* If the mainstream media is "liberal," why did CBS allow themselves to be censored?
* Two detainees in Iraq were arrested for the "crime" of being Palestinian.
* U.S. soldiers reportedly beat a 12-year-old girl in Abu Ghraib. Remember, Rush Limbaugh calls this tactic "brilliant." What a sicko!
* The same report holds that the MPs competed to see who could take the most gruesome picture of detainee abuse. The Washington Post has reported that one of the charged soldiers, Charles Graner Jr., insists that this photo-party was ordered by higher-ups.
* I got some flack for pointing out that the abuses in Iraq reveal much about the repressed sexuality of America's good-ol-boy "Christian" soldiers. Washington Post editorialist Philip Kennicott has also noted the "fetish porn" connection to this scandal. So has Justin Raimondo, who titles his piece "The S&M war." And so has Newsday writer Patrick Moore, who titles his piece "Gay sexuality shouldn't become a torture device."
* The new right-wing slogan will be "Blame Lynndie." (Private Lynndie England is the ciggie-chomping trailer-trash bitch seen in many of the abuse photos.) A flurry of female opinion-spouters -- Linda Chavez, Ann Coulter, Deborah Simmons and Diana West -- have tried to blame the scandal on the "feminization" of our armed forces. Yep, that's the argument: When the army hired a few female MPs, reports of anal rapes and murders and whatnot were bound to follow. So it's all Lynndie's fault. Logical, no?
* Apparently Lynndie and her partner-in-crime (the father of her unborn child) are fundamentalist Christians. It figures!
* Photos are coming out showing abuse by British soldiers at other locations. Also see the story here, about British interrogators murdering one detainee and torturing another for three days. Just yesterday, the cable TV talking heads were saying that only Americans were involved.
* Weapons inspector David Kay now says he tried to warn the administration about the prison abuses, but was ignored.
* The Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch were trying to draw attention to this story for more than a year, but the world reacted only when photos showed up on 60 Minutes. (Amnesty has been denied access to the prison facilities.) Question: How could Amnesty International know what was going on before W knew?
* The Red Cross has been trying to tell the world for some time that the problem exists not only in Abu Ghraib, but in a host of other American-run prisons in Iraq.
* The National Review decries "Members of Congress elbowing their way into camera range to question, in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, whether abuses were widespread and senior commanders were implicated..." In other words, Democratic congressmen are castigated for not sharing in the Bushies' preferred hallucination.
The Taguba report counts as "evidence," I should think. The report uses the term "systemic." As mentioned in an earlier post, I'd like to know the distinction between the terms "systemic" and "widespread."
Although National Review prefers the delusion that no higher-ups were involved, plenty of evidence indicates that the ground-level MPs were ordered to do what they did in order to soften up detainees for interrogation -- in other words, the commanders are implicated in this rotten business. This AP report reveals that a General (as yet unnamed) gave orders to abuse the prisoners.
* The real scandal may be the abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan. From Amnesty International's website:
Former Guantanamo prisoner, Walid al-Qadasi, was held in a secret detention facility in Kabul. He said prisoners termed the first night of interrogation by US agents "the black night". He said that: 'They cut our clothes with scissors, left us naked and took photos of us ...
Indeed, the more paranoid among us may suggest that the Abu Ghraib offenses were revealed to "soften up" the public for later revelation of Afghan atrocities.
* The Abu Ghraib scandal has directed attention to the related scandal of "private" security firms given free reign in Iraq. One of these firms, Vance International, has been used domestically to break strikes and destroy unions. And they used some extremely ugly tactics. The notorious concentration camp at Guantanamo is reportedly employing the equally notorious Wackenhut corporation.
* Nationals of India, seduced by promises of high-paying jobs, have found "employment" in various U.S. Army camps in Iraq and Kuwait. There, they have been held against their will, treated as near-slaves, paid only a fraction of the amount promised. But hey -- what the hell. They're only towel-heads, right?
* The excellent British journalist David Leigh reveals that sexual humiliation of prisoners fall under the heading of "R21" techniques, which British recruits are taught to withstand:
Female guards were used to taunt male prisoners sexually and at British training sessions when female candidates were undergoing resistance training they would be subject to lesbian jibes.
"Most people just laugh that off during mock training exercises, but the whole experience is horrible. Two of my colleagues couldn't cope with the training at the time. One walked out saying 'I've had enough', and the other had a breakdown. It's exceedingly disturbing," said the former Special Boat Squadron officer, who asked that his identity be withheld for security reasons.
Many British and US special forces soldiers learn about the degradation techniques because they are subjected to them to help them resist if captured. They include soldiers from the SAS, SBS, most air pilots, paratroopers and members of pathfinder platoons.
A number of commercial firms which have been supplying interrogators to the US army in Iraq boast of hiring former US special forces soldiers, such as Navy Seals.
Leigh also reveals that the MPs seemed to be under the impression that they were punishing people directly responsible for the 9/11 atrocity.
I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: A week after the attack on the World Trade Center, a CBS poll revealed that only three percent of the populace blamed Saddam Hussein. That number grew wildly over the course of the next year, thanks to a right-wing agit-prop campaign. Broadcast lies have real-world consequences. How could our troops hope to "liberate" a people they had been carefully taught to loathe?
* "It is still not entirely clear who leaked the photos and how they got into the hands of a "60 Minutes II" producer." So saith the New York Times. I think this may prove to be the parapolitical issue surrounding this scandal. There is some effort to make the case that a reservist named Joseph Darby blew the case wide open, but he's not the one who leaked the Taguba report, and I doubt very much that he is the one who leaked photos to the Washington Post. There's a subterranean power struggle going on here, folks.
* And then there's the issue of "outsourcing" torture, as we did in the case of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who, detained by American authorities, was sent to Syria, the land of his birth, where he was treated abominably. Arar is now planning to sue the U.S. for $40 million. There are 9000 detainees in Iraq, and lord-knows-how-many others in Afghanistan and Gitmo. Do the math. Can we afford to become torturers? Isn't our blithe dismissal of the Geneva conventions injurious to our wallets?
* How many days (or hours) will pass before some right-wing hack tries to draw some sort of ersatzs moral equivalence between revelation of the classified Taguba report and Novak's bean-spilling in the Valerie Plame affair? The difference, of course, lies in the fact that Plame worked as an undercover officer, while the Taguba report had no business being classified in the first place.
