Iraqi prisoner abuse and the fallout, pt. 3. The Retributions Begin

An Islamic militant website has shown a video purporting to show the beheading of an American in Iraq.
The video - the contents of which could not be verified - showed five men in headscarves and ski masks cutting off the man's head with a knife.

Moments earlier, the victim said he was an American from Philadelphia.

The group, thought to be linked to al-Qaeda, said it was carrying out the execution in retaliation for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers.

The poor-quality tape - shown on the Muntada al-Ansar site - began with the victim, bound and wearing an orange jumpsuit, sitting on the floor with five masked men behind him.

The victim identified himself as Nick Berg, a US contractor whose body was found near a highway overpass in Baghdad on Saturday.

One of the masked men read out a statement, saying they had offered to exchange the man for inmates of Abu Ghraib prison but the coalition authorities refused.

They then pulled the man to the side and put a knife to his neck.

The man screamed as he was executed.

His killers shouted "Allah is great" before holding what appeared to be a head up to the camera.

Taguba's testimony today provides further information:

Asked who had given orders for prisoners to be "softened up" for interrogation, the general replied: "I did not find any evidence of a policy or a direct order given to these soldiers to conduct what they did."

"I believe that they did it on their own volition. I believe that they collaborated with several MI [military intelligence] interrogators at the lower level, based on the conveyance of that information through interviews and written statements."

The findings of the report have led to seven US army reservists facing charges over their alleged treatment of detainees.

The under-secretary of defence for intelligence, Stephen Cambone, told the committee there had been a clear breakdown of observance of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners in Iraq, although he said it was hard to explain how the abuse had happened.

(Baghdad, Iraq-AP) -- New information that the abuse of some Iraqi prisoners may have been a form of revenge for alleged abuse experienced by Jessica Lynch after she was captured in the early days of the Iraq war.
A letter from the commander of an Army military police battalion alleges that a female soldier took ``vigilante justice'' on Iraqi prisoners she believed had raped the former Army private.
The Associated Press has obtained a copy of Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Phillabaum's letter.
He made his allegation against Master Sergeant Lisa Girman and three other M-P's in a memo to the deputy commander of coalition forces in Iraq.
Phillibaum writes that the alleged abuse occurred in southern Iraq last year. He says he did not condone the alleged mistreatment

could it be that the difference might also have something to do with the way our government works? Or that Al Sadr isn't exactly an elected government? Or that no one really knows who's behind or responsible for this atrocity yet?

I love that 'told the world' part. It so matches with how this information came to everyone's attention too.

'But some Republican committee members charged that the prisoner abuse scandal was being exploited for partisan gain.

"I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment," Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., said during the hearing.'

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4855930/

That's pretty f'ed up.

http://inhofe.senate.gov/

why, hes the greatest secretary of defense the world has known!

okthanksbye,
dick cheney

DONALD RUMSFELD!
DONALD RUMSFELD!
DONALD RUMSFELD!
DONALD RUMSFELD!

Rock over London...Rock on Chicago.
Pepsi, uh huh.

x-post: it's the "whip a camel's ass" part that makes it

Point is: when things like this happen over and over in Arabic countries, who is wringing their hands? Where is the internal criticism? It's either a Zionist plot or *crickets*

"I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment," Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., said during the hearing.'

What do you mean?

(xpost I was right!)

It's hypocrisy. Not holding everyone to the same standard enables those who do not abide by those standards to continue doing whatever they please. This is precisely why certain provisions of the Geneva Conventions no longer apply to one party of a conflict once they have been violated by an opposing party.

Were there leaders in other Arabic countries at a safe distance from Saddam demanding his ouster? (Not meant rhetorically, fwiw.)

nope, they were quietly advocating his exile, but Dubya beat them to the punch.

This is precisely why certain provisions of the Geneva Conventions no longer apply to one party of a conflict once they have been violated by an opposing party.

makes no sense since Dubya declared the war over a year ago.

It doesn't matter if Iraq is a signatory. They're protected by the Conventions as long as they abide by them. If a signatory to the conventions goes to war with a non-signatory, and the non-signatory violates certain conventions, the signatory is no longer bound by those conventions.

You cannot be "crippled" by the geneva conventions due to your opponent's willingness to fight dirty.

Of course not, wtf? I'm not even talking about Iraq. I'm talking about what happens when you rigidly hold yourself to a standard your opponent ignores. I'm talking about why it is hypocritical to not hold dictators and monarchs to the same moral standard you hold a freely elected government.

that makes absolutely no sense. And applying your hypothetical to the current situation, you still haven't explained why the U.S. should be violating Geneva conventions, or even exactly who the U.S. is fighting against now.

1 hour, 1 minute ago Add Politics - AFP to My Yahoo!

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Pentagon (news - web sites) employees gave US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a standing ovation at a meeting in which he said the scandal over abuse of Iraqi prisoners should not be allowed to define the way the US military is seen by the world.

The audience at a Pentagon auditorium rose to its feet in applause after General Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, urged the people to thank Rumsfeld for his leadership.

"There is not a single human being in this government, and certainly not in this building, who works harder or is more dedicated or is a better patriot than is Secretary Rumsfeld," Pace said.

yeah, big news flash, Saudi prince makes anti-Semitic statements. Hold the freakin' phone, even.

h, I could dismiss a hundred links on all these thread with that attitude. I feel like me criticizing Arabs for not criticizing each other is somehow being read as supporting Dubya. Perhaps my Al Sadr Rummy joke caused that. Anyway, if the reaction of Saudi Arabia to internal terrorism is *still* in the midst of all this, to blame the Jews, then yeah I think that's worth some ink.

...is racist

More of a patriot than the president or the vice-president? A strange claim!

I can hear a patriotic chorus humming in the background: hmmmmm hmmmm-ica hmmmm hmmmmm-ica hmmmmm hmmmm hmmmmm hmmmmm for thee hmmmmm hmmmmm hmmmm hmmmmm hmmmm hmmmm hmmm hmmmmm. . .

*

Many of those other human rights violators are propped up by the U.S., of course, so if you count all those cases as some sort of strike against the U.S., it doesn't look too good.

Stuart, I still think you are kind of missing this point: I feel more responsible for the actions of my own government (and this is what some others here are saying as well, I think). At the very least, my objections in that case has more chance of mattering than my objections to, say, human rights violations in China.

I'm not convinced that international human rights organizations pay more attention to U.S. human rights violations. I'd need to see something to back that up.

That's what the French call the month of August?

"I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment," he said. While saying a few "misguided" and "maybe even perverted" perpetrators of abuse needed to be punished, he suggested that much of the criticism was exaggerated and misplaced.

"These prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents," he said. "Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals."

He went on: "I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons, looking for human rights violations while our troops, our heros, are fighting and dying."

Also, while listening to the hearings as I drove to work this morning, I heard one of the Republican senators remark that he was outraged that "this issue is being used for fundraising by the Kerry campaign."

I don't know exactly what he's referring to, but seeing as Kerry is running to put new leaders in place of the ones who have failed us miserably here, it seems like a pretty fucking appropriate issue for Kerry to talk about!

Critiques of sexual behavior and verbal tone only, please. We'll also accept fawning.

As far as holding Sadr to the same standard as Rumsfeld: how many US soldiers have died in captivity over the past year? How many have been tortured and sexually assaulted? How many stripped naked and beset by dogs? Even in the context of resisting an illegal military occupation I think Sadr's followers would have something to say about that. Let's have the "double standard" discussion when the enemies' malfeasance actually matches our own.

SAN FRANCISCO -- U.S. Rep. Pete Stark was under fire for a startling voicemail message that he left for a constituent, NBC11 reported.

The message was a response to the man's criticism of the East Bay Congressman's stand on the Iraqi prison abuse scandal.

Staff Sgt. Dan Dow, who is a member of the National Guard, said he wrote a letter to Stark criticizing the legislator's recent vote against a resolution condemning the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

"Your no vote on this resolution is a disgrace to the people of this district who have elected you," Dow wrote. "I urge you to stop your contemptuous display of bitter partisanship."

Within an hour of faxing the letter to Stark's office, Dow said there was a message on his cell phone from Stark himself.

"Dan, this is congressman Pete Stark," the message said. "I just got your fax, and you don't know what you're talking about.

"I doubt if you could spell half the words in the letter, and somebody wrote it for you," the message went on. "So I don't pay much attention to it. But I'll call you back later and let you tell me more about why you think you're such a great goddamn hero."

Dow, a law student, said he did write the letter himself.

"To have him say I was somehow trying to portray myself as a hero is totally untrue," Dow said. "To me, the only heroes right now are the guys that are out there on the front lines every day."

Stark would not comment on the message to NBC11 news.

However, a report in the Argus newspaper quoted him as saying he got his point across.

"I probably would have left out the blasphemy, it was a poor choice of words," he told the newspaper.

Pete Stark - He Spiked His Re-Election Campaign In The Nuts

"The 26-year-old Mr Berg, who owned a communications equipment company, was involved in rebuilding antennas in Iraq before he disappeared on 9 April.

But he went missing prior to that, and was later found to have been arrested at an Iraqi checkpoint in Mosul and held in an Iraqi jail with Iraqi prisoners for 13 days, his father told American TV on Tuesday morning, before the video was released.

Michael Berg said the US authorities were indirectly responsible for his death, by failing to secure his release and thereby causing him to miss his flight home on 30 March.

"He would have missed the escalation if they had let him go," he said.

The Berg family declined further comment after receiving news of the video. "

"The Bottom Line Is I Don't Trust The President Nor His Advisors"...

God bless Barbara Lee (who tried but failed to prevent Stark from caving into Bush's plan of attack against Afghanistan in response to Saudi/Pakastani terrorists' 9/11 attack).

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/politics/11WEB-ATEX.html?pagewanted=10

I swear some of these folk are completely fubared in the head.

The person who I want to hear speak up is John McCain, as he is probably the only person currently in the Congress who knows first hand what it is like to be on the other side of such behavior.

Of course, this is what happens when you are a war vet and disagree with what is going on. Read on, this guy isn't even asking for Rumsfeld to resign, yet he is giving comfort and aid to the enemy.

http://us.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/06/murtha.iraq/

>Tourists and Torturers

May 11, 2004
By LUC SANTE

So now we think we know who took some of the photographs at
Abu Ghraib. The works attributed to Specialist Jeremy
Sivits are fated to remain among the indelible images of
our time. They will have changed the course of history;
just how much we do not yet know. It is arguable that
without them, news of what happened within the walls of
that prison would never have emerged from the fog of
classified internal memos. We owe their circulation and
perhaps their existence to the popular technology of our
day, to digital cameras and JPEG files and e-mail.
Photographs can now be disseminated as quickly and widely
as rumors. It's possible that even if Specialist Joseph M.
Darby hadn't gone to his superiors in January and "60
Minutes II" hadn't broken the story last month, some of
those pictures would sooner or later have found their way
onto the Web and so into the public record.

Leaving aside the question of how anyone could have
perpetrated the horrors depicted in those pictures, you
can't help but wonder why American soldiers would
incriminate themselves by posing next to their handiwork.
Americans don't seem to have a long tradition of that sort
of thing. I can't offhand recall having seen comparable
images from any recent wars, although before the digital
era amateur photographs were harder to spread. There have
been many atrocity photographs over the years, of course -
the worst I've ever seen were taken in Algeria in 1961, and
once when I was a child another kid found and showed off
his father's cache of pictures from the Pacific Theater in
World War II, which shook me so badly that I can't remember
with any certainty what they depicted. I'm pretty sure,
though, that they did not show anyone grinning and making
self-congratulatory gestures.

The pictures from Abu Ghraib are trophy shots. The American
soldiers included in them look exactly as if they were
standing next to a gutted buck or a 10-foot marlin. That
incongruity is not the least striking aspect of the
pictures. The first shot I saw, of Specialist Charles A.
Graner and Pfc. Lynndie R. England flashing thumbs up
behind a pile of their naked victims, was so jarring that
for a few seconds I took it for a montage. When I
registered what I was seeing, I was reminded of something.
There was something familiar about that jaunty insouciance,
that unabashed triumph at having inflicted misery upon
other humans. And then I remembered: the last time I had
seen that conjunction of elements was in photographs of
lynchings.

In photographs that were taken and often printed as
postcards in the American heartland in the first four
decades of the 20th century, black men are shown hanging
from trees or light fixtures or maybe being burned alive,
while below them white people are laughing and pointing for
the benefit of the camera. There are some pictures of
whites being lynched, too, but these tend not to feature
the holiday crowd. Often the spectators at lynchings of
African-Americans are so effusive in their mugging that
they all seem to be vying for credit. Before seeing such
pictures you might expect the faces in them to express some
kind of collective rage; instead the mood is giddy, often
verging on hysterical, with a distinct sexual undercurrent.

Like the lynching crowds, the Americans at Abu Ghraib felt
free to parade their triumph and glee not because they were
psychopaths but because the thought of censure probably
never crossed their minds. In both cases a contagious
collective frenzy perhaps overruled the scruples of some
people otherwise known for their gentleness and sympathy -
but isn't the abandonment of such scruples possible only if
the victims are considered less than human? After all, it
is one thing for a boxer to lift his hands over his head in
triumph beside the fallen body of his rival, quite another
to strike a comparable pose next to the bodies of strangers
you have arranged in quasi-pornographic tableaus. The
Americans in the photographs are not enacting hatred;
hatred can coexist with respect, however strained. What
they display, instead, is contempt: their victims are
merely objects.

It is conceivable that such events might have occurred in a
war in which the enemy looked like us —certainly, there are
Americans to whom all foreigners are irredeemably Other.
Still, it is striking how, in wartime, a fundamental lack
of respect for the enemy's body becomes an issue only when
the enemy is perceived as being of another race. You might
have heard about the strings of human ears collected by
some soldiers in Vietnam, or read the story, reported in
Life during World War II, about the G.I. who blithely
mailed his girlfriend in Brooklyn a Japanese skull as a
Christmas present. And the concept of the human trophy is
not restricted to warfare, but permeates the history of
colonialism, from the Congo to Australia, Mexico to India.
Treating those we deem our equals as game animals, however,
has been out of fashion for quite a few centuries.

Of course the violence at Abu Ghraib was primarily
psychological - hey, only a few people were killed - and
the trophies were pictorial, like the results of a photo
safari. Some commentators have made a point of noting this
very relative nonviolence, contrasting it with the lynching
of the four American military contractors in Falluja last
month. This line of argument is notable for what it leaves
out: there is a difference between the rage of a people who
feel themselves invaded and the contempt of a victorious
nation for a civilian population whom it has ostensibly
liberated.

That prison guards would pose captives - primarily
noncombatants, low-level riffraff - in re-enactments of
cable TV smut for the benefit of their friends back home
emerges from the mode of thinking that has prevented an
accounting of civilian deaths in Iraq since the beginning
of the war. If civilian deaths are not recorded, let alone
published, it must be because they do not matter, and if
they do not matter it must be because the Iraqis are
beneath notice. And that must mean that anything done to
them is permissible, as long as it does not create
publicity that would embarrass the Bush administration. The
possible consequences of the Abu Ghraib archive are
numerous, many of them horrifying. Perhaps, though, the
digital camera will haunt the future career of George W.
Bush the way the tape recorder sealed the fate of Richard
Nixon.

Luc Sante, who teaches creative writing and the history of
photography at Bard College, is the author of "Low Life,"
"Evidence" and "The Factory of Facts." <

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0419/turse.php

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0419/mondo1.php

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20040511/capt.gh10205111758.bush_gh102.jpg

Never seen Bush II sweat like that before. Hope you enjoy Hell!

I would think sawing someone's head off counts as maleasance wouldn't you say? Or am I wrong?

counting up the instances of abuse on each side = ridiculous argument. So let's not have it. This is a total catastrophe but let's not think for a moment that an Iraq under Saddam, or his appalling sons, or murderous fanatics like Sadr, would be better (or even the same). It wouldn't

It would be

A documentary entitled Massacre at Mazar released in 2002 by Scottish film producer, Jamie Doran, implicates U.S. troops in the torturing and deaths of approximately 3,000 men from Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan.

Doran's documentary follows the finding of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), that concluded that there was evidence of the disposal of human remains at two mass gravesites near Mazar-i-Sharif. In the documentary, two witnesses claim that they were forced to drive into the desert with hundreds of Taliban prisoners who were held in sealed cargo containers. The witnesses alleged that the orders came from a local U.S. commander. Prisoners, who had not yet suffocated to death inside the vans, were shot by Northern Alliance gunmen, while 30 to 40 U.S. soldiers stood watching.

Irfan Azgar Ali, a survivor of the trip, informed the London Guardian newspaper, "They crammed us into sealed shipping containers. We had no water for 20 hours. We banged on the side of the container. There was no air and it was very hot. There were 300 of us in my container. By the time we arrived in Sheberghan, only 10 of us were alive." One Afghani truck driver, forced to drive the containers, says the prisoners began to beg for air. "Northern Alliance commanders told us to stop the trucks and we came down," he said. "After that, they shot into the containers to make air holes. Blood came pouring out. They were screaming inside." Another driver in the convoy estimated that an average of 150 to 160 people died in each container. When the containers were unlocked at Sheberghan, the bodies of the dead tumbled out. Another witness states they observed a U.S. soldier break an Afghani prisoner's neck and pour acid on others.

Come on, they were just letting off a little steam.

I mean if your case is that Iraq violated Geneva conventions during the actual conflict, it could easily be stated that the US has violated Geneva conventions throughout the entire War on Terror pre-Iraqi invasion.
This is true. See the Washington Post, December 26, 2002:
U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations;
'Stress and Duress' Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities
While the U.S. government publicly denounces the use of torture, each of the current national security officials interviewed for this article defended the use of violence against captives as just and necessary. They expressed confidence that the American public would back their view. The CIA, which has primary responsibility for interrogations, declined to comment.

"If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job," said one official who has supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists. "I don't think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA.."
[...]
According to Americans with direct knowledge and others who have witnessed the treatment, captives are often "softened up" by MPs and U.S. Army Special Forces troops who beat them up and confine them in tiny rooms. The alleged terrorists are commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep. The tone of intimidation and fear is the beginning, they said, of a process of piercing a prisoner's resistance.

While it is uncertain how many (if any) private contractors were involved in the abuse, remember that private contractors do not have to abide by the Geneva Convention.

Regarding all this talk of holding one side to the same standard as the other - this seems to be an excuse for having no standards at all. What in the world can it mean to have a standard of behavior, if you throw it out the window whenever others do something of which you don't approve?

I mean, there will always be nations and groups that have no regard for human rights. There will always be something horrendous that others have done, so one can try to escape the spotlight and minimize wrongdoing by pointing in another direction and saying, "Look, they're worse! Nobody's condemning X or Y brutal dictatorship right this second!"

For crying out loud, BushCo has been constantly talking about Saddam Hussein and about terrorist organizations and state-sponsored terrorism for two solid years now - hey, could it be that their crimes have actually been made public and sufficiently condemned already? Could it be that they're using this talk as a smokescreen right now? "Look over there, they're worse! Don't talk to me about anything wrong with US policy until you've talked your way through this very long list of things that are worse, because when we started this conversation, I didn't hear you saying what I decided you should say."

http://aztlan.net/iraqi_women_raped.htm

OK, links to other message boards may well be bad form, but I have to agree with one of the contributors near the top when they say "this is an awesome website". Read with interest as rednecks do more damage to US reputations the world over than any number of photos of GIs "letting off steam". My current favourite quote is "By your email address, i will assume you're from england. no offense, but we ARE better than you. There's a reason we left your country so long ago. Think about it.".

Somehow I doubt that the thoughts of a couple of "rednecks" on an Internet message board are really getting all that much play around the world.

they played an excerpt from the hearings yesterday and one senator voiced disbelief that a "few bad apples" would do what these soldiers did. She said that if a few soldiers wanted to get revenge on Iraqis that they would have just beaten them up and not taken pictures designed to offend muslims. (Sy Hersh made the same point the other day. That these pictures were probably used as blackmail and that prisoners were shown the pictures and told that they would be given out in their neighborhood unless they gave the U.S. information.)

sorry if this is all old news.

It's truly the most depressing thing I think I've ever seen.

That's because it's footage of someone being killed! What the hell did you expect?

People seeking this out and then compaining about it is just fucked.

Albert Camus began his classic essay Reflections on the Guillotine with an anecdote about his father’s excitement over the prospect of attending the execution of a man guilty of a particularly heinous crime in which he slaughtered a family of farmers, including children. Camus’s father believed that the guillotine was too mild a punishment for one who was guilty of such a bloodthirsty crime, but still, he dutifully set out in the dark to go to the designated place of execution at the other end of town where a great crowd had gathered.

And what was the point of the anecdote? Quite simply that when Camus’s father returned home, he didn’t say anything about what he’d seen, but instead, lay down and suddenly began to vomit.

“When the extreme penalty simply causes vomiting on the part of the respectable citizen it is supposed to protect, how can anyone maintain that it is likely, as it ought to be, to bring more peace and order into the community?” Camus writes. “Rather, it is obviously no less repulsive than the crime, and this new murder, far from making amends for harm done to the social body, adds a new blot to the first one.”

Yeah, it's about capital punishment, but that's basically what we're looking at here, isn't it? Eye for an eye? I'd like to think there are Iraqis over there that are just as horrified of what happened to Berg as we are of what happened to those soldiers in Abu Ghraib; just as horrified and just as helpless to stop it.

Or one can choose to turn the spotlight away from the horrendous things others have done because it may undermine their point of bashing America. Funny how that works both ways.

You can come back when you show me a network news channel that is actually showing the act of decapitation as opposed to the still picture before the act has happened which is ALL OVER EVERY FUCKING MEDIA OUTLET IN THE COUNTRY.

I mean, maybe your outrage is clouding your thought processes or something, but seriously you are just being INCREDIBLY FUCKING STUPID.

Me: "the FCC isn't stopping the Washington Post"

hstencil: "THE FCC DOESN'T REGULATE PRINT MEDIA, YOU FUCKING MORON!"

Me: "that's what I just said"

hstencil: "I wouldn't put understanding the difference between print and broadcast media past Stuart"

Yeah, you wouldn't put it past me because I understand the difference.

Point being: the FCC isn't keeping Nick Berg's head out of the papers because it doesn't regulate the papers. Something else is keeping Nick Berg's head out of the papers. Whatever that something is, it should be obvious that seeing graphic images of the wrongs Americans commit because they're NOT TOO OFFENSIVE to print or put on tv, and not seeing what the jihadis do to Americans and innocent Iraqis because they ARE TOO OFFENSIVE to put in newspapers or on tv 1) might tell you something and 2) has a major and unbalanced effect on the public perception of the war.

Dan, I don't know why you're wigging out but all I was saying is that a picture of 5 guys in black standing behind a guy in orange, and a text blurb that says "later they cut off his head" doesn't quite have the same sickening effect of seeing that happen. You cannot equate the emotional impact of the news coverage of Nick Berg's murder with the coverage of the prisoner abuses, because little is left up to the imagination in the latter case. Even if there are still worse photos to come out of Abu Ghraib, the impact of the story so far has relied on the photos we've already seen.

Please do not presume to think you can tell me how things affect me.

Seriously, I'm not entirely clear on your view here.

The media doesn't have footage of Americans cutting off Iraqis heads, or even terrorists heads. There's nothing they have that's comparable to the footage of Nick Berg's murder. The footage of his decapitation did not get out because someone on their side said "this is wrong, i've got to do something." There's no al qaeda investigation into how this happened. There are no jihadi higher-ups condemning this act of brutality. And the public in general doesn't see these monstrosities, they just hear about them.

again, show me where al Qaeda is a representative democracy. Show me the command-and-control structure in the jihadist insurgency.

If you do join the military, everyone from basic training will remember you all too well, and be very glad you got assigned somewhere else away from them so they could do their job without your pontifications.

Didja stop and think maybe that's why the pictures from Abu Ghraib capture our attention so much: because it makes people who (contrary to right-wing spin) love & cherish their country feel ashamed of their country's military?

Well didja?

Two planes crashing into World Trade Center to thread. Actually, your point is nonsensical - the Daniel Pearl story considerably outweighed everything else that happened in Afghanistan in terms of media coverage, including the fall of Kabul itself.

Well, we could change bashing America to bashing the Bush admin if you want. My point was that people are more likely to spotlight those incidents and attrocities that support whatever "side" they're on. People who support the war do this, as do people who are against it.

have you ever read an Amnesty International report, bnw? Also, equating Dubya & company with America the country is a real non-starter.

Accountability is a great strength to us in general, but it is a soft target the jihadis can easily attack, as well.

Matt: I never saw Daniel Pearl murdered, did you?

So I'd figure. I haven't seen anything other than a brief still before the killing which accompanied an online news story, and personally my desire to see any more ranks somewhere well below coating myself in bear grease and throwing myself onto hot coals.

What happens if we criticize ourselves and self-flagellate to the point of pulling out of Iraq and leaving it for the dogs?

Oh, no fear of blaming that on self-flagellation, Stuart. We're going to be pulling out of Iraq and leaving it for the dogs anyway.

show me a major US politician advocating a pullout from Iraq. L'il Denny Kucinich doesn't count as "major."

Ooooooooooooooh, I don't know...maybe someone who's help I had actually asked for.

and footage of an Iraqi corpse murdered at Abu Ghraib has already aired, too.

This is true. They haven't been showing the pictures or video of women and children with their heads blown off by american bombs on t.v. either.

WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR POINT?

Dumb question: was Al Queda's presence in Iraq confirmed before this video?

More inflammatory question: Is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi one of Michael Moore's Minutemen now?

PS - The AP is "racist"

What about the International Red Cross, then?

Honestly I have no idea why anyone even bothers talking to Stuart. The man is either an award-winning wind-up machine, or a seriously "seig heil" style bootlicker. Choose better enemies.

I've accused him of being both and he's not been fond of either take. He HAS also surprised me more than once (though D. Aziz won't like remembering it, Stuart made a pretty solid case against his anti-welfare diatribe, for instance). There's more there than might be guessed so quite why he gives himself over to this kind of reductionist simplicity on this subject is a mystery.

That's my point, although the footage is/was available on the Net, no one aired it, it still caused outrage far exceeding anything else that happened in Afghanistan. You don't need to see something to be outraged by it, Jesus.

Don't take that lecturing tone with me, mister.

Michael Berg described himself as fervently anti-war, but said his son disagreed. "He was a Bush supporter," Berg said. "He looked at it as bringing democracy to a country that didn't have it."

Michael Berg lashed out at the U.S. military and Bush administration, saying his son might still be alive if he had been allowed to leave the country on March 30, as he had originally planned.

"I think a lot of people are fed up with the lack of civil rights this thing has caused," he said. "I don't think this administration is committed to democracy."

Freepers were attacking Michael Berg on their website for not having the 'right' views.

I see your true colors shiiiiinin' throoooooo....

(i.e. you are at best a blind nationalist and at worst a racist, Stuart.)

This is the saddening delusion -- not that democracy is a bad thing, but that Bush somehow is the only right person to bring it and that everything he authorizes is the correct approach. I guess he died for his beliefs but for what gain?

Meantime, some brief but cogent points:

Already coalition forces are trying to reduce confrontations in the hope that a period of relative calm can emerge in the run up to the handover to an interim government on 30 June.

This tactic could see the emergence of new combinations of Iraqi security forces in a more complex line-up than the coalition envisaged. It might have no choice but to accept them.

But if the policy does not work and the handover proves to be symbolic only, then attention will have to turn to the circumstances in which troops can first be reduced and then perhaps be withdrawn.

The problem with the current plan for Iraq is that there is no date by which foreign troops will leave.

There is no clear exit strategy.

It is all left open for future decisions by the series of three Iraqi governments due to take over in the coming 18 months:

* the appointed caretaker interim government on 30 June;

* the transitional government to be chosen by an elected National Assembly next January;

* and the fully elected government at the start of 2006.

While the caretaker government might not act since it will be made up of coalition supporters, the Assembly elections in December or January could be dominated by the issue, leading to a request by the transitional government for a date to be set for withdrawal or for a process to be started.

But even the caretaker government might start making noises, especially if its members are political leaders rather than the technocrats sought by the UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi who is heading the effort to set the government up.

---

In the meantime, the coalition is trying to develop an interim strategy of reducing tension. This was evident in what happened in Falluja where, despite coalition statements that "foreign fighters and terrorists" would be brought to heel, the city was handed over a new force of old Iraqi soldiers.

Now, General Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armoured Division, has now said that the formula might be tried in other cities.

"We are going to try this model any place that I control right now and I think probably you are going to see some similar approach across the country," he said.

It is also evident in the handling of the Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr. General Dempsey has even said that he might hand over security in the holy city of Najaf, where Sadr is based, to a local force which could even include members of the Sadr militia. That would be a significant change indeed.

A senior British official with experience of Iraq said of Moqtada Sadr this week: "The strategy is to get the Iraqis, through the religious authorities, the governors and the provincial councils and the police to act to isolate him." This is quite a change from the earlier policy of trying to arrest him.

---

In a remarkable series of interviews in the Washington Post, senior American army officers have openly expressed doubts about whether the United States will win.

Major General Charles Swannack, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division which was in western Iraq for much of the past year, said that tactically the US was winning but when asked if overall it was losing, replied: "I think strategically we are."

Colonel Paul Hughes, the first director of strategic planning in Iraq after the war, whose brother died in Vietnam said: "Here I am, 30 years later, thinking we will win every fight and lose the war, because we don't understand the war we are in."

On April 5, the Bergs filed suit in federal court in Philadelphia, contending their son was being held illegally by the U.S. military. The next day, Berg was released. He told his parents he had not been mistreated.

(joking!)

Another inflammatory question: are the United States' recent explanations that the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib was "better" than what Saddam's henchmen doled out (and similarly, any "well at least we didn't behead anyone for public consumption" type argument) evidence that US military ethics are more closely fused to Israel's than ever before?

CBS television is understood to be going ahead with the broadcast later on Wednesday of a video diary by a female American soldier who worked at two prison camps in Iraq.

The video does not show scenes of abuse but the soldier is said to talk flippantly of Iraqi prisoners dying and makes it clear she does not see their safety as important.

"We've already had two prisoners die...but who cares? That's two less for me to worry about," she is reported to say in the diary.

poss. answer: did anyone notice how strictly Bush's speechwriters stuck to the "firm daddy" trope, even when he was supposedly eating crow for Arab audiences? He started his apology so strangely: instead of saying "Americans are disgusted" or "I am disgusted" or "this is obviously reprehensible" or any of the logical-sounding apologies you or I could cook up, he starts it off like this: "The Iraqi people need to understand.. (that Americans find this behavior disgusting, etc)." Because stern daddies lecture, they don't apologize. We are all children that need to be taught lessons. It's pretty clear if you look at his speeches that this isn't just instinct by his speechwriters, it's a very conscious strategy, and they stick with it fearlessly.

xp

I've already read a couple of pieces where conservative christians blame this on the liberal education kids today recieve in public schools.

Rumsfeld defends interrogation techniques

(Capitol Hill-AP) -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is defending the interrogation techniques used by the military in Iraq.
He is rejecting complaints that they violate international rules and may endanger any Americans who are taken prisoner.
Rumsfeld told a Senate committee that Pentagon lawyers had approved methods such as sleep deprivation and dietary changes. He says the lawyers also approved rules allowing prisoners to be made to assume stress positions.
His comments came as members of Congress prepared to view more pictures of abuse of Iraqi prisoners.
The Pentagon was providing the pictures, to be seen by senators in a secure location in the capitol.
House members are also getting a chance to see the pictures, which remain under control of the Pentagon.

The Right's Abu Ghraib Denial
Is the liberal outrage really worse than the torture?
By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, May 11, 2004, at 3:52 PM PT

The rapidly emerging conservative line on Abu Ghraib is that Congress and the news media are exploiting the story in order to discredit the Bush administration. "Clearly, the images are serving the political agenda of many newspapers," sniffed Col Allen, editor-in-chief of the New York Post, to the New York Times. Until this past Saturday Abu Ghraib was kept off Page One of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Post, proving that the Post's loyalty to right-wing politics is greater than its not-inconsiderable loyalty to Fleet Street-style tabloid journalism. Murdoch publications have downplayed Abu Ghraib even more than the rest of the conservative press. The Weekly Standard's Web site had nothing to say until yesterday, and the Times piece quotes Fox News executive producer Bill Shine saying he's "dialing back" on use of the photographs.

But other conservative commentators, while less skittish about discussing Abu Ghraib, have adopted more or less the same argument. Torture is bad; liberal outrage against torture is worse. "Like reporters at a free buffet," intoned the Wall Street Journal editorial board on May 6, "Members of Congress are swarming to the TV cameras to declare their outrage and demand someone's head, usually Donald Rumsfeld's." Shame on Congress for wanting to hold the defense secretary responsible for losing control of the troops he sent to Baghdad! It's an "ersatz scandal," Midge Decter, author of a hagiographic Rumsfeld biography, pronounced in the May 7 Los Angeles Times. In an editorial headlined "A Few Bad Men," the Weekly Standard, which turned against Rumsfeld months ago for messing up its pretty war, has now come to his defense. The idea that anyone in addition to the prison guards currently facing court martial should bear any responsibility for the mayhem at Abu Ghraib is, the Weekly Standard says, a con perpetrated by defense lawyers.

The prison guards were badly trained, we hear; they thought they were doing what the interrogators/contractors/CIA wanted them to do; they were cogs in a corrupt military machine. We might say something like that if we were being paid to defend these lowlifes. And, yes, there do seem to have been lamentable weaknesses in training and command. But "sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light" is evidence of a lack of humanity, not a lack of training. And consider this lovely detail: The Washington Post reports that there is "a new batch of photographs similar to those broadcast a week ago [which include] pictures showing crude simulations of sex among soldiers." Did the CIA encourage them to do that, too?

No, but the utter chaos that apparently prevailed at Abu Ghraib might have something to do with a lack of oversight. The military moved quickly to investigate after Gen. Antonio M. Taguba filed his report, but better still would have been sufficient supervision to prevent the abuses from becoming widespread in the first place. (For additional details, see this Feb. 2004 Red Cross report.) A May 9 story by Scott Higham, Josh White, and Christian Davenport in the Washington Post makes clear that one of the reasons the guards were out of control at Abu Ghraib was that there weren't enough of them:

At Abu Ghraib, the guard-to-prisoner ratio was about one to 15, with one battalion guarding 7,000. Army doctrine calls for one battalion per 4,000 enemy soldiers. In civilian prisons, one guard per three inmates is considered ideal.

Why weren't there enough guards? Why aren't there enough American soldiers performing any other vital tasks in Iraq? Because Rumsfeld wouldn't spare them. Until last week, the Weekly Standard was justifiably exercised about this. Here are Robert Kagan and William Kristol in the April 26 issue:

The shortage of troops in Iraq is the product of a string of bad calculations and a hefty dose of wishful thinking. Above all, it is the product of Rumsfeld's fixation on high-tech military "transformation," his hostility to manpower-intensive nation-building in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and his refusal to increase the overall size of the military in the first place. … The question is whether Rumsfeld and his generals have learned from past mistakes. Or rather, perhaps, the question is whether George W. Bush has learned from Rumsfeld's past mistakes. … If his current secretary of defense cannot make the adjustments that are necessary, the president should find one who will.

If this dump-Rummy analysis was correct on April 26, why isn't it now? Because Abu Ghraib has made it more scathing than Kagan and Kristol ever intended.

In the May 7 National Review Online, Kate O'Beirne was so offended by congressional outrage over Abu Ghraib that she abandoned rational thought altogether. Shame on "the Republican leadership in the House, who never got around to condemning the savage videotaped execution of Daniel Pearl," O'Beirne inveighed. Instead, they passed by "overwhelming approval … a redundant resolution condemning 'the abuse of persons in U.S. custody.' " To state the obvious: Congress did not have oversight authority over the terrorists who killed Pearl. Congress does, however, have oversight authority over the Baghdad occupation. It is therefore morally and diplomatically necessary for Congress to condemn the humiliation and torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Chatterbox, who sat beside Pearl for a few years in the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau, can assure you that Pearl would have been outraged to see his name invoked to silence protest against American war crimes. What decent person wouldn't?

Not even President Bush can escape conservative criticism for apologizing (albeit belatedly and clumsily) for the Abu Ghraib horrors and for urging the Iraqi people not to conclude that Americans are barbarians. How paternalistic, complains Jonathan V. Last today on the Weekly Standard's Web site. When Iraqis slaughtered military contractors in Falluja and desecrated their corpses, did Americans conclude that Iraqis were "savages or evildoers"? Um, yes. To be more precise, Americans concluded that Iraqis (Sunnis, anyway) were consumed by a dangerous and unceasing hatred toward Americans. But Last argues, absurdly, that the massacre was merely "[t]he product of a few deranged, dangerous men." If that's true, what was the military battle for Falluja all about? And why did we lose it?

Conservative Abu Ghraib denial reached its crudest expression today, at a Senate hearing, when Sen. James Inhofe, R., Okla., pronounced, "I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment. … I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons looking for human rights violations, while our troops, our heroes are fighting and dying."

Deny though it may, the right can't avoid forever any engagement with the ugly things that happened at Abu Ghraib. It will have to grapple with what the prison guards did and what made them do it. But all is not lost. Conservatives have forgotten the most important rule from the neoconservative playbook. When all else fails, blame the 1960s. The sexual abuse, the exhibitionism in photographing it, and the general breakdown of moral authority, are all legacies of … what, Class? The moral relativism and flight from responsibility that gained legitimacy when liberals surrendered to the radicals in the 1960s. (Or, if you're David Frum: the 1970s.) It's a cheap and shameless argument, but when did that ever stop the culture warriors? Hell, two years ago the Wall Street Journal blamed Enron on the 1960s. The Abu Ghraib argument is actually slightly less ridiculous than that one. Yet searching the Factiva news database for "Abu Ghraib and 1960s and liberalism," Chatterbox comes up empty. This is usually Decter's area of expertise, but obviously her allegiance to Rumsfeld has put any condemnation of Abu Ghraib out of bounds, no matter what the argument. Where have you gone, William J. "Death of Outrage" Bennett? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2100373/

I've noticed something funny (peculiar) about some news reports, too. A lot of them make the contention that the torture at Abu Ghraib was/is culturally specific: that being naked in front of others is particularly humiliating among Arabs, hinting at a kind of sexual conservatism in the culture. How fucking patronizing can you get. I guess New Yorkers wouldn't mind as much? Somebody must have gotten ahold of an "Arab expert" somewhere, and everybody's using him or her, or everyone's just copying each other, which is more likely.

x-post: Chuck that doesn't sound far-fetched at all, and like you I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned anywhere. After all, you wouldn't put the leader of the glee club in there. It wouldn't take that much of a conspiracy to try and figure out who "would have what it takes" to administer what MI guys apparently felt was "required."

The more I read about this Geoffrey Miller fellow the worse he sounds:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19081-2004May11.html

Karpinski said the decision about transferring control of the prison to military intelligence officials was broached at a September 2003 meeting with Miller, who was then in charge of the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, known colloquially as "Gitmo." Miller had come to Iraq at the insistence of top political officials in the Pentagon, who were frustrated by the meager intelligence coming from prisoners. Two weeks ago, he was appointed to reform the U.S.-run prisons in Iraq.

It's fun to stay at the Y-M-M-A!

I just wanted to reprint this because it's really, really funny to me.

And I forget; is Miller the guy who had also been previously ousted as the overall director of a civilian prison a couple years ago, for abuse issues? There was a really good story about that guy in the Times over the weekend, but maybe I've got two people confused. (That Washington Post link didn't work for me, sorry.)

http://www.prisonexp.org/
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2004/s1105314.htm

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4934436/

xpost

Meanwhile, old white guys be conferrin':

http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/12/congress.abuse/vert.warner.levin2.ap.jpg

Senators Warner and Levin today.

Pfc. Lynndie England told a Denver TV station on Tuesday that her
superiors gave her specific instructions on how to pose for the photos.
Asked who gave the orders, she would say only, "Persons in my chain of
command."

In photographs that have been
shown worldwide, England, 21, is
seen smiling, cigarette in her
mouth, as she leans forward and
points at the genitals of a naked,
hooded Iraqi. Another photo taken
at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison
shows her holding a leash that
encircles the neck of a naked Iraqi
man lying on his side.

"I was instructed by persons in
higher rank to `stand there, hold
this leash, look at the camera,' and
they took picture for PsyOps (psychological operations)," she told the
station.

"I didn't really, I mean, want to be in any pictures," she said. She also said
she thought "it was kind of weird."

The interview with England, a military reservist from West Virginia, was
taped Tuesday in North Carolina. England, who is now at Fort Bragg, also
met Tuesday with one of a team of Denver lawyers who have volunteered
to take her case.

Asked whether worse things happened than those already seen on the
photos, she said yes but declined to elaborate.

She said her superiors praised the photos and "just told us, 'Hey, you're
doing great, keep it up."'

England faces a military court-martial that includes charges such as
conspiracy to maltreat prisoners and assault consummated by battery, and
could face punishment ranging from a reprimand to more than 15 years in
prison.

No date has been set for a hearing in the case.

Six other soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company are also
charged. One, Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits of Hyndman, Pa., will face a
court-martial in Baghdad next week.

"We don't feel like we were doing things that we weren't supposed to
because we were told to do them," England said. "We think everything was
justified because we were instructed to do this and to do that."

After meeting with England, attorney Giorgio Ra'Shadd said she shouldn't
be used as a scapegoat by the military.

"You don't see my client doing anything abusive at all," Ra'Shadd said in
an interview. "I think she was ordered to smile."

Ra'Shadd said England was pulled into the situations by intelligence agents
who subverted the military chain of command. He said they used England
to humiliate the men being photographed so they could show the pictures
to more important prisoners and threaten them with the same treatment.

"The spooks took over the jail," said Ra'Shadd. Now in private practice, he
was formerly an Army lawyer assigned to the civil affairs and psychological
operations command at Fort Bragg.

England was sent back to the United States because she became pregnant
while serving. The father of her child is reportedly another soldier accused
in the prisoner abuse scandal.

Also Tuesday, Pentagon officials told a Senate committee that the prison
conditions shown in the pictures were confined to a few low-level soldiers
and intelligence officers.

But Ra'Shadd contended that the blame for the scandal lies high up in the
chain of command, arguing that only the highest-ranking officials could
have allowed civilian intelligence to override military command structure.

Interesting, so he's not an outside lawyer per se and therefore will be well aware of how to work the system. Combined with the fact that the trials are public, this should be interesting once the witnesses get called.

Is someone in charge of reviewing the system? If not, why not?
Was the prison system misdesigned through sinister intent or ignorance?

(xp Chuck at the end of that msnbc/newsweek article I linked above, you can see pictures of the people accused)

Empahasis mine. Let me remind you, he's a general.

http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed051204a.cfm

http://michnews.com/artman/publish/article_3599.shtml

Even more far-fetched conspiracy theory: if one were somewhat desperate to further blur the distinction between Osama bin Laden and Iraq, or to provide evidence of WMD inside Iraq, torture would be the most sure-fire way to go about it. It can produce whatever results one wants.

Thanks, Larcole.

To take an unrelated example, the recent U.S.-backed coup in Haiti has not been very big in the news the way it would be if the mainstream U.S. media were as hyper-vigillant about criticizing U.S. actions.

Also, where were the major media in the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq? My impression is that there was an awful lot of uncritical drum-beating there, unless you were really looking close for more critical perspectives.

As I assume you are aware, Noam Chomsky has practically made an industry out of arguing that the mass media are pretty servile in their coverage of U.S. foreign policy. (His writings about media may not be great social science, but I think they are good media criticism.))

Coalition intelligence put numbers at 70% to 90% of Iraq prisoners, says a February Red Cross report, which details further abuses.

Most "Arrested by Mistake"

As the war began, the Bush administration was still recruiting the American officials who would serve as the de facto Iraqi ministers. The people so recruited had no time to prepare for the assignment, either in learning about Iraq or in mastering the substantive skills needed to run the ministry assigned to them. Many mistakes were made. For example, the US official in charge of prisons decided to work with Ali al-Jabouri, the warden of Abu Ghraib prison, apparently unaware of the prison's fearsome reputation as the place where tens of thousands perished under Saddam Hussein. The coalition rehabilitated Abu Ghraib and today uses it as a prison. The symbolism may be lost on the US administrators but it is not lost on Iraqis.

"Unaware" or purposefully?

Yeah, it's more that if what you have is people who are being shot at in a hostile country, and what you're looking for is people (more to the point soldiers) who will do fucked up stuff under orders, you don't need to winnow out the worst 5%. The worst 95% will do you.

It might be patronizing and besides the points, but its true. I was watching Newshour the other night and they had some man on the street type interviews in iraq discussing how they wont even let their family members see them partially clothed, etc. The same goes with dogs and can be tied into those photos of that poor naked dude getting bitten by the german shephard.

man this post makes me sad. it reminds me of the early days of the occupation when one of our biggest problems was the fact that we were conducting searches of houses with dogs, which is a big no-no according to the koran.

Beheading Dominates Media Worldwide

Wed May 12,11:25 AM ET

By MICHAEL McDONOUGH, Associated Press Writer

LONDON - Amnesty International condemned the videotaped beheading in Iraq of American civilian Nick Berg [bunch of anti-Americans! -h], an act which Prime Minister Tony Blair's office described Wednesday as "barbaric." But Iranian radio accused Western media of using the slaying to distract attention from the abuse of prisoners in Iraq.

Images from the film showing Berg and his captors just before the killing dominated TV broadcasts and newspaper front pages in many countries.

A Kuwaiti newspaper ran a picture of one of the killers holding the severed head and some Greek TV stations showed the actual execution, although they obscured the head. The full video was posted on an al-Qaida-linked Web site.

"Such acts are unjustifiable under any circumstances and constitute a serious crime under international law," London-based human rights group Amnesty International said of the slaying. "Those responsible should be brought to justice in line with international standards."

The masked men who killed Berg claimed they were angered by coalition abuses of Iraqi prisoners. The video, posted Tuesday, showed them pushing Berg to the floor, severing his head and holding it up. His body was found near a highway overpass in Baghdad on Saturday, the same day he was beheaded, a U.S. official said.

The video bore the title "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American," referring to an associate of Osama bin Laden believed responsible for a wave of suicide bombings in Iraq.

Blair's official spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the killing as "a truly barbaric act," adding: "There is no justification for this kind of act in a civilized world."

In Greece, government spokesman Theodoros Roussopoulos said the execution provoked a "sense of abhorrence. ... The Greek government condemns violence wherever it comes from."

Most Greek TV stations aired segments of the video, some stopping just before the beheading while others obscured the head during the execution.

Other broadcasters in Britain, Spain, China, Germany, Italy and Belgium showed images of Berg kneeling on the floor with his black-clad captors standing behind him.

"What follows is too cruel to show," said Belgium's VRT public broadcaster, which aired the video up to the point where Berg was thrown to the ground after one attacker took out a knife.

Germany's mass-circulation Bild newspaper ran a picture of Berg's captors holding up his severed head, eliciting condemnation from the German Journalists' Union.

"Naturally, newspapers have to report on this horrible act," union chairman Michael Konken said in a statement. "But the human slaughter recorded in the picture does not belong in the media."

Iranian radio accused the western media of showing pictures from the video for propaganda purposes.

"As a result, the issue of Iraqi prisoners' torture has been totally ignored by these media," the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran said.

"The American authorities too, have entered this news-making propaganda. These authorities have described the killing method of the American national as loathsome, and implicitly indicated that the American troops were justified to torture Iraqi prisoners."

Arab media reacted cautiously to the execution, with some newspapers conspicuously playing it down or even ignoring it.

Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya, the big two satellite networks, aired edited snippets of the video. "The news story itself is strong enough," said Jihad Ballout, spokesman for Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television. "To show the actual beheading is out of the realm of decency."

Egypt's leading daily, Al-Ahram, ignored the beheading Wednesday. An editor said the news came too late for the paper to confirm the video's authenticity with the U.S. government.

Newspapers in Syria, where the government controls the press tightly, did not report the execution at all.

Five of Kuwait's seven dailies published the report with photographs on their front pages. The other two published brief reports. The Al-Siyassah daily ran two photos, including one with a masked militant holding up Berg's severed head.

HIZBOLLAH SLAMS BEHEADING OF AMERICAN AS UN-ISLAMIC
http://au.news.yahoo.com/040512/15/p/oyu8.html

This is one of the ways that the game is rigged, that the political unity of the right lets them spin things that hurt them as "partisan", because if it was a serious issue, some of them would be saying something, right?

My best hope for this mess (and it was a brighter hope three days ago) is that either Powell or McCain will snap. Powell looks like thinking about doing so, or openly hinting about it (That GQ article, or the Detroit News piece Sym just mentioned), but it would probably only be to save some posterity - it'd be career suicide, a Vader-play.

But McCain could make a constructive choice, if he decided that Bush+Rumsfeld were endangering/dishonouring the Army, and that he could handle being Vice-President to Kerry for four years. He's said that he'd think about it before, before immediately underlining that he's a Republican. But watching him asking Rumsfeld questions last week, he looked angry anough to kill, and (I may be projecting) seemed to suspect that the person in front of him was the one ultimately responsible (in the military sense).

These may be mostly dreaming, but a boy can dream, etc.

Disturbed by Abuse Photos, Senators Call for Accountability

WASHINGTON, May 12 — Senators who viewed hundreds of images of mistreatment of Iraq prisoners today described the material as gruesome and sickening, and some said it increased their determination to make certain those responsible were held accountable.

"They ought to be held criminally responsible, in my view," said Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California.

Dozens of senators filed into a secure room on the fourth floor of the Capitol to view what one lawmaker said were about 1,800 — some redundant — images flashed on a large screen, most of them still photographs but some video images. Most of the lawmakers would not discuss the details of the pictures, but said they were of the same general nature that have been publicly published.

In addition to the pictures depicting the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, the new set of photos included photographs of American military personnel engaging in sexual acts with each other.

"There were additional photographs that did not appear to have anything to do with the investigation, at least of abuse of Iraqi prisoners, involving sexual conduct between American troops," said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. "But largely more of the same."

House members were viewing them simultaneously in a secure committee room. Members of both parties described the photographs and other material, which they viewed under the supervision of military officials, as disturbing.

"It is perverted," said Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, who said the photos indicated to him that there had to be some knowledge of the abuse on the part of military commanders. "It is impossible that this could have been carried out without the knowledge of higher-ups."

Before senators were allowed into the room, Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, urged them to be cautious in later describing the material, and he reiterated that warning later in the afternoon. He said senators should be careful to "not incite in any way anger against our forces or others working in the cause of freedom."

Some lawmakers said the graphic content of the images led them to believe that they should not be made public. And not all members of the Senate took advantage of the three hours in which the material was being made available.

"I've already seen enough," said Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi. "Why would I want to go see a bunch of perverted pictures?"

Indeed.

In the course of committing this strategic error, Rumsfeld made many
tactical misjudgments. He willfully alienated allies whose assistance, many
warned him, would be necessary for a successful occupation. He
arrogantly excluded officials from other federal departments—especially
State and USAID—who knew much more than he did about
reconstruction in general and Iraqi society in particular. He ordered (or at
least accepted the order—we don't yet know who made the decision) the
dismantling of the Iraqi army, a move that created a massive power
vacuum and put tens of thousands of armed, angry, unemployed citizens
on the streets. He believed that Ahmad Chalabi, an exile who had no
political base in Iraq, would readily be accepted as the country's new
leader—and, on that basis, didn't think that much "postwar" planning
would be necessary. Far more unforgivable (after all, everybody's wrong
sometimes), Rumsfeld devised no backup plan in case his belief proved
mistaken (as it did).

The Roots of Abu Ghraib; A President Beyond the Law

By Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis is a former Times columnist.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

The question tears at all of us, regardless of party or ideology: How could American men and women treat Iraqi prisoners with such cruelty -- and laugh at their humiliation? We are told that there was a failure of military leadership. Officers in the field were lax. Pentagon officials didn't care. So the worst in human nature was allowed to flourish.

But something much more profound underlies this terrible episode. It is a culture of low regard for the law, of respecting the law only when it is convenient.

Again and again, over these last years, President Bush has made clear his view that law must bend to what he regards as necessity. National security as he defines it trumps our commitments to international law. The Constitution must yield to novel infringements on American freedom.

One clear example is the treatment of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The Third Geneva Convention requires that any dispute about a prisoner's status be decided by a ''competent tribunal.'' American forces provided many such tribunals for prisoners taken in the Persian Gulf war in 1991. But Mr. Bush has refused to comply with the Geneva Convention. He decided that all the Guantánamo prisoners were ''unlawful combatants'' -- that is, not regular soldiers but spies, terrorists or the like.

The Supreme Court is now considering whether the prisoners can use American courts to challenge their designation as unlawful. The administration's brief could not be blunter in its argument that the president is the law on this issue: ''The president, in his capacity as commander in chief, has conclusively determined that the Guantánamo detainees . . . are not entitled to prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Convention.''

The violation of the Geneva Convention and that refusal to let the courts consider the issue have cost the United States dearly in the world legal community -- the judges and lawyers in societies that, historically, have looked to the United States as the exemplar of a country committed to law. Lord Steyn, a judge on Britain's highest court, condemned the administration's position on Guantánamo in an address last fall -- pointing out that American courts would refuse even to hear claims of torture from prisoners. At the time, the idea of torture at Guantánamo seemed far-fetched to me. After the disclosures of the last 10 days, can we be sure?

Instead of a country committed to law, the United States is now seen as a country that proclaims high legal ideals and then says that they should apply to all others but not to itself. That view has been worsened by the Bush administration's determination that Americans not be subject to the new International Criminal Court, which is supposed to punish genocide and war crimes.

Fear of terrorism -- a quite understandable fear after 9/11 -- has led to harsh departures from normal legal practice at home. Aliens swept off the streets by the Justice Department as possible terrorists after 9/11 were subjected to physical abuse and humiliation by prison guards, the department's inspector general found. Attorney General John Ashcroft did not apologize -- a posture that sent a message.

Inside the United States, the most radical departure from law as we have known it is President Bush's claim that he can designate any American citizen an ''enemy combatant'' -- and thereupon detain that person in solitary confinement indefinitely, without charges, without a trial, without a right to counsel. Again, the president's lawyers have argued determinedly that he must have the last word, with little or no scrutiny from lawyers and judges.

There was a stunning moment in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address when he said that more than 3,000 suspected terrorists ''have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem for the United States.''

In all these matters, there is a pervasive attitude: that to follow the law is to be weak in the face of terrorism. But commitment to law is not a weakness. It has been the great strength of the United States from the beginning. Our leaders depart from that commitment at their peril, and ours, for a reason that Justice Louis D. Brandeis memorably expressed 75 years ago.

''Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher,'' he wrote. ''For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself.''

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

"Take our word for it. They're disgusting," said Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority whip.

--

"I think the only hope that we have, really, of redeeming ourselves here and winning back some of the support that this incident has cost us [is] if we act as an open society that will deal with problems openly, that will hold people accountable," said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Georgia, agreed.

"Every time we have these photographs dribbled out or some expansion of that situation, it is not good for America," Chambliss said. "And we need to conclude it. And getting all of these photographs out at one time is the way to do it."

--

Rep. Jane Harman, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, called the images "stomach churning." The California Democrat said one image showed a handcuffed man beating his head against a wall. Lawmakers said they also saw several images of hooded men masturbating.

--

Asked if the pictures were worse than those already public, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said, "They're all bad."

--

"We all go through strong emotions when something like this occurs," Rumsfeld said, referring to the prisoner abuse. "We see it and we're shocked and we're stunned and we're disgusted, and we know in our hearts that we are better than that, and, yet, that is what is being seen in the world as presenting our country."

And indeed, whose fault is that?

Interesting to see that flake Chambliss saying the pictures should be released. Could deflect some of the politicized debate once again typically forming.

Meanwhile, Sens. Warner and Frist, looking not at all well post-viewing:

http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/12/congress.abuse/vert.warner.frist.ap.jpg

This is an interesting question - because I think the 372nd arrived at Abu Ghraib on October 15, 2003 (some sources, I'll have to verify) - while there was an article that I can't find now which gave the time/date stamp on the released abuse photos, and it was only dated a few days later. Which suggests to me that.. well, these soldiers hadn't even been there for more than a week, and it's hard to believe (if anyone did) that they had been guarding the prison long enough for the situation to eventually deteriorate into total chaos.

I was thinking the exact same thing.

He could have been a serious contender in the 2000 elections, you'll remember his decision not to run was met with relief from the other candidates. He fairly clearly won't be in Bush's second cabinet, (God forfend) because it's a shit job for someone with his principles, but if he sits it out on the sidelines, he might have a shot at being the first black president in 2012. Obviously he'll only have this chance if he sticks with the Republicans.

Obviously he'll only have this chance if he sticks with the Republicans.

I don't think that's necessarily so. A democratic party that's considering nominating a Republican for VP is a democratic party that is becoming more and more conservative -- he would be a good fit with that gang; hell, they might even listen to him.

His principles are what took a hit after that speech.

I also remember his decision not to run being met with more relief from Powell and his family than from the other candidates.

The man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country’s criminal justice system.

If his principles are seen to have suffered (and it will still take a seachange inside the Republican Party for that opinion to be spoken out loud), then he can always try the Blair defence "But I did so much good by holding him back!".

I assumed his 2000 decision was taken because he didn't think he could win (what with Al Gore being the chosen son of the other first black president:) and he didn't want to be the person who lost the election for the Republicans, as that might damage his chances at another shot.

I'm making "the first black president" out to be a really big thing, I don't know if it is to him. But considering how ridiculously well-positioned he was for it (Diplomat, Military, won the Gulf War), I don't really see how it couldn't be.

In the case of black voters, I don't see them lining up in support of Condoleeza Rice simply because of her race; I think there's a lot more to black voters' rejection of Republican politics than race, and Mr. Powell would probably have to make concessions on economic and social grounds that we might expect Republicans to reject outright -- while Democrats would not.

His principles are definitely seen to have suffered, but a fair question might be with whom. I get the sense that more traditional Republicans are happiest when he's a good soldier, and in that sense he did his job well. Many on the left who weren't sure about him have thrown him to the sharks now. But many moderates who were *for* the war are probably feeling mislead and rethinking their support for him. To them, a revolt against the administration might be seen as courageous and redemptive. If he knew he had a job in which to land, he's certainly shrewd enough to move.

My sense of his 2000 decision was that he knew what kind of microscope he would be under -- was perhaps even threatened with the kind of treatment that McCain saw -- and decided that perhaps another year would be best for his image.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1215145,00.html

Seems an utterly ridiculous and fairly off claim if you ask me yet someone I know suggested it to me this morning.

Add to that the sort of poses adopted by her in the photographs, and the insinuations by some of the apologists that it's no worse than Frat behaviour, and it all starts to look exactly like how 'crazy college kids letting off steam during Spring Break' is portrayed (or at least how it comes across over here in Britain).

I'm not defending their behaviour in any way here, btw.

hahahahaha, well if you're a high-ranking female officer, you get court-martialed for "adultery."

Putting it another way - these people have been fucking at work. If you did it, would your boss ignore it?

WASHINGTON, May 12 — The Central Intelligence Agency has used coercive interrogation methods against a select group of high-level leaders and operatives of Al Qaeda that have produced growing concerns inside the agency about abuses, according to current and former counterterrorism officials.

At least one agency employee has been disciplined for threatening a detainee with a gun during questioning, they said.

In the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level detainee who is believed to have helped plan the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as "water boarding," in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.

These techniques were authorized by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the C.I.A. The rules were among the first adopted by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks for handling detainees and may have helped establish a new understanding throughout the government that officials would have greater freedom to deal harshly with detainees. ...

The authorized tactics are primarily those methods used in the training of American Special Operations soldiers to prepare them for the possibility of being captured and taken prisoners of war. The tactics simulate torture, but officials say they are supposed to stop short of serious injury.

Counterrorism officials say detainees have also been sent to third countries, where they are convinced that they might be executed, or tricked into believing they were being sent to such places. Some have been hooded, roughed up, soaked with water and deprived of food, light and medications. ...

Concerns are mounting among C.I.A. officers about the potential consequences of their actions. "Some people involved in this have been concerned for quite a while that eventually there would be a new president, or the mood in the country would change, and they would be held accountable," one intelligence source said. "Now that's happening faster than anybody expected."

The C.I.A.'s inspector general has begun an investigation into the deaths of three lower-level detainees held by the C.I.A in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Justice Department is also examining the deaths. ...

Actually, this was McCotter I was thinking of; somebody wound up linking the Times piece about him, which ran last weekend, above.

Turns out I was wrong about the soldiers who are being tried all being white; the Newsweek piece actually shows Sgt. Javal Davis, a black guy. But he's not in any of the abuse photos we've seen so far, and (for whatever this is worth) supposedly told investigators that he was morally opposed to the abuse he saw happening.

The idea of the Berg beheading video being staged by the US actually occured to me this morning, too, though the thought seems very far fetched. That Times story this morning about how he was apparently held for 13 days in a US-sanctioned Iraqi prison makes his whole death seem increasingly fishy, though. Great piece - -he seems like a funny guy, I love his Arlo Guthrie joke in his email back home to Bucks County. (Good pieces about Miller and CIA/Gitmo techniques in the paper, too, by the way.) Anyway, is it out of the question that somehow he might have been at least deemed an expendable sacrifice, and "allowed" by the US to be taken by Al Quaeda, to once again boost support for the war (which the beheading seems to have done in some circles) and deflect attention away from the torture scandal? (Assuming I have the chronology of his death right; maybe I don't...)

Abu Ghraib Denial, Part 2
Right-wing culture warriors are on the case.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, May 13, 2004, at 4:11 AM PT

Stop the presses! Chatterbox predicted May 11 that right-wing culture warriors would soon be blaming the Abu Ghraib prison scandal on the depravities of the 1960s. But various readers alerted Chatterbox that quite a few conservative commentators (most of them second-tier) have already come tantalizingly close to making just that point:

* Blame moral relativism. Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, to Rachell Zoll of the Associated Press: "This is not a breakdown in the system. This reflects a breakdown in society. These people's moral compass didn't work for some reason. My guess is because they've been infected with [moral] relativism."
* Blame gays. "Could it be, as Rush Limbaugh mentioned in passing on a recent broadcast, that the perpetrators of the alleged crime are homosexuals?" asked Jeremy Reynalds of Men's News Daily. "Many people believe that homosexuals have a much greater potential than heterosexuals to be sexual predators. In addition, a sizeable number of sexually dysfunctional individuals (aka sexual predators) take pictures of their illicit acts."
* Blame pornography. Rebecca Hagelin, a vice president of the Heritage Foundation, on Townhall.com, says we need to "take a cold, hard look at the degradation in our own country" if we want to understand Abu Ghraib: "[W]ith the non-judgmental, sex-crazed, anything-goes culture that we have become at home, it seems that America has set herself up for international humiliation. Our country permits Hollywood to put almost anything in a movie and still call it PG-13. We permit television and computers to bring all manner of filth into our homes. We permit school children to be taught that homosexuality" etc., etc.
* Blame feminists. Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, as quoted by David Thibault on the Cybercast News Service Web page: "The globally distributed photo of a U.S. servicewoman holding a naked Iraqi prisoner by a leash 'is exactly what feminists have dreamed of for years. … That demeaning photo of a female soldier with an Iraqi man on a leash—a woman had to have taken that picture,' Donnelly said. 'And I understand the other woman soldier has admitted that she did.' "
* Blame Quentin Tarantino. Rich Lowry, editor of National Review: "[T]he distinct echoes of Abu Ghraib in our culture are unmistakable. "Consider the iconic film of the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. It includes a scene of the rape of a man imprisoned and kept as a sexual slave, which prompted laughs in theaters. The victim, 'The Gimp,' became a figure of fun. Tarantino's latest, the Kill Bill movies, present the same romance of power and violence, arbitrarily and stylishly wielded. Cruelty, Tarantino tells us, can be fun."
* Blame the Farrelly brothers. Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker: "When President Bush told the world that abuses at Abu Ghraib prison do not reflect American values, he was right. … But some of what happened at Abu Ghraib, specifically the sexualized humiliations, may reflect American culture, especially in the instance of the naked human pyramid, which is nearly iconographic within the adolescent zeitgeist that spawned our current generation of soldiers. … What we saw, at least in part, was 'The Farrelly Brothers Do Baghdad.' "
* Blame women in the military. Linda Chavez, who almost became President Bush's labor secretary: "Military service has become heavily sexualized, with opportunities for male and female soldiers, sailors and Marines to engage in sexual fraternization, which, though frowned upon—and in certain circumstances, forbidden—is almost impossible to prevent. … Take a look at the faces of those soldiers again, especially the female soldiers. They look less like sadists than delinquents. They look like they're showing off at some wild party trying to impress everybody with how 'cool' they are."
* Blame the academic left. James Taranto, in the Wall Street Journal editorial page's "Best of the Web Today": "[I]ncreasing the quality of military recruits would probably help avoid future Abu Ghraibs. One constructive step toward that end would be for elite universities to drop antimilitary policies, so that the military would have an easier time signing up the best and brightest young Americans." (Chatterbox is sympathetic to Taranto's plea that Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and various other schools that chased out ROTC during the 1960s bring it back. But he's not sold on the idea that the "best and brightest" are any less predisposed to torture Iraqis than anyone else. Saddam reportedly has a law degree.)
* Blame the liberal media/entertainment complex. Emilie Lamar, in a letter to the Montgomery Advertiser, observes: "The liberal media and the Hollywood crowd with their abandoning of morals and their attitude of 'whatever feels good' must've rubbed off on the military guards."
* Blame journalists' Vietnam-bred hostility toward the military. Diana West, columnist for the Washington Times: "With Abu Ghraib, the old antagonisms between the media and the military return, with the counter-culturally-minded media exulting over a high and mighty military slip." Seconded by Marvin Olasky, a Bush guru who coined the term "compassionate conservatism."
* Blame our sick society. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council: "We must be willing to look deeper—we must be willing to look our culture in the mirror and ask some hard questions about what kind of society our children are growing up in."

Chatterbox is certain there are more examples. Please don't send them. Meanwhile, George Will, the conservative Washington Post columnist and TV commentator, has a more novel idea: Blame Donald Rumsfeld. You know, the guy in charge of the military. It's a thought.

US Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld has said the
revelations about the abuse of
Iraqi prisoners by American
soldiers were "a body blow".

----

He insisted that the pictures
were not representative of
American values, and that both
he and President Bush had faith
in the troops serving in Iraq.

Referring to media coverage of
the war, the defence secretary
said he had "stopped reading the newspapers".

"It's a fact. I'm a survivor," he said.

The poetry's not getting any better.

Some shmuck named Bob Mansen, in Illinois: "It just makes me madder. Let's kill them all. Let's wipe them off the face of the earth."...

Hey, if it causes the right ends...

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/05/13/iraq.berg/index.html

I'm interested in this:

In an interview with Boston radio station WBUR on Tuesday, Berg's father, said: "I still hold [Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld] responsible because if they had let him go after a more reasonable amount of time or if they had given him access to lawyers we could have gotten him out of there before the hostilities escalated.

"That's really what cost my son his life was the fact that the U.S. government saw fit to keep him in custody for 13 days without any of his due process or civil rights and released him when they were good and ready."

In addition, Chilean freelance journalist Hugo Infante said that weeks before the videotape of Berg's death appeared on the Internet, "Nick told me, 'Iraqi police caught me one night, they saw my passport and my Jewish last name and my Israeli stamp. This guy thought I was a spy so they put me with American soldiers and American soldiers put me in a jail for two weeks.'"

Three Arab states -- Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates --- have condemned Berg's murder. "There is no doubt that killing detainees and mutilating the remains of the dead are acts which are condemned by all religions and contrary to the morals of all nations and peoples," Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan said in a statement released Wednesday.

Does this make any sense to ANYBODY? A Jewish last name and an Israel stamp in an American passport gets you thrown into an American jail? WTF?

(is Israel Mel Gibson or Danny Glover?)

Thursday May 13, 2004 7:16 PM

AP Photo SPD101

By JASON STRAZIUSO

Associated Press Writer

WEST CHESTER, Pa. (AP) - A U.S. diplomatic official in Iraq told the family of slain American Nicholas Berg that he was being detained by the U.S. military when they lost contact with him for several days in early April, according to e-mails provided by the family Thursday.

U.S. government officials have said Berg, who was found dead last weekend in Baghdad, was detained by Iraqi police and was never in the custody of American forces.

He is believed to have been kidnapped within days of his release by either Iraqi police or coalition forces, and later beheaded by militants who videotaped the slaying.

To back its claims that Berg was in U.S. custody, the family showed The Associated Press an April 1 e-mail from Beth A. Payne, the U.S. consular officer in Iraq.

``I have confirmed that your son, Nick, is being detained by the U.S. military in Mosul. He is safe. He was picked up approximately one week ago. We will try to obtain additional information regarding his detention and a contact person you can communicate with directly,'' the e-mail said.

In two e-mails later that day, Payne wrote that she was still trying to find a local contact for the family.

Berg's brother, David Berg, called on the government to come clean about its contacts with the slain American before he died. The family has blamed the government for keeping him in custody for too long while anti-American violence escalated in Iraq.

Berg's due process was violated, his father is correct.

That said, Kris's question IS interesting -- exactly what was said to the US guys by the Iraqis who turned him over?

"psychologists say the stances of the attackers were WESTERN"

"they had pale skin"

"they looked as though they couldn't read arabic"

"al quaeda is mostly CIA now."

It just seems so ridiculous. I mean if someone believes that the US are responsible for killing Berg, then is there any way in which they will ever believe anything they disagree with isn't a lie. It's a total death of rhetoric, I guess in part, to be fair, caused by general lack of info.

I am SO GLAD I am now finished college for the summer, I can't take any more rock solid moral confidence right now.

On Thursday, Wolfowitz told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the administration's second request for funds will come early next year.

"It will surely be much larger than $25 billion," he said.

That would bring the total requested so far for next year to over $50 billion. Many lawmakers of both parties have said they believe even that figure will ultimately prove short by many billions of dollars.

Bush's initial request for $25 billion would give him nearly unfettered control over details of how the money would be spent, which drew fire from senators.

Though Congress is considered certain to provide the money he wants, it is uncertain whether it will grant him such leeway in dispensing it. Democrats and some Republicans, rankled by reports that the administration used earlier funds for Iraq war preparations without telling them, are leery of providing him with unlimited flexibility in spending the money.

"This is not responsible because it's just a blank check for $25 billion," said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, top Democrat on the committee. "So in terms of balance with Congress, there's no balance here."

Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, said he was troubled by a request "that basically outlines some priorities and that states it can be used for any fund."

Wolfowitz defended the administration's request for flexibility.

"We're not looking for a blank check," he said. "We are looking for the kind of flexibility that will make sure that when a need arises, we can allocate funds to where that need exists."

Mmm, doubtless.

um were you alive at all during the 1990s? Ruby Ridge? Waco? Hello?!?

This seems a bit presumptuous.

(x-posts)

Infante stays at the $30-a-night Al Fanar Hotel, where Berg was staying, and regularly chatted and shared drinks with him.

Infante said Berg told him that Iraqi police were suspicious of the electronics equipment he was carrying for his work on radio communications towers when he was arrested in Mosul

Coalition spokesman Dan Senor said Berg was visited three times by FBI agents while he was in custody of Iraqi police. He said the agents concluded Berg was not involved in terrorist or criminal acts and referred other questions relating to Berg's detention to Mosul police.

The FBI confirmed its agents met with Berg, and also said the Coalition Provisional Authority offered Berg safe passage out of Iraq upon his release.

FBI agents "encouraged him to accept CPA's offer to facilitate his safe passage out of Iraq. Mr. Berg refused these offers," the FBI said in a statement.

Infante said Berg had told him he was held in a coalition facility where Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians and Iranians suspected of entering Iraq illegally were also detained.

And it's mighty questionable to accuse people of "bullying" and "shutting down questions before they're asked," just because they're frustrated by the breakdown in discourse and thought that comes with wild conspiracist thinking.

Hm, you know, if ever BushCo needed a sudden cache of WMD of all shapes and sizes hand-stamped and countersigned by Saddam and Osama, along with photos of them making out, to suddenly come to light...

And for the record, that last sentence wasn't an accusation; it was a statement about a particular kind of argument. If you took it personally, Ronan, I apologize.

(And that's a measure of how equally stupid I find both situations)

European researchers at a security conference in Switzerland last week demonstrated computer-based techniques that can identify blacked-out words and phrases in confidential documents.

The researchers showed their software at the conference, the Eurocrypt, by analyzing a presidential briefing memorandum released in April to the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. After analyzing the document, they said they had high confidence the word "Egyptian" had been blacked out in a passage describing the source of an intelligence report stating that Osama Bin Ladin was planning an attack in the United States.

The researchers, David Naccache, the director of an information security lab for Gemplus S.A., a Luxembourg-based maker of banking and security cards, and Claire Whelan, a computer science graduate student at Dublin City University in Ireland, also applied the technique to a confidential Defense Department memorandum on Iraqi military use of Hughes helicopters.

They said that although the name of a country had been blacked out in that memorandum, their software showed that it was highly likely the document named South Korea as having helped the Iraqis. ...

Experts on the Freedom of Information Act said they feared the computer technique might be used as an excuse by government agencies to release even more restricted versions of documents.

"They have exposed a technique that may now become less and less useful as a result," said Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, of the research project. "We care because there are all kinds of things withheld by government agencies improperly."

Philly news - By this time I had missed the last public service-taxi to Baghdad, so I started to negotiate with a throng of taxi drivers (none of whom had a car - that's kind of an afterthought to actually winning the negotiations). I've got one down to 30,000 ID (about $20 at the time) when the IP (Iraqi National Police) swings by on patrol. It seems they had reports about unknown Iranian people infiltrating their town, and at night they can't see much of my face. Anyhow, the story ends in a rather anti-climatic fashion - the police collect me and take me off to the Lieutenant who is more worried for my safety than about me being an Iranian spy. By the time the story get's told and re-translated a few times, they've got me being picked up at the sheep market amidst a bunch of Turkish truck drivers. So I am invited to spend the night in Diwaniya (which I do) and the next morning after hours of waiting and re-telling the sheep story I get on my way back to Baghdad. The sad part is I didn't really have a great desire to return to Baghdad - it's so much nicer out in the country.

http://www.breakfornews.com/NickBergEnemiesList.htm

(I think it's wild conspiracy, personally)

(CAUTION: there are two still photos of the beheading on this page if you don't want to see such stuff)

If that's true, it doesn't say much, given that these particular Muslims are also publicly beheading a guy.

x-post

And seeing as we know of actual, undisputed Muslims who have commited "un-Islamic" murders in the past few years, neither of these details does anything to disprove the idea that they are, in fact, Muslim militants.

Well, I'm not saying I know who or what the beheaders were. The whole thing does take the heat off Abu Ghraib and reincense the Yankee fighting spirit. I put nothing - I repeat nothing - past BushCo.

Rumsfeld has maintained a positive image with much of America because he controls information fanatically and tolerates no deviation from the party line. Differing opinions are punished in today's Pentagon - and every field general who has spoken plainly of the deficiencies of either the non-plan for the occupation of Iraq, the lack of sufficient troops (in Iraq or overall) or any aspect of Rumsfeld's "transformation" plan has seen his career ended.

It isn't treason to tell the truth in wartime. But it verges on treason to lie. And Rumsfeld lies.

Our military needs vigorous, continual internal debate. Contrary to popular myth, our officer corps has a long tradition of dissenting opinions. And the grave new world in which we find ourselves is not susceptible to party-line solutions.

---

Rumsfeld's "vision" was to lavish money on the defense industry and administration-friendly contractors, while sending too few troops to war, with too little battlefield equipment, inadequate supplies and no long-range plan. As one Army colonel put it in the heat of battle, "We're winning this despite OSD."

---

I'm privileged to spend a good bit of time with our military officers, from generals to new lieutenants. And I have never seen such distrust of a public official in the senior ranks. Not even of Bill Clinton. Rumsfeld & Co. have trashed our ground forces every way they could. Only the quality of those in uniform saved us from a debacle in Iraq.

Of course, those in uniform don't get to pick the SecDef. And they continue, as they always will, to loyally carry out their orders to the letter. But to be effective, a SecDef must be respected. He doesn't have to be liked. But, especially in wartime, he must be trusted.

Rumsfeld has failed the most important test of all.

Clinging to power isn't a mark of strength, but of weakness, arrogance and brute obstinacy. Rumsfeld has wounded our military and sent our troops to die for harebrained schemes. In place of sound plans, he substituted political prejudices. Election year or not, he has to go.

It's time to bring integrity, mutual respect and a focus on the realities of warfare back to the Pentagon. The White House has Sen. McCain's phone number.

The emphasis on Bill Clinton was mine. I want every Bush supporter ever to read that one -- because I want to see them flail and whine in response.

With a $500 billion deficit, we do not have the money for new wars. With an Army of 480,000 stretched thin, we do not have the troops. With April-May costing us a battalion of dead and wounded, we are not going to pay the price. With the squalid photos from Abu Ghraib, we no longer have the moral authority to impose our "values" on Iraq.

Bush's "world democratic revolution" is history.

Given the hatred of the United States and Bush in the Arab world, as attested to by Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, it is almost delusional to think Arab peoples are going to follow America's lead.

It is a time for truth. In any guerrilla war we fight, there is going to be a steady stream of U.S. dead and wounded. There is going to be collateral damage – i.e., women and children slain and maimed. There will be prisoners abused. And inevitably, there will be outrages by U.S. troops enraged at the killing of comrades and the jeering of hostile populations. If you would have an empire, this goes with the territory. And if you are unprepared to pay the price, give it up

In the days of Saddam Hussein, hangings at Abu Ghraib prison took place on Wednesdays and Sundays--up to fifty or sixty a day, year after year, decade after decade. Prisoners were often shuttled to Abu Ghraib—a vast complex twenty miles west of Baghdad, with three miles of cinder-block walls and twenty-four watchtowers—in an ice-cream truck. Tens of thousands never came out. In the nineteen-eighties, according to a Washington Post report by Peter Finn, the executioner was a tall, burly man known as the Sword. He wore a pistol with Saddam’s name inscribed on the handle, and his breath reeked of whiskey. The Sword’s successor used to embrace the condemned prisoner from behind on the scaffold, so that when the trapdoor opened the two dropped together and the prisoner’s neck snapped more efficiently. Torture was routine in Abu Ghraib: isolation, beatings, rapes, attack dogs, electric shocks, starvation. In the death house, the walls were covered with graffiti. Most marked the days left to the prisoners. “God save me,” one man wrote, “and I will pray seventy thousand times.” A report published in 1993 by Human Rights Watch quoted a former inmate as saying, “No one, not Pushkin, not Mahfouz, can describe what happened to us.”

Meanwhile, on the CNN site, a breaking news crawl:

At least one technique removed from list of interrogation methods used by U.S. military in Iraq, sources tell CNN. Details soon.

Gee, wonder why.

(x-post)

"To our knowledge, he was detained by the Iraqi police in Mosul," coalition spokesman Dan Senor told CNN. "He was in Iraqi police custody. He was met by U.S. officials, he was visited three times by the FBI, but at all times, he was in Iraqi custody."

"I think some of the confusion emanates from the fact that a number of the detention facilities throughout the country, there are American MPs who play a support role there," Senor added. "But it doesn't detract from the fact it's still an Iraqi facility, and I think once we do a little more investigating we can hope to provide more clarity."

---

Berg's body arrived Wednesday at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. His parents had requested permission to be at the base when the coffin arrived, but that request was denied. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, said Thursday that refusal came from the Department of Defense.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry also spoke with Michael Berg, Kerry said at a campaign stop in Little Rock, Arkansas. He would not discuss the details of the conversation. "There's no word to describe how as a father I know I would feel if it was one of my daughters or one of my stepsons," the senator told a local television station. Kerry's campaign said Michael Berg contacted them Wednesday night.

That note of refusal from the DoD about Berg's coffin -- I REALLY want to know what the explanation was there.

Two Pentagon officials have been asked to stay away from the details of the detainee abuse scandal in an effort to have unbiased officials review future legal decisions.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has been told to stay out of the scandal issue and focus on issues such as troop rotation and the June 30 handover.

Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been taken out of the day-to-day Pentagon management of the scandal, according to several Pentagon sources.

Sources close to Pace say taking him "out of the loop" on the abuse scandal is necessary because Myers has deliberately talked publicly about the matter, in part to openly address the crisis with the American public and with U.S. military troops.

Wolfowitz and Pace appeared Thursday before the Senate Armed Services Committee in a hearing on the administration's request for an additional $25 billion to pay for military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But senators also used the time to press the two about interrogation techniques -- an issue at the heart of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

The two Pentagon officials appeared to express doubts about interrogation rules applied to military prisoners in Iraq and could not give lawmakers a clear answer on who signed off on them.

Three techniques removed from list of interrogation methods approved for use by U.S. troops in Iraq, sources tell CNN. Details soon.

Who's for five?

Donald Rumsfeld's "save my job" tour of Baghdad was just the beginning.

More fun:

http://i.a.cnn.net/cnn/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/14/fri/story.rumsfeld.ap.jpg

"OBEY."

How did the U.S. get Berg's body back from wherever it was, anyway?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3821536,00.html

Two British men detained in the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, allege they were tortured & forced to listen to Eminem at deafening levels. The men described their abuse in an open letter to George Bush released by the NY based Center for Constitutional Rights, which is providing counsel for the men. In December of 2003, a Lebanese man who was on a pilgrimage to Islamic holy sites & was instead detained by U.S.troops, made the same accusations.

>>The boogie monster of rap, yeah, the man's back
With a plan to ambush this Bush administration, mush the Senate's face in, Push this generation of kids to stand and fight for the right to say Somethin' you might not like, this white hot light that I'm under, no Wonder I look so Sunburnt, oh no I won't leave no stone unturned
Oh no I won't leave, won't go nowhere, do-si-do, oh, yo, ho, hello there
Oh, yeah, don't think I won't go there, go to Beirut and do a show there
Yeah, you laugh till your muthafuckin' ass gets drafted, while you're at Band camp thinkin' the crap can't happen
Till you fuck around, get an Anthrax napkin, inside a package wrapped in saran wrap wrappin'
Open the plastic and then you stand back gaspin', fuckin' assassins hijackin' Amtraks crashin'
All this terror America demands action, next thing you know you've got Uncle Sam's ass askin'
To join the Army or what you'll do for they Navy
You just a baby, gettin' recruited at eighteen
You're on a plane now, eatin' their food and their baked beans
I'm twenty-eight, they gonna take you 'fore they take me
Crazy insane or insane crazy? When I say Hussein, you say Shady<<

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Two disc jockeys were fired after playing an audiotape of the beheading of American Nick Berg by Iraqi militants, and cracking jokes about the grisly death.

Listeners called the radio station to complain after hearing Berg's bloodcurdling screams in the broadcast of the tape, followed by the DJs laughing and playing musical accompaniments.

The DJs, known as Marconi and Tiny, were fired Thursday from their morning show perch at Portland's KNRK-FM, which is owned by Pennsylvania-based Entercom Communications Corp. Station employees would not release the legal names of the DJs.

The station's manager sent an apology out over the airwaves, saying: "The actions of the KNRK news morning show were insensitive, inappropriate and repulsive. On behalf of Entercom Portland and KNRK, I apologize to our listeners."

One of the DJs apologized on his Web site, posting a statement that read, "I have become so numb to the horrific things that happen in this world that I sometimes forget there are still people who feel. I in no way meant to be insensitive to anyone. My comments on this were inapropriate (sic)."

Berg's headless body was found Saturday in Baghdad. Three days later, a videotape posted on an al-Qaida-related Web site showed him decapitated by hooded, armed men.'

What kind of sick fucks?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3716151.stm

Several US newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, have reported allegations made by Spc Jeremy Sivits, the first soldier to face court-martial over the scandal, about the extent and nature of the abuse at Abu Ghraib.

The papers said they had seen the statement he gave to US investigators.

The New York Times said he portrayed in "graphic but unemotional language" how guards had forced inmates to strip, masturbate and pile on top of each other.

He alleged that in one instance Cpl Graner "punched the detainee with a closed fist hard in the temple that it knocked the detainee unconscious," the paper said.

"He [Graner] was joking, laughing... Like he was enjoying it," Mr Sivits said, according to the transcript.

---

However, lawyers for the soldiers named by Mr Sivits said his statements were questionable because he was entering into plea bargaining with prosecutors.

Paul Bergrin, a lawyer representing Sgt Davis, described Spc Sivits' statement as "fabricated" and "self-serving".

---

The Reuters news agency quoted a US soldier recently returned from Abu Ghraib as saying sex and violence were rife at the jail.

"There was lots of affairs. There was all kinds of adultery and alcoholism... going on," said Dave Bischel, before going on to describe how chairs were set up round a mattress for an audience to watch.

they don't have page a8 online?

doesn't change the fact that there are currently 37 civilian deaths at the hands of british forces under investigation, anecdotal evidence on some of these suggests rogue battle groups pot-shotting at unarmed non-combatants, and countless beatings and abuses.

'i was just following orders' as an get-out has been trashed under international law as far back as Nuremberg. all UK combat troops undergo mandatory annual ICRC certification - they know the salient points of the Geneva Convention inside out before they go to war.

QLR will take a pasting over this, pictures or no pictures.