Via wood s lot, from America’s greatest writer of all time, Mark Twain:
“I did not like to hear our race called sheep, and said I did not think they were.
‘Still, it is true, lamb,’ said Satan. ‘Look at you in war, what mutton you are, and how ridiculous!’
‘In war? How?’
‘There has never been a just one, never an honorable one on the part of the instigator of the war.
I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful as usual will shout for the war. The pulpit will warily and cautiously object at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, ‘It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.’ Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers as earlier but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation pulpit and all will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
Skeptical Notion makes the important point that despite what the right wing hacks say, the release of the pictures didn’t change perceptions among ordiary Iraqis because they already knew:
I often wonder how stupid Kaus really is. Then I read his blog, and I remember: Very.
Today he’s joined the Goldberg “Sixty Minutes II should never have printed those pictures, and we should never show any more” bandwagon, using the logic that “Because they showed the pictures, now the Iraqis know — on a visceral level — what we were doing, and now they’re really pissed.” and suggests that they should have done a verbal story (yes, that Red Cross report got so much attention) instead.
I’m still shocked by the unspoken assumption that the Iraqis — and the rest of the Arab World — are fundamentally stupid. I’m not sure why, but it appears to be an article of faith that “If you don’t speak English, it’s because you’re retarded” among a great many of the movers and shakers.
News flash for you, Kaus: The Iraqis already knew.
Yes they did.
The 38cm sculpture with the words “We are living American democracy” inscribed on its base was fashioned two months ago.
Susan at Suburban Guerilla has an impressive collection of posts that shed some light on the Nick Berg story. Something is definitely rotten in Baghdad.
First of all, the claim that the US military didn’t have him in custody is bullshit:
And while you’re over there taking advantage of her editor’s eye that cuts through the crap, send a little cash Susan’s way so that she can attend the conventions. It will be worth our while, I have no doubt.
Update:
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — An American who was beheaded by militants had told friends he was arrested by Iraqi police in Mosul because he had an Israeli stamp in his passport. The Mosul police chief Thursday denied having arrested him.
The body of Nicholas Berg, 26, was found last weekend in western Baghdad. Three days later, a videotape posted on an al-Qaida-related Web site showed Berg decapitated by hooded, armed men.
Questions about Berg’s stay in Iraq remain, including the time and place of his abduction. U.S. and Iraqi officials have offered varying accounts of their contacts with the self-employed telecommunications businessman from West Chester, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb.
U.S. officials said Wednesday that Iraqi police arrested Berg in Mosul on March 24 because they believed he may have been involved in “suspicious activities.”
U.S. spokesman Dan Senor would not explain those suspicions but insisted that Berg was held by Iraqi — and not American — authorities. He said, however, that the FBI visited Berg three times before he was released April 6.
In e-mails released by his family, Berg wrote about his experiences in trying to track down and later meeting an in-law in the Mosul area. Berg also described his work in seeking to repair communications towers in Iraq.
In Mosul, police chief Maj. Gen. Mohammed Khair al-Barhawi insisted his department had never arrested Berg and maintained he had no knowledge of the case.
“The Iraqi police never arrested the slain American,” al-Barhawi told reporters. “Take it from me … that such reports are baseless.”
[…]
A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Berg was detained by Iraqi authorities “for his own protection” because his behavior in Mosul seemed unusual for a Westerner.
He had been seen traveling in taxis and moving about the dangerous city without any escort, the official said. He added that Berg, who was Jewish, had in his possession texts that were “anti-Semitic” in tone, the official said without elaborating.
In his e-mail quoted by the Times, Berg guessed the FBI agents in Mosul had questioned him about Iran because he was carrying some literature in Farsi and a book about Iran.
He also wrote that U.S. military police who were supervising the Iraqi police had heard some of his fellow prisoners referring to him as an Israeli and suggested he be moved to a separate cell.
Please sign this Petition if you are inclined to do such things. It’s to tell that drooling vulture they call the Senator from Oklahoma that he doesn’t speak for you.
Of course, if you agree that the Iraqi prisoners should be grateful all they got was a little forced sodomy with a chemical light then don’t sign. It’s not like we are quite as bad as Saddam or anything.
Another round of applause for David Brock’s Media Matters. They are now running a TV spot in DC highlighting Limbaugh’s putrid statements about the torture scandal.
You really need to check out Limbaugh’s latest on MM every day and circulate it widely. I’ve always known that the best way to expose the right was simply by letting normal people see what they actually say.
He’s never had to answer for the nonstop lies and character smears of the last 12 years. He isn’t handling the pressure very well. All these tough guys on the right who enjoy seeing a grown man cry must be loving Rush these days:
They can’t destroy me, folks. The media didn’t make me. The media can’t destroy me. The media didn’t make me who I am. I did that along with you. So if the media didn’t make me, if the media didn’t — if they’re not responsible for building me, they can’t tear me down. They can try.
And I don’t know that that’s what they’re doing, but nevertheless, don’t sweat it. That’s — I just — I felt compelled to answer this, because there must have been over the last three or four days a whole bunch of e-mails from people who think I ought to be angry about it and want me to fight back and this sort of thing. And I’ve also learned that over the years, that fighting back is not the right way to handle this. You just keep doing what you’re doing. Just be who you are and let that be the fight.
Don’t — if you start responding to these people, that’s all you’re going to end up doing, which is why I was reluctant to even do this. But I wanted to do it one more time, get it out of the way, get it on the record. And let’s just see how much of this, this total explanation, including the context of the Skull and Bones comment, let’s see how much of this ever shows up in any of these places which have used that quote as a means to be critical, disparaging, discrediting, whatever.
The context is that a pill popping fascist gasbag who popularized Republican hatespin and character assassination is getting a taste of his own medicine. He’s been spewing this stuff for years. Finally somebody is calling him it. Bravo.
Maureen Dowd has an unusually good column up in which she reports something I hadn’t heard before:
In a public relations move that cheapens the heroism of soldiers, the Pentagon merged the medals for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, giving the G.W.O.T. medal, for Global War on Terrorism, in both wars to reinforce the idea that we had to invade Iraq to quell terrorism.
Can you believe that crap? I realize that we are always calling things “Orwellian” but actually dubbing Afghanistan and Iraq as the Global War On Terrorism makes the slightly Nazi-esque term Homeland Security sound a little bit delicate.
More importantly, this is another one of those never-never land dipshit political moves that piles one disasaterous decision on top of another. In honor of Karen Hughes, we’ll call them Catastrophies With Consequences.
Dowd continues:
The truth is that our invasion of Iraq spurred terrorism there and around the world.
That initial deception — and headlong rush to throw off international conventions and old alliances, and namby-pamby institutions like the U.N. and the Red Cross — led straight to the abuse of Abu Ghraib. Now the question is whether the C.I.A. tortured Al Qaeda operatives.
Officials blurred the lines to justify ideological decisions, calling every Iraqi who opposed us a “terrorist”; conducting rough interrogations, perhaps to find the nonexistent W.M.D. so they would not look foolish; rolling all opposition into one scary terrorist ball that did not require sensitivity to the Geneva Conventions or “humanitarian do-gooders,” to use the phrase of Senator James Inhofe, a Republican.
One of my arguments against the invasion was the entirely predicatable blowback. It seemed to me that after 9/11 and the whole worldwide Jihad thing that we should be a little bit more cunning and wily and a little less full of shit.
I could never see the logic in unnecessarily opening this Iraq front, particularly when it was obvious that it was going to make matters worse without any discernible benefit. We had enemies enough already and smarter and simpler ways to combat terrorism than crashing around the mid-east like an uncontrolled, enraged beast.
And it doesn’t take a Phd from the University of Chicago to realize that when you go around making things up— like we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq “because of terrorism” — there might be some glitches in the president’s crusade for peace, love and understanding. Politicians should remember that children are listening. And I’m talking about fully grown Americans who may be confused by the president’s clear message that we invaded Iraq to liberate a bunch of terrorists.
The wing nut talking points, after an obligatory “yeah, yeah, it’s icky yada, yada, yada” is that the victims of the bad apples at Abu Ghraib were the worst of the worst, the terrorists, the murders, the ones who are trying to KILL YOUR BABIES in their sleep, so let’s not get our panties in a bunch because this is war, mister!
Inhofe: “The idea that these prisoners — you know, they’re not there for traffic violations. If they’re in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners — they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we’re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.”
It has been noted elsewhere that the Red Cross report and The Taguba report estimated that somewhere between sixty and ninety percent of the prisoners held at Abu Ghraib were innocent.
Inhofe said several times over the last few days that the innocent were processed and let loose immediately but numerous news reports say they were generally held for about three months before they were freed with some cigarettes and $10.00.
Unsurprisingly, Inhofe is full of it. But, like our president, I doubt that he reads anything but his picture Bible and The Moonie Times so he is unaware that there have been a number of news accounts over the past week or so from those who are in the pictures and they are not terrorists, insurgents or murderers. They are poor innocent schmucks who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fact that they are free today should suggest that they were not the “worst of the worst,” who, if you believe the president in his State of the Union address are either in custody or “have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way — they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.”
The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd says he feels that he cannot move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Mr. Abd looked at yet again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.
“That is Joiner,” he said, pointing to one male soldier in glasses, a black hat and blue rubber gloves. His arms were crossed over a stack of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners.
“That is Miss Maya,” he said, pointing to a young woman’s fresh face poking up over the same pile.
He gazed down at another picture. In it, a second female soldier flashed a “thumbs up” and pointed with her other hand at the genitals of a man wearing nothing but a black hood, his fingers laced on top of his head. He did not know her name. But the small scars on the torso left little doubt about the identity of the naked prisoner.
“That is me,” he said, and he tapped his own hooded, slightly hunched image.
[…]
He was arrested in June at a military checkpoint, when he tried to leave the taxi he was riding in. He was taken to a detention center at the Baghdad airport, he said, and then transferred to a big military prison in Um Qasr, near the Kuwaiti border. He said he had stayed for three months and four days.
The treatment in Um Qasr, he said, “was very good,” adding: “There was no problem. The American guards were nice and good people.”
After the three months, he said, he was transferred to Abu Ghraib, a sprawling prison complex 20 miles west of Baghdad, where Mr. Hussein incarcerated and executed thousands of his opponents.
[…]
Finally, after an ordeal of what Mr. Abd believed to be about four hours, it was over.
The soldiers removed the beds from their cells, he said, and threw cold water on the floor. The prisoners were forced to sleep on the ground with their hoods still on, he said.
“I was so exhausted, I fell asleep,” Mr. Abd said. “These were the same walls where Saddam Hussein used to interrogate people. We thought we would be executed.”
But the next morning, he said, doctors and dentists arrived to care for their injuries. Beds and pillows were brought back in. They were fed. Everyone was nice, Mr. Abd said. Then at night, the same crew with “Joiner” would return and strip them and handcuff them to the walls.
About 10 days after it started, the nightly abuse ended, for no explained reason. “Joiner” just stopped coming to the cell block, and about a month later, Mr. Abd and two others among the seven were transferred to a civilian Iraqi prison in Baghdad.
It is a horrible story that is well documented in the Taguba report and verified by people who saw it. This innocent man was caught up in a Kafkaesque nightmare(or perhaps Saddamesque nightmare is the correct term)
It’s interesting that Inhofe and Limbaugh and the rest who are trying to concoct some sort of narrative that their non-sadist base can live with, are unaware that this fellow claims that he was never interrogated, thus supporting the yesterday’s fading talking points about “bad apples.” Of course, the soldiers involved are now saying that the pictures of the torture were ordered up by their superiors as part of some sort of psy-op interrogation plan, so who knows?
Now, Inhofe and his cronies can say that there is no proof (except for the matching scars and paperwork proving his incarceration at the same time.) But, there is more:
Hasham Mohsen Lazim traded used tires for a living in the Shiite slum of Sadr City. He had been in trouble only once in his life, he said, a desperate time six years ago when he deserted Saddam Hussein’s army to support his wife and four small children.
Then on one warm night in August, a taxi ride home ended in a U.S. Army holding cell, the first stop in what he described as a hellish four-month journey through the U.S. military prison system in Iraq. His experience veered between anguish and confusion, abuse and fury, before culminating in a series of pictures, broadcast worldwide in recent days, that memorialized his 24-day stay in the grimmest precincts of Abu Ghraib prison.
“Something awful happened to me,” Lazim said during a two-hour interview broken by long pauses of silent despair. “I will never forget it until the day I die.”
The story is very much like the NY Times account. It is hard to see how they could have come up with so much detail that matches the reports, the pictures and the testimony of Americans who were questioned for the investigation.
He too is now free, which puts the lie to this latest attempt to defend the indefensible. If he was a terrorist with American blood on his hands, I don’t think it’s likely that he’d have been set free to kill some more.
Inhofe and his crew of sadistic freepers had better have a back-up plan.
[Feminazi] Limbaugh on prisoners getting “a taste of [their] own medicine”
CALLER: When I saw those pictures — the Iraqi supposedly torture pictures — I felt no shame. The only thing I could think is, they’re getting a little taste of their own medicine, and those Iraqi women must be cheering.
LIMBAUGH: Made that point last week, but it didn’t go over well with Rush Monitors. I did — that’s — made that point. That point has not been quoted. I said, you know, this might not be bad — oh, it’s gonna happen again — I said, if you look at the role Iraq — Arab men make their women play — the roles they play, the roles they have to live — to, to, to make American prison guards females and to give those women utter power over Arab men — some might call that torture, some might call that decent punishment, some might say here’s a taste of your own medicine. This is what you’ve been doing to your women for time immemorial, only now the tables are turned. But all that’s been lost because [with a slight lisp] “This is horrible. This is, this is disgusting. This is outrageous. This is mean.”
Limbaugh on Democrats and the media
I’m gonna submit here — and I don’t care who quotes me on this, and I don’t care where they repeat it — there’s a lot of acting going on here, and there’s a lot of false phony concern for these Iraqi detainees. This is not about people genuinely outraged about this. …
The Democrats and the media don’t give a rat’s rear end about what happened to those prisoners. All this is, is the latest weapon they can use politically to harm Bush, which is why they’re trying to harm me, in fact. It’s all political. They don’t give a hoot about those prisoners. …
Limbaugh on Media Matters for America’s monitoring
You know, isn’t it interesting folks, I’ve been around here for fifteen and a half years. I’ve never been so often quoted on a single story. I think what happens is that the media has come across a new website that’s supposedly chronicling what I say, and they all go there and they read it and they see and then they take the propaganda of that website and repackage it and call it news. And they leave the context of my remarks out. For example, nowhere where I’ve been quoted have I been quoted as saying that I think what happened there is not good. I don’t support it, and I don’t encourage more of it. I have not said that — or I have said that, they’ve not quoted me on that. There’s a number of things that they’ve left out, uh, most of it context. Uh, but it’s just, it’s amazing, all these years they could just tune in to my show and listen, but no, that’s too tough. But now there’s just a central clearinghouse for out-of-context quotes from this program. They can go there and present as news, even though it’s just repackaged propaganda.
Imagine that. Rush says he’s being quoted out of context with repackaged propaganda when his words are repeated verbatim. He says that nobody is quoting all the stuff where he condemns the torture. All they do is report stuff like this, taken from the same show yesterday:
Limbaugh on sincerity of public outrage
How many of you went out to social occasions over the weekend and this subject, this story came up? And how many of you wanted to really say, “I don’t see the big deal here. This is war. These are people who tried to kill Americans.” But you didn’t say it or some variation of that because you were afraid because you were with a bunch of people who were start yelling at you that you for being insensitive or coarse or crude or whatever, so you said what you thought you had to say in order to get along during a controversial situation if this conversation came up wherever you were.
How many of you did that? How many of you did that? Admit it to yourself you don’t have to raise your hands out there. I’m not, we’re not counting hands out there. I want you to think about it because the fact of the matter is I think that’s what most people are doing. I think most peo –that’s where my optimism and faith in the people of this country remains steadfast. I don’t think most people are that outraged by this. I don’t thi — let’s put it this way, I don’t think the public outrage nowhere near matches what we watched on television on Friday and yesterday exhibited by these holier than thou sanctimonious elected officials who are themselves acting and saying what they think you their voters want them to say and what you their voters expect to hear. …
Folks, somebody asks what you think of this prisoner thing, just tell them the truth, and I guarantee you more people you tell the truth will say, “Yeah, I agree with you” than you know…
He’ll be back on the little blue babies soon if people don’t show some compassion and let him off the hook. Rush is not supposed to be called on his outrageous talk. He is supposed to be allowed to brainwash his 20 million dittoheads daily without interference. This is upsetting him.
I watched the video of Berg’s beheading and it literally made me sick to my stomach. Do not watch it. It’s a barbaric, horrible display of inhumanity. I wish I hadn’t seen it. I’ll never forget it.
The story surrounding Berg is getting very strange indeed. I don’t know what is wrong, exactly, but something is. The government is not being straighforward about the circumstances and it’s very wierd:
An American civilian who was beheaded in a grisly video posted on an al-Qaeda-linked Web site was never in U.S. custody despite claims from his family, a coalition spokesman said Wednesday.
[…]
The video posted Tuesday showed a bound Berg in an orange jumpsuit — similar to those issued to prisoners held by the American military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was sitting in front of five men, their faces masked, as one read an anti-American text.
[…]
But unanswered questions remained about Berg in the days before he vanished, as well as where and when he was abducted.
Berg, who was Jewish, spoke to his parents March 24 and told them he would return home on March 30, according to his family in suburban Philadelphia.
But Berg was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul on March 24, was turned over to U.S. officials and detained for 13 days, the family said. His father, Michael, said his son was not allowed to make phone calls or contact a lawyer.
Coalition spokesman Dan Senor told reporters that Berg was detained by Iraqi police in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. The Iraqis informed the Americans, and the FBI questioned him three times about what he was doing in Iraq.
Senor said that to his knowledge Berg “was at no time under the jurisdiction or detention of coalition forces.”
Michael Berg told The Associated Press, however, that U.S. officials were “playing word games.”
“The Iraqi police do not tell the FBI what to do. The FBI tells the Iraqi police what to do. Who do they think they’re kidding?” the elder Berg said.
Calls by the AP to police in Mosul failed to find anyone who could confirm Berg was held there. The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority runs Iraq, controlling not only the police, but the military and all government ministries.
FBI agents visited Berg’s parents March 31 and told the family they were trying to confirm their son’s identity.
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.
Berg’s father blamed the U.S. government for creating circumstances that led to his son’s death, saying if his son had not been detained for so long, he might have been able to leave Iraq before the violence worsened.
[…]
Asked for details about Berg’s last weeks in Iraq, Senor replied: “We are obviously trying to piece all this together, and there’s a thorough investigation.” He said he was reluctant to release details but did not say why.
“The U.S. government is committed to a very thorough and robust investigation to get to the bottom of this,” Senor said, adding that “multiple” U.S. agencies would be involved and that the FBI would probably have overall direction.
Senor said that in Iraq, Berg had no affiliation with the U.S. government, the coalition or “to my knowledge” any coalition-affiliated contractor. But Senor would not specify why Iraqi police, who generally take direction from coalition authorities, had arrested him and held him.
Police in Mosul “suspected that he was engaged in suspicious activities,” Senor said, refusing to elaborate. Berg was released April 6 and advised to leave the country, Senor added.
Michael Berg said that in early April, his son refused a U.S. offer to board an outbound charter flight because he thought the travel to the airport — through an area where attacks had occurred — was too risky.
State Department spokeswoman Kelly Shannon said that on April 10, Berg told a U.S. consular officer in Baghdad that he wanted instead to travel to Kuwait on his own.
Berg apparently had an Iraqi in-law in the Mosul area, according to emails to his family.
Brig. Gen Mark Kimmitt said the only role the U.S. military played in Berg’s confinement was to liaise with the Iraqi police to make sure he was being fed and properly treated because “he was still an American citizen.”
This man was apparently just wandering around Iraq trying to find work on his own, unaffiliated with the US government. I had no idea that Americans could even go to Iraq on their own. If I recall correctly, Democratic lawmakers had a difficult time getting permission to go to Iraq over the last year, but perhaps that was because of security concerns.
I don’t know what all this means. It’s possible that it’s just a strange and bizarre series of events that ended in horror. But you have to wonder why the FBI was supposedly answering to the Iraqi police in Mosul while the US military who supposedly control the country are denying that they had Berg in custody when it is pretty clear that they did. Something isn’t right and from the way this AP report reads, this reporter agrees.
Although Inhofe did not directly challenge American policy dictating adherence to the Geneva Convention in Iraq, he did stress the pre-eminence of aggressive intelligence-gathering when confronting terrorism.
“We’re in a different kind of world than we’ve ever been in before,'” he said during the interview. “And I believe that we need to be tougher than we have ever have been before … and it’s imperative that we get intelligence.”
At a time when the Bush administration has issued a series of apologies for the mistreatment of Iraqi captives, it might be easy to assume that Inhofe is consciously challenging the White House from its right flank. But the Oklahoma senator insists that he is stoutly supporting the administration and beleaguered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Asked about his inflammatory opening statement to the committee, Inhofe said confidently, “I’m sure that the president was glad that I did it.”
I’m sure he was. The man who mocked a condemned prisoner begging for her life by pursing his lips and saying “Oh, please don’t kill me,” is definitely a kindred spirit.
