this happened in a U.S. military prison, repeatedly, for months on end, publicly, with photos taken. This has to go right to the top.

and leaked by whom?

But I have seen the photos. As to who took them:

- Perhaps they were taken by the 'bad apples' we are hearing about, and that's that. If so, that still shows that they weren't particularly concerned about being caught, which would imply to me that higher ups were not communicating any sense that this was wrong, and quite likely encouraging it.

- Perhaps some 'whistle-blower' types took and released the photos, although lots had people smiling for the camera, so the whistle-blower would have had to have turned against the behavior.

- Perhaps the spooks wanted photos taken and selectively leaked, to demoralize the Iraqi resistance. If so, it seems to have backfired.

We have probably only seen a small proportion of the photos that exist. I have heard many more are circulating on the internet, including porn sites, but I prefer not to try to verify that claim.

This so bad on so many levels.

If there was ever any shred of a chance at "success" in Iraq, it's gone now.

I now think we need to get the fuck out right now. It's over. It's all over.

...best we may be able to do is ameliorate the impact of the re- Ba'athification that seems to be the only way the US sees as the way to go (teachers, civil servants, middle class, military).

is that the military and the press have known about this for months! Yet the media only began discussing the story when the photos emerged, apparently on internet porn sites.

In other words, there seems to be no whistleblower. If some of the participants hadn't been sick and stupid enough to put these photos on the internet - bragging about them! - then the public would never have known about this.

If the commander in chief didn't know about this months ago, then why not? Why wasn't he told? And if he knew, why is he pretending it is such a shock to him?! Either way he is lying.

Ironic isn't it ? They want to censor all kinds of shit, and the torture photos that SINK them show up on a porn site.

Porn as truth, I guess.

All he has to do is call Mel Gibson in for some help. He'll put them in his next movie, and the fundies will flock to it in true devotion.

I think his name is SPC Darby. He was given a CD-Rom (they were passing them around out of pride) and turned them in. His words were something along the line of "This is wrong".

Of course by then, the photos had already been mailed to friends around the world some of whom obligedgly placed them on S&M & WarSexPorn sites. Just how many CDs were floating around one has to wonder!

---

While the source of the British photographs remains anonymous and difficult to authenticate, the pictures from Abu Ghraib came from an outraged military policeman - Specialist Joseph M. Darby - who was given a CD containing pictures of the naked and abused Iraqis by one of those who is facing prosecution. Darby penned an anonymous complaint and attached the CD. He later came forward to give evidence against his colleagues.

Darby was not alone in having become aware of abuse at the hands of British and US forces. As early as last summer, researchers for Amnesty International had began picking up worrying allegations of torture and killings within the then still chaotic system for the detention of Iraqis. These claims, Amnesty says, have persisted despite its own report warning the occupying powers of their obligations under the Geneva Conventions.

It was not only Amnesty that was hearing reports of abuse. Over the past six months, as has now become clear, a number of warnings were being sounded about abuse by allied soldiers. And they were warnings the coalition forces appear to have ignored until this year.

By November last year dark rumours of violence and sexual abuse were in circulation among Iraqis, human rights groups and the media - many of them impossible to verify. But some should have been easy to check out, not least those pointing to Abu Ghraib and the persistent claims of abuses within its walls.

<snip>

But if these allegations now seem chillingly credible in the light of the photographs, more serious allegations have emerged from Abu Ghraib that remain impossible to establish - not least allegations of rape involving both male and female detainees.

US military investigators are examining one case of male rape but last year allegations emerged in an anonymous letter widely disseminated among Iraqis that US soldiers had also raped women - claims that were being circulated by Iraqi rebels to foster animosity against coalition forces.

<snip>

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1208192,00.html

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1208192,00.html

Bush has supposedly put tremendous pressure on all intelligence agencies in the past year to find something, anything in the way of WMD in Iraq. The torture and humiliation of these prisoners was apparently done to punish those who refused to talk, or to scare others into telling all they knew. Is it possible that the Bush administration put so much pressure on military intelligence and the CIA that they were up to doing anything to get evidence to support Bush's invasion? Could it all boil down to the WMD issue again?

and he'll stop at nothing to regain his creditability. He'd even give Cheney a little head if he thought it would change things.

.

it is no wonder that our "troops" might behave illegally and immorally. WMD's! Wake up and smell the oil.

Wouldn't be the least bit surprised.

Servicemen on Death Row; 6 killers await as military justice crawls


By THOMAS M. DeFRANK
Daily News Washington Bureau Chief

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=17&did=300


It's called the special housing unit at a place known as The Castle. But for the six soldiers on the military's Death Row at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., life is no fairy tale.

Despite intense public and media interest in Timothy McVeigh's execution, little attention has been paid to the six condemned soldiers incarcerated within the pale yellow-and-white walls of the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks.

One of those convicted murderers is in the last stages of a 12-year appeals process that may end with the first execution by the armed forces in more than 40 years.

HERE ARE A FEW OF THE MOST SENILE

I CALLED THIS SHIT BACK IN OCT. HARDLY ANYONE HERE SAW ANYTHING WRONG WITH A "little" TORTURE.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=192572#193487

Very Disturbing!

Though this is about British soldiers, it sounds like torture of Iraqis has been epidemic. I feel very disgusted beyond words. This country has gone to hell. :cry:


DWolfman

But a lot of them were trolls. Look how many have been banned.

...condoning, excusing, denying, justifying....is the twisted logic of freepers and their ilk.

Notice how all the war apologists have slinkered off?

The Occupation apologists? Not a peep- hiding out in GD2004 amusing themselves with polls and still trying to brow-beat people.

Just like when the war started. There were people here actually bitching about how "inconvenienced" they were by the anti-war protest, shilled for and excused the war. As the horrors became known, they started slinkering off, many never to be seen again.

Then the slew of School of the Americas & NED apologists with their wailing that "the US does not teach torture, does not torture". They're awfully quiet now. You don't see them in LBN or in any of these horror-related threads.

Then the slew of Langley spooks that descended en masse saying that International ANSWER was a communist organization out to destroy the US and our "freedoms". They were short-lived too. DUers as a whole kicked their asses out of here.

Nope, it's pretty quiet lately. Nobody wants to admit that they were WRONG! WRONG to support such evil and to be apologists for it!

And then of course we have the crowd that feels that all these little brown people hate the freedom of the 2 only democracies in the world. Awfully quiet too.

Let's just hope they'll all have the decency to shut up for a long, a very long time because pictures expose all their words as lies, shilling and apologetics.

I just noticed your timestamp, Tinoire. I thought I was the only one up til 3 last night. Lots of midnight oil I suppose..:toast:



DWolfman

You know how addictive this place can get... So much news to keep up with.

My theory has always been that we can catch up on our sleep when we're dead ;)

:toast:

according to Karpinski? And does the CIA report back to Tenet? And who's balls does Tenet lick? Are the square dots connected?
You got it baby!!

because this story REEKS of a cover-up.

====


In a letter earlier this year, Frederick wrote, “I questioned some of the things that I saw.” He described “such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell.” He added, “The answer I got was, ‘This is how military intelligence wants it done.”’Prisoners were beaten and threatened with rape, electrocution and dog attacks, witnesses told Army investigators, according to the report obtained by The New Yorker. Much of the abuse was sexual, with prisoners often kept naked and forced to perform simulated and real sex acts, witnesses testified. Hersh notes that such degradations, while deeply offensive in any culture, are particularly humiliating to Arabs because Islamic law and culture so strongly condemn nudity and homosexuality.


<snip>

General Karpinski said in the interview that the special cellblock, known as 1A, was one of about two dozen cellblocks in the large prison complex and was essentially off limits to soldiers who were not part of the interrogations, including virtually all of the military police under her command at Abu Ghraib.

<snip>


General Karpinski noted that one of the photographs of abused prisoners also showed the legs of 16 American soldiers — the photograph was cropped so that their upper bodies could not be seen — "and that tells you that clearly other people were participating, because I didn't have 16 people assigned to that cellblock."

<snip>

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?section=WORLD&oid=50186

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/international/middleeast/02ABUS.html?pagewanted=2

Something here is rotten.

I doubt Congress will do anything.

Most Repuke ChickenHawks have alaways been "JOCK SNIFFERS FOR THE MILITARY" (A. COULTER'S little contribution to the English Language)