why blogtopia* is a wonderful place
May. 6th, 2004 08:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sisyphusshruggedDwight Meredith, who rocks immoderately, once again manages somehow to dissect and lay out on the table [something I couldn't figure out how to talk about without cursing like a sailor with Tourettes] in a reasonable, competent, evidence-based and completely devastating way.
It must be a lawyer thing.
The issue this time is what the President knew about the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison and when he knew it and what he did when he found out.
The answers to all three are probably not what you think.
The details of the (OK, I'll be civil too) unfortunate events in Abu Ghraib are here, along with the pictures.
They're very hard to look at, but if you have any questions about the hearts and minds (of the people whose country we devastated ostensibly to bring them freedom) that we're losing in Iraq, please look at them.
If you look at them, keep in mind that the folks in charge over there did not need probable cause or even solid evidence to incarcerate prisoners in that particular facility, so they were under a fair amount of pressure to get the prisoners to confess to something.
After all, it would look bad if we, the liberators, were keeping innocent people in prison.
You might also keep in mind that what went on in that prison was considered acceptable tactical behavior by a government which has told us repeatedly since 9/11 that we can trust them to take our own constitutional protections away. They're fighting in the Supreme Court right now for the right to do it without oversight.
Could that be you in the pictures?
Probably not as long as we have laws that say it can't.
Cross your fingers and hope we continue to have those laws, because George Bush has had a blank check from Congress for some time now and he finds them inconvenient.
Or, you know, we could vote the bastards out.
edit: Oh, just lovely. There's a link in comments to new photos that have been uncovered.
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chipuni says, can I be sick now?
* Yes! Skippy coined that phrase! (y!sctp, for short). It's a lefty blog thing.
It must be a lawyer thing.
The issue this time is what the President knew about the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison and when he knew it and what he did when he found out.
The answers to all three are probably not what you think.
The details of the (OK, I'll be civil too) unfortunate events in Abu Ghraib are here, along with the pictures.
They're very hard to look at, but if you have any questions about the hearts and minds (of the people whose country we devastated ostensibly to bring them freedom) that we're losing in Iraq, please look at them.
If you look at them, keep in mind that the folks in charge over there did not need probable cause or even solid evidence to incarcerate prisoners in that particular facility, so they were under a fair amount of pressure to get the prisoners to confess to something.
After all, it would look bad if we, the liberators, were keeping innocent people in prison.
You might also keep in mind that what went on in that prison was considered acceptable tactical behavior by a government which has told us repeatedly since 9/11 that we can trust them to take our own constitutional protections away. They're fighting in the Supreme Court right now for the right to do it without oversight.
Could that be you in the pictures?
Probably not as long as we have laws that say it can't.
Cross your fingers and hope we continue to have those laws, because George Bush has had a blank check from Congress for some time now and he finds them inconvenient.
Or, you know, we could vote the bastards out.
edit: Oh, just lovely. There's a link in comments to new photos that have been uncovered.
As
chipuni says, can I be sick now?* Yes! Skippy coined that phrase! (y!sctp, for short). It's a lefty blog thing.
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no subject
Date: 2004-05-06 07:22 am (UTC)What more do we need to do to convince the Arab nations that we are infidels and pigs who hate them personally? What?
no subject
Date: 2004-05-06 07:24 am (UTC)More pictures...
Date: 2004-05-06 07:34 am (UTC)According to the Washington Post, there are more than 1000 new pictures. They have cropped and published some of them.
Can I be sick now?
no subject
Date: 2004-05-06 01:17 pm (UTC)President Bush has asserted that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib "does not reflect the nature of the American people."
"That's not the way we do things in America," he added.
(...)
If the president was wrong about the nature of the American people, he was no less wrong about the way things are done by Americans.
At the outset of the occupation, it was earnestly argued that the Iraqi people would welcome and benefit from imposition of U.S.-style democracy and freedoms. The American public — and, I suspect, most of the world — believed that Americans could do a better job of running a prison such as Abu Ghraib. We're not arbitrary, abusive, unaccountable or unjust, right? Indeed, last June, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski told a reporter that Americans were making living conditions so much better at Abu Ghraib that she was concerned prisoners "wouldn't want to leave."
But again, we are deluding ourselves. The hard fact is that the U.S. did install in Iraq an American-style approach to prison management. Like the U.S. prison system, it is underfunded and inadequately supervised, lacks civilian oversight and accountability and is secretive and tolerant of inmate abuse until evidence of mistreatment is pushed into the public light. That, regrettably, is the American model.
Over the last four decades, political leaders here at home have committed themselves to incarcerating inmates at rates that ultimately rivaled the former Soviet Union and repressive Middle Eastern regimes. Prisons have grown overcrowded and understaffed.
At the same time, there has been no commensurate commitment to protecting prisoner rights or upholding even minimal standards. Both state and federal legislatures, with the complicity of federal courts, have continually trimmed avenues of legal redress for inmates subject to abuse.
For its part, the public was fed the myth that prisoners were coddled, and accepted on faith that inmates were treated fairly. The public faith was interrupted only when graphic images materialized as evidence or by guards "rolling over."
no subject
Date: 2004-05-06 03:04 pm (UTC)http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/24/dissonance-cooper.php
The Military Intelligence investigation — one of six now in course — didn’t begin until 10 days ago. Even after CBS’s 60 Minutes contacted the Pentagon three weeks ago for response, and the DOD knew for sure this story was going to break, still no one in the administration even briefed congressional oversight committees or gave them the Taguba report.
<...>
The ineptitude of this administration is truly breathtaking. You needn’t have been a genius to anticipate this sort of abuse. Given that the most ardent proponents of this war argued that it was aimed at shifting the Middle Eastern balance of forces away from anti-Americanism, the Bush administration had a special responsibility to take measures to avoid any such dehumanization and degradation.