US Administrational Hypocresy.

[Spannerman]

I guess that if none of us were there in Iraq and we let Sadman get on with his own torture, like we did for 28 years, the only complainants would have been those Iraqis that we could not hear from. Sadr and his 'republicans' would not have had an uprising against the coalition, the oil flowing now is as good as it was pre GW2, we would not have had to restore power and water and we in Britain could have saved 50+ lives and £6 billion, the Americans 10 times + that amount and innocent Iraqi lives would have been saved. So what progress has IRAQI FREEDOM given to those that reside there?

Can anyone imagine the misery a smart bomb or cruise missile off target causes. That kid who lost his family and both arms, that is his torture, the tanks against RPG and Kalishnikovs is someone elses torture. Those bodies being returned daily to the US is someone elses life time torture all because the whim of two men who were misguided themselves in getting rid of a dictator that posed no threat to anyone other than his own people.

Only those two misguided 'leaders' knew the WMD and the 45 minute threat posed, everyone else knew it was a load of bolleaux.

On June 10th at the local elections (in the UK) and the Euro elections the people of this country are going to send one hell of a message to Mr B Liar and his cronies that the only course of action open to him is to honourably resign

But knowing the very tight rope he walks it is more than probable that God will allow himself to walk on water once again. I have noticed the murmurings within close knit Labour circles (Puttnam and Cook) in the last 24 hours that the long knives are about to strike BLIAR as they did MAGGIE.

[Tab]

Sod Blair, and sod every one else, vote for the person that you think will represent you the best, the one who might cut your council tax, or stand up to those idiots in Brussels, don't just vote to annoy Blair, but try and do some good with your vote.

[saffer]

I guess that if none of us were there in Iraq and we let Sadman get on with his own torture, like we did for 28 years, the only complainants would have been those Iraqis that we could not hear from. Sadr and his 'republicans' would not have had an uprising against the coalition, the oil flowing now is as good as it was pre GW2, we would not have had to restore power and water and we in Britain could have saved 50+ lives and £6 billion, the Americans 10 times + that amount and innocent Iraqi lives would have been saved. So what progress has IRAQI FREEDOM given to those that reside there?

Can anyone imagine the misery a smart bomb or cruise missile off target causes. That kid who lost his family and both arms, that is his torture, the tanks against RPG and Kalishnikovs is someone elses torture. Those bodies being returned daily to the US is someone elses life time torture all because the whim of two men who were misguided themselves in getting rid of a dictator that posed no threat to anyone other than his own people.

Only those two misguided 'leaders' knew the WMD and the 45 minute threat posed, everyone else knew it was a load of bolleaux.

On June 10th at the local elections (in the UK) and the Euro elections the people of this country are going to send one hell of a message to Mr B Liar and his cronies that the only course of action open to him is to honourably resign

But knowing the very tight rope he walks it is more than probable that God will allow himself to walk on water once again. I have noticed the murmurings within close knit Labour circles (Puttnam and Cook) in the last 24 hours that the long knives are about to strike BLIAR as they did MAGGIE.

I agree woth what you are saying Spannerman, however, I still do not think any one has the right to trat POW that way wether you are Saddam or Bush.

There are cases when this is going to be used by any country at war to gain infomation. This I feel, will be unknown to the public and is an unfortunate result if you are captured and know more than the average grunt. However, these US soldiers were having fun with it. That I would label as sadistic.

[Seven]

a dictator that posed no threat to anyone other than his own people.

Exactly, I'm from the continent and my people would still be suffering from Nazi germany if America and Britain would have called it a day after the fall of France. We cannot imagine what it would be like to live in fear every day of our lives. I believe the majority of the Iraqi people are happy Saddam is gone. And I do believe they will be better off in the long run.

[cambridgebloke]

Hi Frank S

heres some info on tiger cages.

www.oz.net/~vvawai/sw/sw44/Tiger-Cages.html

Si

[saffer]

Now why do I have the burning desire to scream B*LLOCKS when I read about all this.

Yes a fraction of it may be true, and more than likley is, however it ceates alot of off shoot for people to jump on for the ride.

I do not beleive that all the allogations are true, and to label the horrors of Vietnam on his war on terrorism is a very large generalisation when considering the audits from independant parties that Vietnam did not have.

Pictures tell stories, but not necessarily the truth
By Jim White
(Filed: 10/05/2004)


Stephen Glass was a terrific writer. His prose zipped off the page, his characters were utterly plausible; his plots sang. No wonder that at the end of the Nineties he was the most in-demand young scribe in America, a 25-year-old everyone wanted.



His colleagues loved him; his superiors drooled over his talent; his rivals cursed his ability to dredge up the smartest tales. There was just one slight drawback. His articles were almost entirely a product of his imagination, which might be fine for a novelist but is not on if you are a journalist.

Glass's stories were precisely that: of 41 articles he had published in leading American magazines, 27 were wholly or partially fabricated. He falsified sources, he invented contacts, he concocted government policies, he spun theories, he made up trends. This wasn't just the mother of invention; Stephen Glass was the entire family tree of fabrication.

Now, you might think this is not exactly a surprise. After all, don't journalists do this all the time? Don't they invent quotes, spin yarns, plant scares, and generally tittle-tattle away at the truth until it is pared down almost to nothing?

Such is the level of distrust of journalists in this country that our integrity is reckoned by the general public to be down there with estate agents, quack doctors and Post Office executives. Frankly, if given the choice of who to believe, a journalist or a member of the Cabinet, most of you would plump for the latter. That's how bad things are for my profession.

And Glass has hardly helped. His case caused consternation in America precisely because he did not inhabit the world of supermarket tabloids, with their scoops about Michael Jackson being voted president of Mars. He came from what was meant to be the most trustworthy journalistic culture in the world.

He was a staff member at the New Republic, a Washington-based publication of small circulation but muscular influence, which likes to boast it is the in-flight magazine of Airforce One. Glass operated in an environment that prided itself on self-regulation, where each sentence is scrutinised for veracity to within an inch of its life. Yet such was the scale of his porkies, they breezed by unnoticed. As he quickly realised, as long as you make up your sources, then your facts always come through as the real thing.

"I didn't have any suspicions of him," Peter Beinart, the magazine's current editor - and a fellow writer at the time of Glass's deception - told me, "which when I look back is pretty astonishing."

In the nervous breakdown at the New Republic that followed Glass's exposure, the staff asked each other the question: "Why did he do it?" One theory is that he sought a short cut to the ultimate goal of the young American: celebrity.

"He felt himself under enormous pressure to succeed," Beinart said. "Mind you, a lot of young journalists feel that pressure, but not many are pathological liars."

The unpalatable reality is that, through his fibbing, Glass has become a celebrity. A film about his exposure has just been released, called Shattered Glass. It asks some intriguing questions about journalistic integrity - not least in a line that one character, the magazine's receptionist, utters at the film's conclusion. She suggests to the editor who exposed Glass that it could never have happened if the New Republic had been a publication that used photographs.

"He couldn't have lied if there had been pictures, could he?" she says.

Really? There might have been a time when the camera never lied, but it isn't now. Run it through a computer and a picture can tell a thousand different stories apart from the truth. Remember Tourist Guy, the bloke supposedly snapped on the top of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, unaware of the plane zooming in over his shoulder? Or what about the Democratic presidential contender John Kerry, apparently photographed sharing a platform with Hanoi Jane Fonda at an anti-war rally in the Sixties?

The actress Kate Winslet, too, has recently been alarmed at the consequences of the new way with the lens. She was pictured on a magazine cover a couple of years ago looking extraordinarily statuesque. Her image tweaked by digital photo technology, she had been thinned at the hip, lengthened at the thigh, sexed up like a government dossier. A bit of fun at the time, but a couple of years on Winslet was disturbed to see on television a woman who had undergone painful plastic surgery to look just like that cover shot.

Then there are the Mirror's Iraq pictures. At first they seemed to deliver such a straightforward tale: here were the men supposedly liberating the country from the sort of despot who tortured prisoners, engaging in a spot of torture themselves. The irony was as ugly as the actions depicted in the snaps.

But, like a Stephen Glass feature, the pictures told their story a little too well, a little too conveniently. Compared with the contemporaneous stills of Americans abusing Iraqis - whose veracity nobody doubts - they were too clean, too clear, too fortunate in the way they disguised all identity. Their provenance has subsequently unravelled to the point where they threaten to undermine the reporting of the war's ugliest little secret.

The parallels with the Glass case are evident. At the New Republic, Glass's peers allowed his stories through because they wanted them so much to be true; likewise, the Mirror's Piers Morgan published these photographs because he too was desperate for them to be true. If nothing else, both cases might provide us journalists with a useful ethical aide-mémoire if we are ever to climb above axe murderers in those polls of trustworthiness: wanting things to be true is no substitute for knowing them to be true.

And if you are wondering what happened to Stephen Glass, the man who made everything up, worry not. He became a lawyer.

[cambridgebloke]

Saffer

I agree that some stories are made up, this does not however mean that all stories are untrue.

During wars unpleasant things happen and men do things they would not normally do, it is a fact that the US has commited some POW related offences in the past, this is no reflection on most of the brave and well trained troops that fight wars more the brass who make the rules at the top. My comments are about Bush and his policy and also past relevant events. Maybe you need to accept that under the banner of glory many people think we go to war under that we do not always play by the rules.

I have no doubt that many of the photos of dead civilians we have seen in Iraqi cities were indeed dead militia fighters who have been disarmed, but when enemy troops have been processed they are to be cared for as we would care for our own men, it is not license to humiliate a few people.

I might add that I believe the mirrors photos are fake.

I am a proud Englishman and I am not a hater of the US people but I am realistic. When you get into the marines and get sent to war you will doubtless find out more than I will ever know about what it means to fight and defend a nation. Good luck to you.

SB

Si

[saffer]

I do not agree with the humiliation of the Iraqis and of course many people killed in this war are not of the militia.

However, I do beleive that the fighting of an invisible enemy is one that a nation/nations of our size will find very difficult. This has, of course, been shown in confrontation with terrorists of the past, further more and of more relevence, as shown in this war.
Therefore certain methods of interogation are neccessary to reduce the risk of deaths to inocent civilians.

I understand what you are saying, and I agree that the current affairs are highly sensitive and should not be conducted on such a tone.

On the other hand, the majority of detainees I believe would have been treated well. Others of a higher authority level in the terrorist world may not be so lucky, taken underground and we will not know what happens to them. However in contrast I do not beleive that any captured soldier of the coalition will see better treatment than that we have been witness to over the last few days in the news.

Again I would like to stress that I do not beleive that degrading POWs for fun is any thing but sadistic.

One day I hope the east is democratic and enjoys the endless topics of meaningless shit that our poloticians thrive upon, ie; fox hunting!

Just for a quick reference; check out the last quote.

Mechanic first to face trial over prisoner abuse
By Toby Harnden in Baghdad
(Filed: 10/05/2004)


The first court martial of a soldier on charges of mistreating prisoners in Iraq will take place next week, it was announced yesterday, as the abuse scandal intensified with the release of another disturbing photograph.


Undated photo of Sabrina Harman, one of the US army personnel accused of abusing Iraqi detainees
Specialist Jeremy Sivits, 24, who worked in a McDonald's restaurant before training as a United States army mechanic, is due to be tried in Baghdad a week on Wednesday on relatively minor charges that carry a maximum sentence of a year's detention.

Prosecutors believe that he was a peripheral figure in the abuse at Abu Ghraib jail that prompted outrage throughout the Arab world and sparked a political crisis for President George W Bush.

The trial is due to be open to the public and the press. It has still not been decided whether it will be televised.

Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt, the senior US military spokesman in Iraq, said: "It's not our intention to hide anything. We have an enormous amount of pride in the American legal system."

Charged with mistreating detainees and dereliction of duty, Sivits is understood to have taken many of the photographs that have seriously damaged America's image and threaten to undermine the moral case for the Iraq war.

One of those photographs, taken in December 2003 and published by New Yorker magazine yesterday, shows a naked and clearly petrified Iraqi prisoner cowering as two dogs bear down on him.

A report by Maj Gen Antonio Taguba on the abuse found that soldiers used "military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee".

The photograph, accompanied by an article claiming that Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, and senior officers tried to hush up the abuse, is the latest in a series of shocking images to emerge and is likely to be followed by more.

According to the magazine, other photographs show the dogs "straining at their leashes and snarling at the prisoner" and in one he is pictured with blood streaming from his leg "lying on the ground, writhing in pain, with a soldier sitting on top of him, knee pressed to his back".

According to defence officials who spoke to NBC news, other photographs show American soldiers "severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner, and acting inappropriately with a dead body".

Sivits, 24, from Hyndeman, Pennsylvania, is one of six soldiers currently assigned to other duties in Iraq while awaiting court martial. A seventh is in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

There was an intense debate among senior coalition officials about which one should be tried first. Some argued that Staff Sgt Ivan "Chip" Frederick II, 37, said to be a ringleader, should face the first court martial. Instead, it was decided that it would be better for Sivits, who is expected to plead guilty as a result of a plea bargain, to be tried.

Relatives of Sivits, nicknamed "Puggs", have said he was probably just following orders.

His father, Daniel, said: "My son is not a trained MP. He is trained as a mechanic . . . He's used to changing tyres on a Humvee. Why was a mechanic allowed to handle prisoners?"

[/b]

[Frank S.]

The Taguba report is more explicit and in-depth than those few pictures which have been published to date.
This report, however, could be described as 'preliminary', as it focusses on four detention facilities in Iraq, operated by units from the 800th Military Police Brigade. A follow up to this report was apparently decided against by gen. Sanchez.
Among the questions which will need to be answered:
1 - If Abu Ghraib was in fact under the command of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade as of November '03, who is responsible for violating AR 190-8, which stipulates that no MP personnel be involved in MI supervised interrogations sessions?
2 - How effective were these sessions proven to be?
3 - The majority of alledged abuses having occurred in Block 1A (for insurgents and political prisoners), what were the criteria for placing prisoners in that section, understanding that the reasons for said prisoners to be placed in that section are now questioned?
4 - How did 27 to 32 prisoners escape from Abu Ghraib? (Severe personnel understaffing and disregard for proper detainee accounting have been mentioned, i.e. infrequent detainee roll-call and absence of documentation regarding transfers)
5 - Regarding question #1, what was the status of those interrogators who alledgedly ordered MP personnel to 'assist' in interrogations? Were they MI personnel, contractors (from Titan, among others), or a combination of both?
6 - Why is there a shortage of trained military interrogators/interpreters at Abu Ghraib when the Army reports having a number (unknown) of such personnel still Stateside waiting to be called up?
7 - What are those 'third nation' personnel alledged to have either taken part in or directed the abuse? What is their status and national origin?

There are many more questions. Such as understanding why National Guard reservists were assigned to operating these prisons, rather than active duty personnel who, according to the GAO (general accounting office) are much more suited to the task.
I think this issue should not be politicized and that the focus should be on the strategic implications of those incidents.