Ex-prisoner on U.S. torture: 'I never saw such a thing under Saddam'

That is a huge part of the story that is getting lost here. These people were caught up in sweeps looking for insurgents and in instances like Mr. Saleh. That scumbag Inhofe saying in front of America that they were criminals and terrorists being "abused" is DISGUSTING! What a puke...

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you may want to put in a /sarcasm tag.

If you meant what you said, that's an incredibly racist comment.

a Frankenstein that will come to haunt us one day.

Like the abused child that grows up and abuses others. These atrocious crimes will not wash from the memory easily.

http://www.nyjournalnews.com/newsroom/051204/b0112shoshana.html

Ex-POW says he fared better than jailed Iraqis

By JENNIFER WEIL
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: May 12, 2004)

WEST NYACK — Shoshana Johnson said her treatment at the hands of her Iraqi captors was better than the humiliation and abuse shown being committed by the U.S. service members in recent pictures.

"It really hurts to think that our soldiers would do something like this," Johnson said yesterday during an event to create teddy bears for children of service members. "I was treated very humanely and of course, as Americans, we all assume that the same is done for them. I hope everybody realizes that most soldiers are not like this."

The former Army specialist, who was captured at the same time as Pfc. Jessica Lynch, said that while she was not mistreated in her 22 days as a prisoner of war, her captors did not always follow the Geneva Conventions.

"Do I expect the average Iraqi to know every niche of the Geneva Convention? No. But I was treated humanely."

Johnson explained that she received medical care while she was held.

"That's what I was talking about being treated humanely," said Johnson, who was shot in both ankles. "The U.S. doctors said if they hadn't operated on me, I would have lost my legs."

..more..

Just last year I never thought I'd see reports that the US is treating their prisoners worse then some third world country is treating ours. I really wish I could vote this election.

Oh, thats right, they will be our neighbors and co-workers. I just can't wait.

Don

They normally went on their military career. One of them is a politician for forty years : Le Pen.

But many soldiers of the draft, witnesses of tortures (rarely they had to torture, their officers wasn't confident enough in their "capabilities" and "discretion"), came back home and needed a very long time to be right with themselves.

How did you come up with that leap? The handful of people that humiliated the prisoners are going to be in Kansas making little rocks out of big rocks. Unless you are in prison with them they won't be your "neighbors and co-workers."

there are currently more than 25 investigations looking into abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan prisoner treatment. Now where would one get the "just a handful" talking point from ?

All of that miserable bastard's people too - the "handful" of torturers in charge.

FBI AGENTS And kick the shit out of a Black or Brown man on the streets of Amerika.

They will use their clubs on Black Men like the Rodney King Pinata Party.

I swear it is bad news after bad news, ...that just keeps building up into one giant avalanch. I thought Bush was bad before but now he just f*d up, he is in the levels of being the worst President in US History. I think he is already there.

Just ask any prisoner in lockup and they'll tell you they are innocent and have been abused.

They are all pigs and complainers like Rodney King. Plus they are Black, brown or some other minority who is unworthy </sarcasm>

Red cross up to 90% innnocent and even the military industrial machine say over 60%.


Why you so suprised? Bushco stereotyped iraqis as subhumans, terra-rist evil doers...torture used for coercision, that is the point of the technique.

The Roots of Torture
The road to Abu Ghraib began after 9/11, when Washington wrote new rules to fight a new kind of war. A NEWSWEEK investigation

By John Barry, Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff
Newsweek InternationalMay 24 - It's not easy to get a member of Congress to stop talking. Much less a room full of them. But as a small group of legislators watched the images flash by in a small, darkened hearing room in the Rayburn Building last week, a sickened silence descended. There were 1,800 slides and several videos, and the show went on for three hours. The nightmarish images showed American soldiers at Abu Ghraib Prison forcing Iraqis to masturbate. American soldiers sexually assaulting Iraqis with chemical light sticks. American soldiers laughing over dead Iraqis whose bodies had been abused and mutilated. There was simply nothing to say. "It was a very subdued walk back to the House floor," said Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. "People were ashen."

The White House put up three soldiers for court-martial, saying the pictures were all the work of a few bad-apple MPs who were poorly supervised. But evidence was mounting that the furor was only going to grow and probably sink some prominent careers in the process. Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner declared the pictures were the worst "military misconduct" he'd seen in 60 years, and he planned more hearings. Republicans on Capitol Hill were notably reluctant to back Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And NEWSWEEK has learned that U.S. soldiers and CIA operatives could be accused of war crimes. Among the possible charges: homicide involving deaths during interrogations. "The photos clearly demonstrate to me the level of prisoner abuse and mistreatment went far beyond what I expected, and certainly involved more than six or seven MPs," said GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, a former military prosecutor. He added: "It seems to have been planned."

Indeed, the single most iconic image to come out of the abuse scandal—that of a hooded man standing naked on a box, arms outspread, with wires dangling from his fingers, toes and penis—may do a lot to undercut the administration's case that this was the work of a few criminal MPs. That's because the practice shown in that photo is an arcane torture method known only to veterans of the interrogation trade. "Was that something that dreamed up by herself? Think again," says Darius Rejali, an expert on the use of torture by democracies. "That's a standard torture. It's called 'the Vietnam.' But it's not common knowledge. Ordinary American soldiers did this, but someone taught them."

Who might have taught them? Almost certainly it was their superiors up the line. Some of the images from Abu Ghraib, like those of naked prisoners terrified by attack dogs or humiliated before grinning female guards, actually portray "stress and duress" techniques officially approved at the highest levels of the government for use against terrorist suspects. It is unlikely that President George W. Bush or senior officials ever knew of these specific techniques, and late last —week Defense spokesman Larry DiRita said that "no responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses." But a NEWSWEEK investigation shows that, as a means of pre-empting a repeat of 9/11, Bush, along with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods. It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers—and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation—methods that the Red Cross concluded were "tantamount to torture."
(snip/...)

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4989481/

.. nazis.

:puke:

This is what is occurring because of the heinous, racist, greedy, policies of this mis-administration and "a few individuals" who continue to support the torture and murder of "those damned brown terra-ists"!

We will never be a mollifying influence in the middle east again and our influence on the world stage has been damaged irreparably. I never thought when this bastard bush* was selected that it would mean the beginning of the end for a once proud nation.