30 MORE TORTURE SCANDALS PROBED

[seemslikeadream]

The dossier of terror includes :

Claims that POWs were thrown to their deaths from a bridge. A videotape of the killings is said to have been destroyed.

The drowning of 16-year-old Ahmad Jabbar Kareem, who was allegedly forced into a canal by British soldiers near Basra.

The deaths of two men detained by the Black Watch near Basra a year ago. Abd al-Jabbar Mossa, 53, and Rathy Namma are both said to have suffered heart failure. Mossa's family claim he was hit on the head.

Weeks after the torture photographs were taken, a prisoner was allegedly beaten to death by members of the same Queen's Lancashire Regiment.

An MOD spokeswoman said yesterday's bombshell allegations which followed pictures of US troops abusing inmates in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison are being investigated by the Royal Military Police.

more
http://www.sundaymail.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=14201795&method=full&siteid=86024&headline=30-more-torture-scandals-probed-name_page.html

[mzmolly]

1. WTF, did our young men/women turn into monsters over there?

MY GOD!!!

[seemslikeadream]

2. I'm having a hard time keeping my torture stories straight!

[mzmolly]

3. It's all so sad. Goes to show you what war can do to a person..

*shakes head*

[Rebel_with_a_cause]

26. I'm having a hard time keeping my dinner down

sleep deprivation as well...the stories and photos are haunting. They make me physically ill.

[saigon68]

5. No there were a lot of Criminals recruited to begin with.

They just needed the proper environment to obtain gratification of their murderous desires.

I wonder how many sexual deviants were recruited.

[seemslikeadream]

6. The Pictures That Lost The War

By Investigations Editor Neil Mackay



IT’S an image that would do Saddam proud. A terrified prisoner, hooded and dressed in rags, his hands out-stretched on either side of him, electrodes attached to his fingers and genitals. He’s been forced to stand on a box about one-foot square. His captors have told him that, if he falls off the box, he’ll be electrocuted.
The torture victim was an Iraqi and his torturers were American soldiers. The picture captures the moment when members of the coalition forces, who styled themselves liberators, were exposed as torturers. The image of the wired and hooded Iraqi was one of a series of photographs, leaked by a horrified US soldier inside Saddam’s old punishment centre, Abu Ghraib – now a US PoW camp.

When the images were flashed around the world by America’s CBS television network last Wednesday, there was a smug feeling within the UK that British troops would never behave like that to their prisoners. But on Friday night, the UK was treated to images – courtesy of the Daily Mirror – of British soldiers urinating on a blood-stained Iraqi captive, holding guns against the man’s head, stamping on his face, kicking him in the mouth and beating him in the groin with a rifle butt.

The pictures of US soldiers torturing their captives have the added horror of sexual abuse. In five of the 14 images that the Sunday Herald has seen, a female soldier – identified as Lynndie England, a 21-year-old from a West Virginia trailer park – is playing up to the camera while her captives are tortured. In one picture, she’s smiling and giving the thumbs-up. Her hand rests on the buttocks of a naked and hooded Iraqi who has been forced to sit on the shoulders of another Iraqi prisoner.

In another, she is sprawled laughing over a pyramid of naked Iraqis. A male colleague stands behind her grinning. Later, she’s got a cigarette clenched between grinning lips and is pointing at the genitals of a line of naked, hooded Iraqis. A third snap shows her embracing a colleague as a naked Iraqi lies before them.
http://www.sundayherald.com/41693

[ConcernedCanuk]

10. That "colleague" is her FIANCE !! - I guess we shouldn't be surprised.

[revcarol]

38. Trailer park?

Nice try at putting this on the poor.

[seemslikeadream]

40. I'm wondering if you were speaking to me?

I don't think I mentioned trailer park or poor people anywhere.

[JoFerret]

7. It's the Bush simplicity mentality that enables this

.

[ikojo]

17. It doesn't take much to turn people into monsters.

I recall there was a psychological test done in one of the Ivy League schools (or it could have been a California school) in the 1960s. It was a test to see how well and how far someone would go at following orders.

It had something to do with shocking people and the people at the controls believed they were really shocking the others and still continued to do so when ordered by a superior.

It's a fairly famous experiment. I hope someone who has more knowledge and can fill in my gaping holes will post more about it.

When a kid enlists in the military boot camp really serves to rip them of their individuality and make them part of the group. They all pretty much look alike and definitely dress alike. They are no longer individuals but an army.

Also, given the state of American culture today, I don't think it takes much to turn our young men/women into monsters. American society is already full of hate against the Islamic world and over the last few decades we have been told that "they" don't have the same reverence for human life as "we" do.

[nagbacalan]

19. The Milgram Study

[9215]

34. I was wondering when someone was going to say this

Welcome to DU

:toast:

[mia]

21. The Perils of Obedience

Here's a link to the original study by Stanley Milgram in the early 60's with a follow-up article in 1974. The Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) is also related to this discussion.


The Milgram Experiment
A lesson in depravity, peer pressure, and the power of authority
http://www.new-life.net/milgram.htm

The aftermath of the Holocaust and the events leading up to World War II, the world was stunned with the happenings in Nazi German and their acquired surrounding territories that came out during the Eichmann Trials. Eichmann, a high ranking official of the Nazi Party, was on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The questions is, "Could it be that Eichmann, and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"...


The Perils of Obedience
by Stanley Milgram
http://home.swbell.net/revscat/perilsOfObedience.html

Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the person dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond, with defiance or submission, to the commands of others. For many people, obedience is a deeply ingrained behavior tendency, indeed a potent impulse overriding training in ethics, sympathy, and moral conduct...


Stanford Prison Experiment
Philip G. Zimbardo
http://www.prisonexp.org/index.html

"What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?"

[saigon68]

41. turn people into monsters

Lynching 1930

A mob of 10,000 whites took sledgehammers to the county jailhouse doors to get at these two young blacks accused of raping a white girl; the girl’s uncle saved the life of a third by proclaiming the man’s innocence. Although this was Marion, Ind., most of the nearly 5,000 lynchings documented between Reconstruction and the late 1960s were perpetrated in the South. (Hangings, beatings and mutilations were called the sentence of “Judge Lynch.”) Some lynching photos were made into postcards designed to boost white supremacy, but the tortured bodies and grotesquely happy crowds ended up revolting as many as they scared. Today the images remind us that we have not come as far from barbarity as we’d like to think.

[seemslikeadream]

4. Army accused of widespread Iraq torture

BRIAN BRADY AND YAKUB QURESHI


WIDESPREAD torture and unlawful killings of civilians are detailed in an explosive new report from human rights campaigners on the conduct of the British Army in Iraq, Scotland on Sunday can reveal.

The Amnesty International dossier will allege that "a pattern of torture" has emerged in the British-controlled south of the country, and that at least three innocent civilians have been shot dead without justification.

Last night, Prime Minister Tony Blair joined in the chorus of politicians and senior army officers condemning the behaviour of UK soldiers photographed abusing a hooded Iraqi captive.

Yesterday’s publication of the pictures - following similar ghastly images involving US troops - threatened to further inflame anti-coalition feeling in the Arab world, while undermining support for the war in America and UK.

Reports last night said that six junior non-commissioned officers from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment were being questioned in connection with the scandal.

http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=498762004

Abuse by UK soldiers in Iraq 'common'

BRIAN BRADY AND MIKE THEODOULOU IN CYPRUS


IT WAS pitch dark when Walid Fayay Mazban drove home through British-controlled southern Iraq late on August 24 last year.

As so often happened amid the confusion still gripping Iraq less than six months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the street lights were not working.

Mazban’s family are convinced this was why he did not see the makeshift roadblock erected by British soldiers near their base in Basra. They also believe that one ‘mistake’ cost him his life.

When the 42-year-old drove through the checkpoint, punishment was immediate: the troops opened fire and he was hit several times in the back. It is believed he was dead by the time they got to his car.

After a perfunctory search, the soldiers found nothing suspicious in his vehicle and the incident was written off as a tragic accident. The following month, his family was given around £1,000 as a "humanitarian" payment, although the Ministry of Defence insists the gesture does not signify guilt.

http://news.scotsman.com/uk.cfm?id=498152004

[JoFerret]

29. Amnesty

writing the check today.

[Name removed]

8. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Robbien]

15. Iraqis do not want paid mercenaries murdering their families

And because they went too far, you are saying they like torture?

We bomb them and killed hundreds, they killed four paid mercenaries. How does that give us the right to turn into animals and degrade them and how does it follow they will like being degraded?

[seemslikeadream]

16. Bye Bye

*

[dArKeR]

9. 'Shame on the Americans' Title should be "Shame on Bush'

Baghdad, Iraq - A member of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council demanded on Saturday that Iraqi authorities investigate reports that American guards abused inmates in the very prison where Saddam Hussein's regime tortured its opponents.

The scandal broadened after Britain's Daily Mirror published new photographs of a hooded Iraqi prisoner who reportedly was beaten by British troops. The newspaper's front-page picture showed a soldier apparently urinating on the prisoner.

Also on Saturday, The New Yorker magazine said it had obtained a US Army report that Iraqi detainees were subjected to "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

Sodomised with a light

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0,,2-10-1460_1520702,00.html

[saigon68]

11. Sodomised with a light

I thought only the New York Police Department (NYPD) did that???


Oh, I was wrong that was a toilet bowl brush handle.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

12. One area where Bush certainly deserves blame is in the whole tone of

disrespecting any international law or convention. The whole concept of something like the Geneva convention has been devalued with the Bush position on the prisoners at Guantanamo, not recognizing international courts, etc.

They have thumbed their (our) noses at the world. If there is any publicized mistreatment of U.S. prisoners taken by Iraqis following these revelations, it will be very difficult for people not to understand why the Iraqis would have done so.

I think this is one of the better potential themes of the Kerry campaign, for the U.S. to "rejoin the community of nations" and recognize its importance and try to reestablish mutual respect.

[CJCRANE]

28. Yes, about 5 billion people would support Kerry if

he made "rejoining the community of nations" a cornerstone of his campaign.

[seemslikeadream]

13. Use of private contractors in Iraqi jail interrogations

US military in torture scandal

Use of private contractors in Iraqi jail interrogations highlighted by inquiry into abuse of prisoners

Julian Borger in Washington
Friday April 30, 2004
The Guardian


The killing of four private contractors in Falluja on March 31 led to the current siege of the city.

But this is the first time the privatisation of interrogation and intelligence-gathering has come to light. The investigation names two US contractors, CACI International Inc and the Titan Corporation, for their involvement in the functioning of Abu Ghraib.

Titan, based in San Diego, describes itself as a "a leading provider of comprehensive information and communications products, solutions and services for national security". It recently won a big contract for providing translation services to the US army, and its involvement in Abu Ghraib is believed to have been to provide translators.

CACI, which has headquarters in Virginia, claims on its website to "help America's intelligence community collect, analyse and share global information in the war on terrorism".

Neither responded to calls for comment yesterday.

According to the military report on Abu Ghraib, both played an important role at the prison.

At one point, the investigators say: "A CACI instructor was terminated because he al lowed and/or instructed MPs who were not trained in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations by setting conditions which were neither authorised in accordance with applicable regulations/policy."

Colonel Jill Morgenthaler, speaking for central command, told the Guardian: "One contractor was originally included with six soldiers, accused for his treatment of the prisoners, but we had no jurisdiction over him. It was left up to the contractor on how to deal with him."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1206725,00.html

[9215]

33. Was the murder and mutilation of those Blackwater

contractors a payback, for what US private security firms were doing to prisoners?

[seemslikeadream]

36. Maybe so or

someone else thought it was because Bremmer shut down the newspaper.

[truth2power]

42. Payback for this, possibly

Tinoire posted this earlier today in another thread, regarding the blackwater mercenaries:

What is bizarre is that it was the stories of women being raped in the Fallujah prison which really started the uprising and led to the deaths of those 4 mercenaries (who had been seen shooting women and children in the back of their heads with hollow-points). (emphasis added)

Yeah...shooting people with hollow-points would tend to piss off the bystanders royally.

Here's the thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1510848

BTW: Someone quoted Michael Moore that the guys from Blackwater and etc. are not fixing roofs or pouring concrete. They're not contractors. They're mercenaries.

[seemslikeadream]

14. Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq

Iraqi ambassador pick grilled on hand-over




By Steven Weisman
The New York Times

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's nominee for ambassador to Iraq on Tuesday defended the limits that would be placed on Iraqi self-rule, particularly those on control over security forces, asserting that after June 30 Iraqis will have "a lot more sovereignty than they have right now."
Facing skeptical questions about the new constraints emerging in the long-planned transfer of power before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the nominee, John Negroponte, said he saw his major challenge as trying to avert conflicts if the new Iraqi government objected to U.S. military actions. "These are the kinds of questions that I think our diplomacy is going to have to deal with," said Negroponte, who is now ambassador to the United Nations.
The toughest questions came from Democrats, but all the senators said they would support Negroponte's confirmation, which the committee could approve on Thursday. Senate aides said Negroponte could be confirmed by the full Senate as early as next week.
Negroponte said that any decisions on whether to attack rebel strongholds, as the United States is threatening now in Fallujah and Najaf, would require "great political sensitivity" even though American s will nominally be in charge of such decisions.

http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Apr/04282004/nation_w/161439.asp





Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq


Dems Ignore Negroponte's Death Squad Past, Look to Confirm Iraq Appointmen


As Negroponte, responded to Hagel, he was interrupted by an activist, Andres Conteris of Non-violence International.

Andres Conteris, is program director for Latin America and the Caribbean for the human rights group Non-violence International. He disrupted yesterday's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on John Negroponte's appointment as US ambassador to Iraq.

As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte played a key role in coordinating US covert aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up a CIA-backed death squad in Honduras. During his term as ambassador there, diplomats alleged that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. In a 1995 series, the Baltimore Sun detailed the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 3-16, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." In 1994, Honduras's National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights reported that it was officially admitted that 179 civilians were still missing.

A former official who served under Negroponte says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras skyrocketed from $3.9 million to over $77 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America.

http://www.pacifica.org/programs/dn/040428.html

Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq




Negroponte's "embassy" in Baghdad will, according to press reports, constitute the largest US "embassy staff" in the world with some 3000 employees, including up to 1,000 Americans.


Yet according to a four-part series in the Baltimore Sun in 1995, in 1982 alone the Honduran press ran 318 stories of murders and kidnappings by the Honduran military.

Opponents of Negroponte are demanding that all Senators read the full report before voting on his nomination.http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ROF111A.html
In a cruel irony, the Bush administration has appointed a bona fide "terrorist" to wage its "war on terrorism" in Iraq.


It should come as no surprise that "on the day he was appointed to Iraq, Honduras decided to bring its troops in Iraq home." (Financial Times, April 21, 2004)

http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=2&contentid=1189



Face-off: Bush's Foreign Policy Warriors


On August 27, 1997, CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz released a 211-page classified report entitled "Selected Issues Relating to CIA Activities in Honduras in the 1980's." This report was partly declassified on Oct. 22, 1998, in response to demands by the Honduran human rights ombudsman. Opponents of Negroponte are demanding that all Senators read the full report before voting on his nomination.

Reich, unlike Negroponte, is primarily a lobbyist and anti-Castro activist rather than a diplomat. He is director of the Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba and works for some of America's favorite industries: liquor (Bacardi), tobacco (British-American Tobacco), and weapons (Lockheed Martin). He also serves as vice-chairman of the Worldwide Responsible Apparel Program, or WRAP, an apparel industry-backed group characterized by union activists as an artifice for clothing importers to avoid serious scrutiny of their factories in developing countries.

In the 1980s, he headed a propaganda department in the State Department called the Office of Public Diplomacy. This unit, staffed with CIA and Pentagon psychological warfare specialists, reported to Oliver North. The function of the operation was to win support for administration policy in Central America. They wrote op-eds under the name of Nicaraguan rebel leaders and attacked those who differed with Reagan's policies. The Congressional investigation of the Iran-contra scandal identified numerous illegalities which led to the closure of the Office of Public Diplomacy.

Reich followed up these activities by serving as ambassador to Venezuela from 1986-89, at the height of the Iran-contra scandal. The Venezuelan government tried unsuccessfully to block his nomination.

While working for Bacardi, he successfully lobbied to slip Section 211 into the 1998 Omnibus Appropriations Bill, thus stripping Cuba of trademark protection. Ironically, he will be overseeing the Helms-Burton Act, which he helped to draft, which the administration has just decided not to carry into effect.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ROF111A.html


NEGROPONTE - Sleeping Ambassador or Death Squad Diplomat?

The widespread use of American aerial surveillance to direct the Contra murderers to villages where only women and children were present to be killed, the routine use of torture, the encouragement of drug-smuggling into the U.S. to provide funding for the U.S.-backed forces all were revealed only after Negroponte had left his post as U.S. Ambassador to the Honduras. And who could forget the Honduran Anti-communist Liberation Army's ever popular practice of dropping victims from helicopters while they were in flight?

Make no mistake about it -- both Iraqi rebels and Al Qaeda terrorists see Negroponte's appointment as the first stage in implementing a policy of covert violence against their right to sovereignty and will effectively use it to recruit and incite radicals to commit more acts of violence against us. It's no coincidence that our Office of Homeland Security issued a heightened security alert just as Bush announced his plans for Negroponte.

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/04/con04178.html

US Martyrs Pose Questions for Negroponte
October 28, 2003
By TONI SOLO

US nuns murdered in El Salvador 4

In 1981, a couple of decades before Rachel Corrie was murdered, the bodies of four women were found in a shallow grave in a rural district not far from San Salvador, El Salvador's capital. They had been raped and shot dead by members of the Salvadoran army on the orders of senior officers. In the context of the time, the atrocity would hardly have merited reporting. But the women were United States citizens. Two were religious sisters of the New York based Maryknoll order, Ita Ford and Maureen Clarke. One was an Ursuline Sister, Dorothy Kazel, the fourth a lay missioner, Jean Donovan. By virtue of their nationality, the story did make the news, just--the back page of the New York Times, to that paper's eternal shame.

Those four women had helped defend Salvadorans from the terror unleashed against their own people by the Salvadoran government with support from the United States administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. They gave their lives working alongside vulnerable people and communities in El Salvador. The murders followed the assassination in 1980 of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. The women's deaths were manipulated by the US government and its ever-pliant news media. The full facts took years to emerge. US ambassador to the UN, Jean Kirkpatrick, falsely accused the women of having supported the Salvadoran armed opposition, the FMLN. In fact, the four women were passionate advocates of non-violence, accompanying the rural villagers they served while caught up in a violent civil war.

Ambassador Kirkpatrick's statements on the case of the four women were to be expected from an unrepentant supporter of the bloodthirsty Argentinian military dictatorship. Her successor at the UN was Vernon Walters, former deputy director of the CIA, co-organiser of the continent wide terrorist blueprint Plan Condor and promoter of Ronald Reagan's terrorist war against Nicaragua. In 1986 Vernon Walters threw in the face of the UN his government's rejection of the International Court of Justice verdict convicting the US of terrorism against Nicaragua.

Kirkpatrick's and Walters' apologetics for mass murder helped John Negroponte, then US ambassador to Honduras, cover up his support for the systematic forced disappearances used to destroy Honduran civilian opposition to the presence of Contra bases in their country. Thomas Pickering, US ambassador to El Salvador at the time, also gave misleading information on local army and paramilitary murders, probably an essential qualification for his subsequent posting in 1989 as US ambassador to the UN, taking over from Vernon Walters.

Jean Kirkpatrick, Vernon Walters, Thomas Pickering, John Negroponte and other US government representatives sent clear signals that the local military in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala were to be allowed a free hand by the United States government to murder tens of thousands of civilians and anyone who spoke out against the slaughter. Perhaps the defining climax to the sickening murder campaign came in 1989 when the Salvadoran army killed six Jesuit academics and two of their domestic staff at the University of Central America in San Salvador. These crimes were made possible because the United States government consistently tried to conceal its institutional role in funding, training and supporting the military and paramilitary perpetrators. The Iran-Contra scandal was the culmination of that sustained program of regional deceit.


http://www.counterpunch.org/solo10282003.html

[nolabels]

23. John Negroponte must be like a moth to a flame

[saigon68]

18. LOTS OF PRE-TORTURE APOLOGISTS IN OCT AT DU

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

Read this thread.

I could see it on the wall and then some assholes were looking the other way at WAR CRIMES.

[9215]

31. Excellent link. Everybody should check this out. nt

[bpilgrim]

32. 33. "He did the right thing, and he got results." - Character Assassin

:puke:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=192572#193548

peace

[9215]

43. Jeez, the "ends justifies the means" or what?

[despairing optimist]

20. "We have no quarrel with the Iraqi people."

Gee, imagine if we did. This is beyond outrageous and disgusting.

Mr. Bush, we certainly have a quarrel with YOU. See you in Nuremberg. Oops, I meant November.

[scarface2004]

22. cheney ordered torture....

for anything that moved......he hates them 'brown skinned irakees'!!

'the only good irakee is a dead irakee'!! bushed sneered.

[Jim Warren]

24. Know what pops into my head?

GUANTANAMO!

[Emillereid]

25. I think these guys probably are feeling a great deal of anger

about being there and the lies they were told about liberating a grateful population and saving the homeland from dreadful weapons. But what do they do with the anger -- some kill themselves, some have psychological breakdowns. Most of the soldiers are low on the pecking order -- they can't get angry at their commanding officers or their commander in chief, so they turn on those ungrateful, uncooperative Iraqis. There have been many reports of wanton violence and carnage inappropriate to the situation, so the lastest stories of torture should come as no surprise especially since there appears to have been a fair amount of 'winkin' and 'noddin' from high ups. Same dynamic as we saw with frustrated poor white red-necks taking it out on those even lower in the social order -- blacks.

Also I think in order to kill the Iraqis as part of the war they had to dehumanize them -- pretty hard to shift gears and see them as fellow human beings -- especially since they are often trying to kill you.

[Tinoire]

27. Photos (posting link only)

http://pulpnonfiction.blogspot.com/

Saturday, May 01, 2004

These were just as haunting for me.

I GUESS NOW WE KNOW WHY THEY WERE SHOOTING ALL THE JOURNALISTS! (as if we didn't know at the time)

[moonshadow2020]

47. Im new here...thanks TINOIRE for that link!

They have added IRAQ VIDEOS to the pics:

http://pulpnonfiction.blogspot.com

[Tinoire]

48. Thank you moonshadow2020

& welcome to DU! Glad to have you on board :hi:

[9215]

30. The natural consequence of

a fascist mentality that permeates the military culture from the top down. The insanity has metastisized.

If allowed to go on unchecked it could lead to the same thing that happened to the Jews in WWII. This may sound extreme, but once you have a culture that condones such behavior it isn't long before a genocidal mindset takes over.

To some in the military the war in Iraq is the beginning of Armageddon and they justify their psychopathic behavior as matter of survival.

If this doesn't get the US Public outraged then we are in deeeeep do- do.

[lumpy]

35. The 'ugly American' has just

gotten uglier. This is the product of a decadent society.

[fortyfeetunder]

37. Must be a perversion of the post- 9/11 hangover

I'm wondering if the culpable think that torturing these innocent people -- remember the prisoners were victims of Saddam and probably guilty of no crime -- felt that this was leveraging payback for what certain people did hijacking and sending the airplanes into the World Trade Center. And these innocent victims had nothing to do with 9/11.

I can't blame the Arab world for being angry about this and they spend some time taking Bush and co. to task for making it happen.

[Bozita]

39. Iraqis now hate us for a lot more than our freedom

[rebellious woman]

44. Contrary to belief, Iraqis never hated us for

our freedoms, they have hated us since Reagan and
Bush I "screwed them over"....They didn't hate us
they hated our "government", now however, they
hate both, thanx to the "current resident in the
wh. Read the old books on Saddam and the House
of Saud...there is where the answers lay in all of
this madness.

[9215]

45. I think Bozita had his eyes rolling

on that one. He was quoting something Bush said long ago on terrorism.

Welcome to DU :toast:

[The_Casual_Observer]

46. Only 30???

Come on, they have had a whole year, surely our brave well trained and patriotic prison guards, backed by CIA goons have done more than 30 of these.