The damage is done, It really does not matter if the photos are fake or real to people in Iraq and the Middle East who want the US and British Soldiers out.



SOLDIERS WHO BATTLE WITH PRESSURE

By Steve Mckenzie



IN armies all over the world down through history, there are records of abuses by soldiers.

And the allegations against US and British troops in Iraq are an awful public relations disaster for the Coalition.

But it seems to me the acts have not been systematic or pre-planned. The pressures of war and modern soldiering should take some of the blame.

They cannot just be a front-line shock troop but also a police officer, prison warder or even a social worker.

Pilots are trained to blow up buildings full of people, then have to turn their hand to delivering relief aid.

In Iraq, British and US forces were expected to overcome Saddam Hussein's army quickly, then take onWar expert PROFESSOR JIM WYLLIE of Aberdeen University examines the situations that can harden soldiers to crueltya role of maintaining civil order. The Americans have been criticised for the way they have handled flashpoints Fallujah and Najaf.

It has been said they should take a leaf out of the way the British are handling Basra, using their experiences in Northern Ireland.

But Ulster had Bloody Sunday and the shoot-to-kill controversies.

If there is any solace to be had, it is that our media has the freedom to make us face up to these allegations.

Watching the Iraq War portrayed on television is somewhat like watching an old black & white western movie. The cowboys move into Indian territory take their land and when the Indians fight back the cowboys call the Indians savages...

In Iraq the cowboys take over the country and when the Iraqis fight back the cowboys call the Iraqis terrorists. America still has a cowboy mentality and a belief that the most guns and the best gunslingers win and it may be true, unfortunately it may be after many cowboys are dead. This is especially true after the disgusting photos emerged showing American soldiers committing war crimes against their prisoners in Saddam's Abu Ghraib prison; make no mistake, they were war crimes and it was not just a few soldiers going too far. Reports allege army intelligence officers, CIA agents and private contractors along with the pictured individuals abused and even killed prisoners. The actions of these individuals have set back the Iraq War so far it may never be a winnable; at least under the present leadership, if you can call it leadership...

Remember when American soldiers were captured by Saddam's military? I still remember the scared look on Shashana Johnson's face as she answered questions to the interviewer. We were outraged; showing prisoners on videos and in photos was a violation of the Geneva Convention. Are we still so concerned about the Geneva Convention?

Now we have pictures showing American soldiers sexually abusing Iraqi prisoners, making them get naked and pose in sexual positions, attaching electrical wire to them, imagine if the Iraqi military had done that to Shashana Johnson and her fellow American prisoners. We would have been so outraged that we would have wanted to kill all Iraqis. So you can imagine how the Iraqis and all Arabs must feel seeing pictures of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by patriotic American soldiers with smiles on their faces. So much for winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqis...

The actions of those Americans in Abu Ghraib prison have intensified the Arab anger, the war and the danger to all American soldiers in Iraq. Iraqis I saw interviewed on television compared President Bush to Saddam. They don't believe the American government and they don't believe Bush and why should they? They were told that America was there to liberate them from Saddam and that things would be different but they see Abu Ghraib prison still torturing people just like under Saddam and the only difference is it is the Americans doing the torturing. This is a huge debacle. You can claim all you want that it was a few bad soldiers but if the situation was reversed and Saddam claimed it was a few bad soldiers that tortured Americans, would you believe him? I doubt it and I doubt Iraqis will believe the American claim. Which means the war will intensify with little chance of stability in Iraq and all because of a little good-natured torture...

What should happen to those that took part in the torture? Is a court marshal enough? If CIA agents and private contractors did participate in the abuse what should happen to them? Should they face a war tribunal? Iraqi leaders have set up a tribunal of judges and prosecutors to try Saddam and other members of his Baathist regime, why not turn over the CIA agents and private contractors that participated in the torture to them, after all the war crimes happened in their country. What if the interim government that America hands over power to on June 30 asks to have them extradited would the U.S. comply or would they shield war criminals if the war criminals were Americans? This opens up a whole can of worms. All the while American soldiers will be taking more shots and bombs from mad Iraqis...

Like it or not as commander and chief Bush is the face of the U.S. military and its occupation. When it goes well, Iraqis love him, when it goes bad, they hate him; right now it is going bad, very bad. When torture happened under Saddam, Iraqis blamed Saddam, now torture has happened under Bush and Iraqis blame Bush. With torture on Bush's Iraqi resume, American troops will never win in Iraq; they will take the punishment for the misdeeds of a few ignorant soldiers. The only possible way to win the Iraq war now is to put a new face on it. A new president whether John Kerry, John McCain or whoever could tell the Iraqis and the world that the mistakes of the previous administration will be corrected. A new president could approach the United Nations with an offering to join the treaties that Bush reneged on, such as the Kyoto treaty and the Antiballistic Missile Treaty if the United Nations or its member nations helped both financially and militarily in Iraq. Bush doesn't get anything of substance from the United Nations because he doesn't offer anything in return. A new president could wipe the slate clean and bring in foreign troops to backup the U.S. soldiers. All Bush can do is shuffle the same tired troops; he offers nothing to the countries of the world and so he gets nothing. With Bush all America can expect is a worsening condition in Iraq, more casualties and little help from the world community. A new president could do wonders or as they say in the old black & white western movies, it's time for a new sheriff...

this is horrible....
as i usually dont get involved in political threads, i have to add to this one! and i dont want to go too far off topic but.....
i have alot of vietnam friends here where i live, and they have told me stories of some of the things they have seen and done. which if you have heard these stories, you would cry, on some of the things done, on both sides!
so i am looking at this topic, and im looking at it from 2 angles.
i see alot of what US and UK soldiers have done, but, i really done see alot of what the Iraq soldier has done to our guys, im sure it is just as bad, if not worse!

any reports you get from the government or the news, doesnt really tell the whole story!

i hope some of this makes sense!

this is also pretty freaking horrible...and it is yet again another thing in the 'war on terror' that will only intensify hatred towards the west ...maybe they are trying to draw them out by provocation
isreali style..

They should be careful though. If the muslims hate westerners too much they might hijack airliners and ram them into skyscrapers.:er:

U think this can't happen to u here in the USA?

Power corrupts, and if you wanna be a cop, u realy do enjoy the games.

I can't believe anyyone is surprised about this.




How come nobody has said, like they usually do;

YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY, IF YOU AREN'T GUILTY?

lets hope the US never has to actualy invade turkey
 

...backwoods or backwards...???

backwoods


Rednecks.......

don get too excited, IT's just a thought....
 

This fuc'n with the Iraqie prisoners is looking bad.

Hate to say it, but it seems a gay thing, like as in 'homos'. :uu:

The general who ran the joint sure looked to be a dyketype. It happened on the nite shift and nobody cared.

Maybe gays (?) should not be allowed in the armed service if this is what happens..

She's quite a looker!

Re: don get too excited, IT's just a thought....
 

Although the torture is somewhat homo-erotic, I suspect that those involved are not homosexual. Quite the opposite actually. Most of the true-blue gay men I know, couldn't be that cruel. Subjective, I know, but probably accurate.

Re: Re: don get too excited, IT's just a thought....
 

Actually, I agree.

What we are seeing on film is a power trip by our ego hungry cops who feel they can abuse whoever they want with even less oversight than they get here.

If this wasn't filmed nothing would have come of it.

Re: Re: Re: don get too excited, IT's just a thought....
 

this is a bit of a first in history changing events brought on by pocket personal digital devices...
as horrendous as it is..
someone one was found to have a screen saver of these images on one gov/army computer or some such stuff..

so has anyone seen this documentry
on these Taliban prisoners of war suffocated in containers and shot in the desert under the watch of American troops?
tourture is one thing massacre is another..

Re: Re: Re: Re: iTourture
 

yeh this would be right..
 

Halliburton Pulling the Plug on GI Communications

A week after a scandal broke involving photos of American troops torturing Iraqi prisoners, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, & Root is pulling the plug on private electronic communications with the folks back home, apparently at the request of the Department of Defence. See, for example, this note from military blogger ginmar:
here

(some choice comments there as well..)

Good ole Ann....



RANTEL: . . .What is your general take on all of this [Abu Ghraib]?

COULTER: Well, the point I just made on Hannity & Colmes--which no one has been making--is that this is yet another lesson in why women shouldn't be in the military.

RANTEL: Oh, really? You're bringing this up? It's funny because somebody mentioned that and I kind of pooh-poohed it. So tell me more.

COULTER: Well, you can't avoid the fact that there are a disproportionate number of women involved, for one thing, in the abuse photos. It was a girl general who was in charge of running our Iraqi prison. And, you know, for one thing, I'm a little disappointed in Rumsfeld--he allows the greatest fighting force on the face of the globe to have girl generals--what are we doing with girl generals? But I think as a general matter, besides the fact that women don't have the physical abilities to do the training exercises while carrying even a medium-size backpack, women are more vicious than men.

RANTEL: Really?

COULTER: These are a few, you know, I mean, in general, these abuse photos are manifestly a few bad apples in an overwhelmingly honorable military. I don't know if you remember, but back during the Afghanistan war--and that was even the war that liberals pretended to support--our military was trained how to bury the dead so that their heads were facing Mecca. That's an incredibly honorable thing to do--and, by the way, it's something that doesn't occur to a woman because we are vicious. You don't want us in the military.

RANTEL: Uh, uh, you're not being tongue-in-cheek here, Ann, at all?

COULTER: No, I am not. I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek about how vicious women are, but I do think it is a serious problem having women in the military. Men are used to this sort of thing. I mean, C. S. Lewis himself said, remarking on the differences between men and women, if your dog bit a neighbor's child, who would you like to go deal with: the woman of the house or the man of the house? Men are much more capable of engaging in combat and still being honorable about it. I'll give you another example that seems completely off-point and perhaps you'll think I'm insane but I was watching the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday night and, you know, Jay Leno was telling a lot of jokes, cutting both ways, and you see people, even somewhat slimy people like Richard Ben-Veniste in the audience, but he was laughing uproariously at the jokes--even the ones that were to the detriment of John Kerry or the Democrats. But the women journalists, ohhhh, they're very dour, they're angry, they don't laugh if the joke doesn't go their way. This is what women are like. Men are better at engaging in combat while behaving in an honorable way. And it is--now I will swing back to the abuse photos.

RANTEL: Yeah.

COULTER: It is simply a fact--I have only seen five of the abuse photos--there are females in two of them. We don't have a military that's 40 percent female.

RANTEL: Now there's the one picture with the girl--that woman with the cigarette hanging out of her mouth--the woman soldier with the cigarette--and she's holding the gun at the guy's genitals. Is that the one you're referring to?

COULTER: There's that one and there's also a female in a pile-of-bodies photo.

RANTEL: Right. Well, you know, this is an angle I hadn't thought of. What--

COULTER: And [unintelligible] a woman general--a girl general.

RANTEL: The brigadier general, [Janis] Karpinski.

COULTER: Yeah, and, of course, we have affirmative action to get more women generals--girl generals--running the--Come on! Come on! That's silly. No civilized society allows women in the military--this is separate and apart from the fact that you should not be allowing women to fight.

RANTEL: I'm a little speechless only because I can imagine some our listeners saying, "Ann is a woman. Ann is an amazingly successful woman, you know, three times New York [Times] best-selling author and great political commentator and successful at everything she's ever done. Why do you think that women can't do these jobs in the military?"

COULTER: Well you definitely wouldn't want me fighting in this war--all 99 pounds of me--if you want to win. [Coulter cackles]

RANTEL: But wait. Wait a minute. I recognize that there are physical differences between the average man and the average woman with the possible exception of Janet Reno, but I'm talking about--

COULTER: [cackles]

RANTEL: But you seem to be making a blanket statement that putting women in general, as females, in the military is a bad idea.

COULTER: Yes, and in addition to our manifest physical limitations, I think women are more vicious than men.

RANTEL: That would explain Hillary Clinton.

COULTER: Yes!

RANTEL: [Laughs]

COULTER: It would explain the White House Correspondents' Dinner with these dour feminists sitting, frowning at jokes that cut against them. You know, I will admit that there are many men who are women [Coulter chuckles] and there are some women who can behave like men, but as a general matter, women are overwhelmingly unable physically to be in the military and I think also psychologically.

RANTEL: Yeah, that's the part I'm getting to. So you think there's a psychological difference between them. We know the physical is obvious.

COULTER: It's in our genes to protect the hearth and home. to respond viciously to the enemies, to intruders, whereas, just think of immediately after the 9/11 attack, I was huffing and puffing and fuming the very night of it that we weren't already dropping bombs in Afghanistan?--

RANTEL: But I think a lot of guys--men and women were, don't you think?

COULTER: I suspect that actually is how the Democrats would have responded because they are women. . .

I'd prefer "rabidly self-loathing", but hey, if the shoe fits. At least the transcriptionist got the [cackle] part right, what a freaking witch.

Let's review, so far we are blaming gays* and women. (*or at least homosexual tendencies, which I certainly wouldn't argue, but we would have to talking about repressed homosexual tendencies in "straight people," since Spc. Charles Graner (who worked in a prison stateside) and Pfc. Lynndie England, the man and woman figuring prominently in the photos were lovers, and none of the others implicated were openly gay.)

What a desperate attempt to avoid the obvious.

Personally I think it's incredibly naive to believe that such acts as these are not fairly typical of both war and prison situations in general, and to argue that they simply didn't happen, as some in this thread seem to want to believe, in the face of an explicit internal US Army report that they did is just willful avoidance.

Anyone familiar with Dr. Stanley Milgram's work or the Stanford Prison Experiments in the 70s would probably consider such events almost inevitable. In fact, these acts of 'mild' mind games and pseudo-sexually-based humiliation are almost exactly what the Standford experiments produced, down to the stripping, bags on the heads, golden showers and the small dick jokes, and these were "normal guys" without any additional motives of possibly obtaining valuable information or any "intelligence" lurking around dropping hints about 'softening' interrogation techniques.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and having the scruples to resist such corruption is a factor independent of gender, sexuality, race or creed.

(except for republicans...


joke!)

In spite of the the tone and the focus about Arab reactions in most of the reportage, I think Americans are far more outraged by it than Arabs, because Americans insist on promoting a totally unrealistic and sugar-coated view of both war and human behaviour in general, and we're always shocked when the truth leaks out. We'd like to pretend I suppose that most people, having listened to the lamentations about the horror perpetrated on our country for three solid years and then put in a situation of total control over 'suspect Iraqis,' would probably serve them chamomile tea, play some Yanni and run warm bubble-baths for them.

You can continue to argue whether these acts were "torture" all you want and whether it's a 'gay thing' or a 'female thing,' it doesn't really matter, The only question is whether you think it's excusable behaviour--for anyone.