Andrew Sullivan has some higlights of the military investigation concerning the treatment of Iraqi detainees. The chilling highlights inlcude:
6. (S) I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts:
a. (S) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
b. (S) Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
c. (S) Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
d. (S) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
e. (S) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear;
f. (S) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
g. (S) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
h. (S) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
i. (S) Writing “I am a Rapest” (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;
j. (S) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture;
k. (S) A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee;
l. (S) Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;
m. (S) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.
The full text is available here.
Bush blew it today. When he spoke on the Alhurra network, he should have apologized to the Iraqi people and fired Rumsfeld.
He's lost his balls. The transformational leader has shown that he can only be born again once.
Posted by: dorsano at May 6, 2004 01:44 AM
I'm sure that at this moment they are trying to figure out a way to blame the Clinton administration for all of these abuses. Obviously President Bush has never been one to stand up and say "I'm responsible for running this ship"
Posted by: Thomas at May 5, 2004 02:16 PMPaul -
I think there is a way to convey to the Arab nations the disgust of the American people, not just of the President or Don Rumsfeld (although I question Rumsfeld's sincerity). Here is my idea.
We (don't know who "we" is yet) write an open letter addressed to the Iraqis, the Arab and Muslim peoples in general. In this letter we state our disgust and our condemnation of the actions. And we apologize for the actions of these soldiers/mercs, something that Bush didn't do and won't do. We apologize? Yes, because those are Our troops fighting for Our country. That is Our army over there. We pay for it, we support them. We have to apologize.
We post this letter on a web site. We get this letter published in at least three major U.S. papers (WSJ, NYT, LATimes perhaps). We send it to be published in as many Arabic newspapers as possible.
And on the Web site, we put in a place for any U.S. citizen visiting the site to put in their names to be attached to the letter.
Thoughts?
Posted by: Mark Kittel at May 5, 2004 01:41 PMIs there any way we can convey to the Arab nations and peoples how horrified the American people feel about how our troops have behaved in these Iraqi prisons?
This behavior is shameful and scars our nation's ability to present itself as a beacon of morality and justice to the rest of the world. Already, when the U.S. protested the election of Sudan to the UN's Human Rights committee, the Sudanese were able to retort that the U.S. was in no position to question another country's human rights abuses...
Even with our weakest argument for invading Iraq, to free the Iraqi people from tyranny, which was the only argument left to us after the facts of NO WMD and NO CONNECTION TO BIN LADEN were revealed, that now is gone. We have become no better than the torturers and murderers acting under Saddam's rule. Our attempt of going in as liberators will be forgotten, replaced by our image going out as bullies.
The punishment for those responsible for these atrocities should not stop with just the soldiers directly involved. Punishment must be meted out to the officers in charge who should have made damn sure our soldiers knew how honorably to treat prisoners, to the entire chain of command of the military who failed to remind our troops that even in war we are supposed to behave like human beings, all the way up to the Secretary of Defense, who sat on the report and by all accounts refused to read it until it exploded onto the media, even to the President of the United States. As Commander In Chief, it is his job to set the tone and attitude and morality of our military's actions, it is his job to make sure our troops are doing the right job the right way, and on all counts George W. Bush has failed miserably as an incompetent hack. Bush's lies and ineptitude have led to our nation's shameful conduct.