Month: May 2004

General Disorder

Kevin Drum discusses the sickening new pictures in The Washington Post as well as an interview with Sy Hersh in which he mentions the strange choice of General Miller to “clean up” the abuses as Abu Ghraib:

“HERSH: No, look, I don’t want to ruin your evening, but the fact of the matter is it was the third investigation. There had been two other investigations.

One of them was done by a major general who was involved in Guantanamo, General Miller. And it’s very classified, but I can tell you that he was recommending exactly doing the kind of things that happened in that prison, basically. He wanted to cut the lines. He wanted to put the military intelligence in control of the prison.”

Just as reminder, I posted about this a few days ago:

“One of the five Britons recently returned to the UK from Guantanamo Bay has claimed that he was subjected to cruel and sadistic treatment by US authorities.

Jamal al Harith, from Manchester, told the Daily Mirror today that detainees of Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta had to face frequent beatings, prolonged periods of isolation and traumatic psychological torture.

The 37-year-old was held at Guantanamo Bay for just over two years after coalition forces brought about the fall of the Taleban regime in Afghanistan. The divorced father-of-three said that the behaviour of prison guards was a deliberate affront to Islam and exacted to offend and terrorise the detainees.

Jamal told the Daily Mirror: ‘The whole point of Guantanamo was to get to you psychologically. The beatings were not as nearly as bad as the psychological torture – bruises heal after a week – but the other stuff stays with you.’

Mr al Harith said that religious practises were often disrupted or even banned in order to punish and antagonise prisoners.

The most extreme of these claims centres around how guards would bring prostitutes into the camp to pose naked in front of prisoners, who were used to veiled women, and counter to Islamic practice.

He said: ‘It was a profoundly disturbing experience for these men. They would refuse to speak about what had happened. It would take perhaps four weeks for them to tell a friend – and we would shout it out around the whole block”

If there is even a modicum of truth to this, the choice of Miller to head up the prisons in Iraq after the torture debacle is so completely insane that it may be the straw that breaks Rummy’s back.

Josh Marshall has more — according to the Taguba report there is good reason to believe this is true.

And, Newsday reported just today that:

Promising a broader investigation, the U.S. military acknowledged Wednesday that two guards at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had been disciplined over allegations of prisoner abuse.

[…]

Military officials were still investigating the three cases, which had not been submitted to a court, and whether any other complaints of prisoner abuse had been made.

The revelations came as Guantanamo’s former commander, Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, apologized Wednesday for the “illegal or unauthorized acts” committed by U.S. soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Photographs showed Iraqi prisoners being abused by smiling American guards at the notorious Saddam Hussein-era prison.

Miller has taken charge of U.S. prisons in Iraq. He was the commander of Guantanamo from October 2002 to March 2004 and has said he was able to increase the amount of valuable intelligence tips gleaned from detainees during interrogations.

The hard-nosed general attributed the success to a system of rewards given to detainees and said officials were working to make the detainees’ incarceration more comfortable.

[…]

Criticism from human rights groups lessened when the detainees were moved into their permanent cells but spiked again after a rash of suicide attempts. There have been at least 34 suicide attempts since the mission began in January 2001.

Marshall points out the differences between Gitmo and its allegedly hardened terrorists and the average Joes who are being “liberated” indefinitely in Iraqi prisons, but the wanton disregard for any kind of rule of law in the WOT is the root cause of all these problems. General Hard Nose is the last guy who should be anywhere near a prison right now.

And, just to end the day on an up note, Hersh also had this to say on O’Reilly:

I can tell you just from the phone calls I’ve had in the last 24 hours, even more, there are other photos out there. There are many more photos even inside that unit. There are videotapes of stuff that you wouldn’t want to mention on national television that was done. There was a lot of problems.

There was a special women’s section. There were young boys in there. There were things done to young boys that were videotaped. It’s much worse. And the Maj. Gen. Taguba was very tough about it. He said this place was riddled with violent, awful actions against prisoners.

Jesus.

Big Man

Tom Friedman: “We were hit on 9/11 by people who believed hateful ideas ideas too often endorsed by some of their own spiritual leaders and educators back home. We cannot win a war of ideas against such people by ourselves. Only Arabs and Muslims can. What we could do –and this was the only legitimate rationale for this war — was try to help Iraqis create a progressive context in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world where that war of ideas could be fought out.

But it is hard to partner with someone when you become so radioactive no one wants to stand next to you. We have to restore some sense of partnership with the world if we are going to successfully partner with Iraqis.”

[…]

This administration needs to undertake a total overhaul of its Iraq policy; otherwise, it is courting a total disaster for us all.

That overhaul needs to begin with President Bush firing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — today, not tomorrow or next month, today. What happened in Abu Ghraib prison was, at best, a fundamental breakdown in the chain of command under Mr. Rumsfeld’s authority, or, at worst, part of a deliberate policy somewhere in the military-intelligence command of sexually humiliating prisoners to soften them up for interrogation, a policy that ran amok.

Either way, the secretary of defense is ultimately responsible, and if we are going to rebuild our credibility as instruments of humanitarian values, the rule of law and democratization, in Iraq or elsewhere, Mr. Bush must hold his own defense secretary accountable. Words matter, but deeds matter more. If the Pentagon leadership ran any U.S. company with the kind of abysmal planning in this war, it would have been fired by shareholders months ago

Golly Tom. What happened to this?

No, the axis-of-evil idea isn’t thought through – but that’s what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: “We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld – he’s even crazier than you are.”

There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right. It is the only way we’re going to get our turkey back.

Well, that worked out really well. Looks like old Rummy took Tom literally.

And this guy is considered to be one of our leading analysts of the middle east. I think it’s safe to say that after this his column is officially irrelevant and should be used exclusively as cat box filler.

Submissive Bigmouth

Via Road to Surfdom

Rush: In these American prisoners of war, have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes. The babes are meting out the torture. Well, I’ve just been asked if I’m surprised.

Pause for a few minutes of lubricous sound effects followed by a sigh…

You know, I could get into a lot of trouble here with this. No, part of me is not — yes, I’m surprised. I am surprised. I do not believe — I will go to my grave placing women on the pedestal of gentleness. On the surface it’s a smart move, but in real life it could be incredibly stupid, but regardless – women are tougher than — you know, we all must be honest about this. I mean, this business of weaker sex is all a bunch of trumped up stuff they teach when you you’re five years old and you end up living your whole life that way, and it’s just one big mystery that never gets solved.

A mystery you’ll never solve, that’s for sure Gordo.

One thing’s becoming crystal clear lately. Rush, with his constant references to testicle lockboxes and Feminazis and “babes” with German Shepards is a certified sexual masochist. Really. Just the day before he described this behavior as “emotional release.” Is it reasonable that anyone but a submissive slaveboy looked at those pictures and got HOT over them?

Folks, these torture pictures with the women torturers, I mean Marv Albert looking at those pictures would say, “Hey, that doesn’t look so bad.” You know, if you really look at these pictures, I mean I don’t know if it’s just me but it looks like anything you’d see Madonna or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe you can get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean this is something you can see at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City: the Movie. I mean, it’s just me.

No, Rush. It isn’t just you. There are whole communities of people who can fulfill your fantasies and lots of big, mean “babes” to punish you like you need to be punished. Nothing to be ashamed of. A lot of bigmouthed, phony macho men like you need a little spanking.

But, it’s just a game, Rush.

War, on the other hand, isn’t a game. It’s a real life struggle for survival for all concerned and chickenhawk fuckheads like you need to confine your S&M fantasies to your little dittohead fan clubs.

But do say hello to Little Dick and Mistress Lynn next time you have “dinner” in the dungeon.

He No Media Ho

Via Suburban Guerrilla I find that Keith Olberman is the media hero of the week. He had Joe Wilson on and had the cojones to publicly reveal what Tweety and all the others fail to mention:

OLBERMANN: You do know that they are still going after you, right? We promoted the fact that you would be on this show tonight. Today we received three separate copies of the same e-mail with talking points from the White House, one asking a contact here “Can you please get this to the Olbermann people. Wilson is on the Olbermann show.” Misspelled my name, by the way, but that‘s neither here nor there. Another one asks one of our producers “I understand you have Mr. Wilson on. Can you please call me on this?”

Susan has more

Revisiting the Massacre

Sadly, this seems like a good time to bring up an earlier horrible story that nobody wanted to hear about. Were U.S. troops in Afghanistan complicit in a massacre?

June 15, 2002

Irish documentarian Jamie Doran says he has evidence of American complicity in a massacre in Afghanistan, and he’s been showing his rough footage to European leaders in the hope of preventing a coverup.

Doran, who worked at the BBC for more than seven years and has made documentaries about human rights abuses throughout the world, screened 20 minutes of his unfinished feature documentary, “Massacre at Mazar,” to the European parliament and the German parliament on Wednesday. After witnessing the screening, Andrew McEntee, former head of Amnesty International in the U.K., called for an independent investigation.

Doran has yet to release the footage to the public because he says his eyewitnesses’ identities need to be obscured for their own protection. But Doran felt he had to get some of the information out immediately because the mass graves he secretly filmed are in danger of being tampered with, which would make an independent inquiry into his film’s allegations of Northern Alliance and American war crimes impossible.

According to Doran, of the approximately 8,000 Taliban prisoners taken after the fall of Kunduz in late November 2001 to Gen. Rashid Dostum, around 5,000 are unaccounted for. He says he’s filmed eyewitnesses testifying that many of those prisoners suffocated in the metal containers used to transport them between Qala-I-Zeini fortress and Sherberghan prison, and that Northern Alliance troops fired into the containers, killing and wounding other prisoners. One witness claims that an American officer ordered the bodies dumped in the desert of Dasht-I-Leili, and that living people were taken there as well and executed. Furthermore, Doran says he has witnesses claiming to have seen American special-forces soldiers torturing prisoners who made it to Sherberghan.

I remember hearing about this film on “Democracy Now” some months ago. It could not find distribution in the US and no television station would air it. It has been seen all over the world, however, including the CBC in Canada, (which also has a lot of links to various stories and resources on this story.)

Here’s an article about it from the Global Policy Forum:

When the containers were unlocked at Sheberghan, the bodies of the dead tumbled out. A 12-man U.S. Fifth Special Forces Group unit, Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 595, guarded the prison’s front gates and, according to witnesses, controlled the facility in the hopes of picking key prisoners for interrogation and possible transportation to Guant?namo Bay. (This is how Lindh was singled out.) “Everything was under the control of the American commanders,” a Northern Alliance soldier tells Doran in the film. American troops searched the bodies for Al Qaeda identification cards. But, says another driver, “Some of [the prisoners] were alive. They were shot” while “maybe 30 or 40” American soldiers watched.

Members of ODA 595, interviewed for the PBS program “Frontline” on August 2, 2002, confirm their presence at Sheberghan but cagily deny participating in war crimes. “The prisoners were being treated the exact same way as Dostum’s forces were,” said master sergeant “Paul.” “I didn’t see any atrocities, but I easily could have. Some prisoners may have died because they were sick or ill, and Dostum’s forces just couldn’t give them any care because they didn’t have it.” But even General Dostum admits 200 such deaths. And the Northern Alliance soldier quoted above says U.S. troops masterminded the cover-up”: “The Americans told the Sheberghan people to get rid of them [the bodies] before satellite pictures could be taken.”

These ODA 595 Special Forces guys freely admitted being very close to General Dostum and his troops. But, they had to leave right after the massacre at Mazer al Sharif:

Yeah we eh, we were ordered out quite rapidly and without General Dostum’s knowledge. He was out of town and we got word that we were to be quickly ex-filled, to brief Mr. Rumsfeld.

We have no idea what really happened here, but there is ample evidence that the massacre itself took place. Whether Americans were involved remains unknown.

And, while this is a war crime, there is a distinction between what happened in Afghanistan to these suspected Taliban fighters and the Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib — the most obvious being that we invaded Iraq, unprovoked, on the basis of lies about “grave and gathering” threats, lies about ties to terrorists and the increasingly surreal and threadbare claim of liberation. Nonetheless, war crimes are war crimes and this was a particularly horrifying one.

And regardless of any righteousness of cause, it is the policy of “gloves off” that Bush and his testosterone addled advisors begat right after 9/11 that led inexorably to the sickening display at Abu Ghraib. There is a direct line from Mazar al Sharif to Gitmo to arcane arguments about habeus corpus before the Supreme Court to Abu Ghraib and it began with the puerile warcry that afternoon on top of Ground Zero when our president called for bloodlust instead of strength and wisdom.

I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon.

With that level of statesmanship and leadership, what did we expect?

Freudian Spin

There are a few people there in Iraq that want to claim credit for any situation on the ground, but the people in Fallujah are tired of foreign fighters and radicals and extremists preventing them from living a normal life. And those who remain in Fallujah will be taken care of. And the Iraqi forces that have been stood up are now in the process of patrolling the streets and bringing law and order to the streets.

Most of that comment is either gibberish or a bad translation from his native Martian, but the president is certainly right about the people of Fallujah being tired of foreign fighters, radicals and extremists preventing them from living a normal life. It’s just a bit disorienting to hear Bush describe himself in such terms.

Oh. Well That Explains It

Via Wonkette

“RUSH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the skull and bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?”

Just gimme some ‘o that old time moral relativism baby. And pass me a coupla little blue babies to wash it down with.

Hate is a gateway drug.

Spinning Depravity

The Right is in trouble but they just keep digging their hole deeper and deeper and if we don’t stop them, we will all be sucked into the void they have created. Even their most nimble spinners and rhetorical pole dancers are unable to sound even minimally coherent when trying to rationalize the horrors of Abu Ghraib. The tired old “Jane, you ignorant slut” formula is embarrassingly irrelevant in light of the pictures that shook the world, yet their intellectual bankruptcy seems to provide them no other way to discuss with the problem.

Here is Tucker Carlson, fielding a “question” to Bianca Jagger yesterday who was on Crossfire on behalf of Amnesty International:

Read the rest on The American Street, here

Also, be sure to check out (among many others) Kevin Hayden’s post today about never having to say you’re sorry and Mary Ratcliffe’s very interesting piece about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. In fact, read it all. There are a ton of fine writers over there churning out good stuff day in and day out. I’m thrilled to be a part of it.

I said what I meant and I meant what I said

Wolf Blitzer’s “Arab analyst” was unimpressed with Crusader Codpiece’s little interview. She thought that the Iraqi people might get the impression that the president was talking down to them. Wolf, clearly stunned and shaken, said, “you think this president was condescending?!” She replied that while we may find the president friendly and open, when his words “the people of the middle east have got to understand…” are translated into arabic they sound quite rude.

I have always thought they sounded rude coming straight out of his mouth. The boy is always lecturing people with words like “you gotta unnerstand, in a democracy we love freedom. Free people love democracy. That’s what freedom is. I tole the Iraqi people they are free and I meant it!” Apparently, he has somehow gotten the impression that if you forcefully say incredibly stupid things as if it’s the first time anyone has ever uttered them, people will believe that you are a strong leader.

Certainly, hearing Bush go on and on again this morning about how good Americans are for bringing democracy to the Iraqis and insisting that we got rid of torture and rape rooms so the Iraqis could be free is not likely to bring any greater confidence in our ability to deal with the hideous reality Abu Ghraib.

I can’t see how this will help us. They should never let him off his leash.

The Boy In The Bubble

From Salon:

It’s time to revise the president’s stump speech. We wouldn’t want anyone out there to be misled, and surely, he wouldn’t either.

We found, in just a handful of sentences from a speech Bush gave on his “bus tour,” several misleading comments that would not pass the muster of even a junior factchecker. Even saying Bush is on a “bus tour” isn’t quite right. Apparently, the president is taking the kind of bus tour that involves flying in an airplane.

Here are seven consecutive sentences from Bush’s speech at a Michigan rally on Monday. We counted four factual problems. If we had more time, we’d fact-check the whole speech. But you get the idea.

“My opponent admits that Saddam Hussein was a threat. He just didn’t support my decision to remove Saddam from power. (1) Maybe he was hoping Saddam would lose the next Iraqi election. (Laughter.) We showed the dictator and a watching world that America means what it says. (Applause.) Because — because we acted, Saddam’s torture chambers are closed. (2) Because we acted, Iraq’s weapons programs are ended forever. (3) (Applause.) Because we acted, nations like Libya got the message and renounced their own weapons programs. (4) (Applause.)

1.) Actually, Kerry voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. He disagreed with the president’s rush to use force. As Kerry wrote in an op-ed in September 2002: “Regime change in Iraq is a worthy goal. But regime change by itself is not a justification for going to war. Absent a Qaeda connection, overthrowing Saddam Hussein — the ultimate weapons-inspection enforcement mechanism — should be the last step, not the first.”

2.) Saddam’s torture chambers may be closed, but the president should be embarrassed to even mention the phrase “torture chamber” and Iraq in the same sentence this week. One Iraqi prisoner allegedly abused at the U.S.-run prison Abu Ghraib say he preferred Saddam’s brand of torture to what the American troops meted out.

3.) Since no one, not even the scores of U.S. agents scouring bombed-out Iraq, has found evidence that Saddam had active WMD programs just prior to the invasion last year, it is not right to say they were ended “because we acted.” In fact, they “ended” well before Bush rushed to war with shoddy proof. The UN says Iraq hadn’t had WMD of any significance since 1994.

4.) Libya again. He continues to mention the Iraq War as the reason Muammar Gaddafi got religion and gave up pursuit of WMD programs. To get a different, correct view on this topic, read Brookings’ Martin Indyk’s piece, called The Iraq War did not Force Gadaffi’s Hand.

And the arrogant little prick smirked all the way through it. I saw it.