Apparently Fox News and the other major media aren't giving the US torture of Iraqi prisoners as much play as it's getting abroad, but please read Seymour Hersh's report in the New Yorker and look at the screen captures from 60 Minutes at the Memory Hole. The clowning of the "guards" around the naked, humiliated prisoners is truly sickening. The government is of course trying to spin this as a "few isolated instances" but the torture was widespread and systemic, according to the military's own reports. Also, our old friends the "contractors" (mercenaries) are once again involved--apparently they dreamed up the "interrogation methods" of sexually abusing Iraqi prisoners. The 60 Minutes photos were pixelated so you couldn't clearly see that the men are being made to masturbate in some of them, while the "guards" jeered. Such activity is much more taboo in the Muslim world than here, and you better you believe this is being discussed all over the globe right now. "Why do they hate us?", you asked after 9/11--look at the pictures. And it wasn't just forced nakedness and "mock orgies." According to a government report cited by Hersh, activities also included:

[b]reaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

"They were ugly images. Is this the way the Americans treat prisoners?" asked Ahmad Taher, 24, a student at Baghdad's Mustansiriyah University. "Americans claim that they respect freedom and democracy — but only in their country." - Canada's Globe and Mail.
- sally mckay 5-02-2004 12:42 am

Seymour Hersh holds his own pretty well with Bush shill Wolf Blitzer in a CNN interview. Here's a transcript. One especially interesting part is in bold:

BLITZER: Let's move back to the situation in Iraq now. By now, you've probably seen the photographs that aired last week that prompted an international outrage over the treatment of some Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison.

We have more now. Extensive allegations of abuse are being detailed in the brand new issue of The New Yorker magazine. Joining us, the author of that article, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Seymour Hersh.

Sy, thanks very much for joining us.

You got a copy of this report that a general, Antonio Taguba, put together for the Pentagon, in which he reported, and I'm quoting now, "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at the Abu Ghraib prison a few months back. Who's responsible? What happened?

SEYMOUR HERSH, NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: Well, first of all, he's reporting events that took place that we don't have photographs of. So clearly what we have photographs of, those kind activities had been going on for a long time.

BLITZER: So, you're saying it's not just one isolated incident. This is more widespread. Is that what you're saying?

HERSH: Well, what we talked about was sort of a systemic failure. What he was saying was that this has been investigated. The high command in Iraq knew as of late last summer there were problems there. There's been -- his was the third investigation, and his only began after the photographs surfaced.

So, once those photographs got into play, I think the high command here in Iraq and also in Washington realized they had a problem that was out of control. So he goes in, does his study. A- plus study, the guy would have been a great journalist. It's a terrific report.

BLITZER: You managed to get a copy of this report, and it's obviously well-documented in your article.

Earlier today, General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was on television, made a few of the talk shows. And I want you to listen to specifically to what he said in response to his allegations of prisoner abuse.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GENERAL RICHARD MYERS, CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF: There was no, no, no evidence of systematic abuse in the system at all. We've paid a lot of attention, of course, in Guantanamo, as well. We review all the interrogation methods. Torture is not one of the methods that we're allowed to use and that we use. I mean, it's just not permitted by international law, and we don't use it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: All right, what are you -- first of all, your immediate reaction to what you heard from General Myers?

HERSH: Why don't I read you something from the Taguba report...

BLITZER: That's the general who put together this assessment.

HERSH: Right, and he filed it in late February, and it still hasn't been...

BLITZER: And I just want to point out, General Myers said he has not read that report yet, it hasn't reached up to him yet in the chain of command.

HERSH: I certainly believe him, which as far as I'm concerned, more evidence of the kind of systematic breakdown we're talking about. But let me read you the kind of stuff he said that predated the photographing.

"Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoritic acid liquid on detainees, pouring cold water on naked detainees, beating detainees with broomhandle and a chair, threatening them with rape, sodomizing a detainee with chemical lights and perhaps a broomstick, sicking military dogs on detainees." I mean...

BLITZER: Very graphic, and it gets even worse because I read the excerpts that you included in your article.

But the bottom line, he says, General Myers, this was not -- there's no evidence of systematic abuse. This may have been a few soldiers simply going bad.

HERSH: Taguba says otherwise. He says this is across the board. And what he says that's very important, is that these are jails, by the way, when we talk about prisoners, these are full of civilians. These are people picked up at random checkpoints and random going into houses. And even in the Taguba report, he mentions that upwards of 60 percent or more have nothing to do with anything.

So they're people just there. There's no processing. It's sort of a complete failure of anything the Geneva Convention calls for. And what can I tell you?

BLITZER: There was a woman, Brigadier General Janice Karpinski, a reservist, she was in charge of this prison. She's quoted in the New York Times this morning as saying the prison in that particular cellblock where the events took place were under the control of the MI command, military intelligence command.

Who was really in charge? Who's responsible here?

HERSH: Well, obviously, the highest command in Iraq. Because, as of last summer, they knew there was a problem in the prison.

BLITZER: When you say highest command you mean General Abizaid, General Sanchez?

HERSH: General Sanchez, Ricardo Sanchez. I think he's -- that's where you have to immediately go. This is going to end up there.

BLITZER: But you don't have any evidence he specifically knew what was happening in Abu Ghraib, do you?

HERSH: What I do have evidence of is that there were three investigations, each by a major general of the Army, ordered beginning in the fall of -- last fall. Clearly somebody at a higher level understood there were generic problems.

And the issue that General Karpinski's talking about, what Taguba says in his report is that the intelligence needs of interrogation drove the prisons. In other words, those prisons were turned, you could almost say -- it's a slight exaggeration -- almost into another Guantanamo.

Interrogation became the mantra, the thing that was essential, and that was not run by the people of the military police running the prisons. That was run by the intelligence community, not only military, CIA and private contractors.

BLITZER: Well, let's get to this. What role did you discover the CIA played in this, and what role did private contractors, who are civilians, play in this alleged abuse?

HERSH: Never mind me. It's what General Taguba said. He said he believes that the private contractors and the civilians, the CIA, paramilitary people, and the military drove the actions of that prison.

In other words, what we saw -- look, a bunch of kids from -- they're reservists from West Virginia, Virginia, rural kids -- the one thing you can do to an Arab man to shame him -- you know, we thrive on guilt in this society, but in that world, the Islamic world, it's shame -- have a naked Arab walking in front of men, walking in front of other men is shameful, having simulated homosexual sex acts is shameful. It's all done to break down somebody before interrogation.

Do you think those kids thought this up? It's inconceivable. The intelligence people had this done.

BLITZER: So, what you're suggesting is that the six soldiers who have now been indicted, if you will -- and they're facing potentially a court martial -- they were told to go ahead and humiliate these prisoners? And several of these soldiers were women, not just men.

HERSH: In one photograph, you see 18 other pairs of legs, just cropped off. There were a lot of other people involved, watching this and filming this. There were other cameras going. There were videotapes too.

And this -- I'm sure that, you know, in this generation these kids have CD-ROMs all over the place. We'll see more eventually.

I'm not only suggesting, I'm telling you as a fact that these kids -- I'm not excusing them, it was horrible what they did, and took photographs, and the leering and the thumbs-up stuff, but the idea did not come from them.

BLITZER: General Karpinski says in the New York Times also, "Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame? They want to put this on the MPs" -- those are the reservists -- "and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it's not going to go away."

Clearly, there's going to be a full-scale investigation. Are you satisfied on that front?

HERSH: Oh, my God, yes.

BLITZER: And what do you think should happen?

HERSH: You mean, besides getting out of Iraq?

BLITZER: Well, beyond the politics of this, but you're assuming that this is much more widespread than this one incident, and then that these pictures that we have -- we don't have pictures of other incidents. That's what you're...

HERSH: It's not just a question of what I'm assuming. General Taguba says it's systematic, it's out of control, it's a problem, we've got to deal with it. This is what the report says. It's a devastating report, and I just hope they make it public.

BLITZER: Was it useful, though, this kind of -- if there was torture or abuse, these atrocities, did it get information vital to the overall military objective in Iraq, based on what you found out?

HERSH: Nobody said that, and of course I assume you will hear that. But let me tell you, I talked to some people. I've been around this business in the criminal investigations, My Lai and all that, for years. I talked to some senior people, one guy who spent 36 years as an Army investigator, and he said, what happens when you coerce -- it's against the law, the Geneva Convention, to coerce information -- what happens is, people tell you what they think you want to hear.

So you've got a bunch of people, you don't know whether they know the insurgency or know al Qaeda, but they give you names, their brothers-in-laws, their neighbors. You then send out your people to arrest those people, bring them in, more people that may have nothing to do with anything. You break them down, then -- whatever means, interrogate them and get more names. It's a never-ending circle that's useless.

I would guess that the amount of information we have was minimal, out of this group, because they were largely people, as I say, picked up at random.

BLITZER: You mentioned My Lai. A lot of our viewers remember you broke the story of the My Lai massacre. You won a Pulitzer Prize for your coverage during the Vietnam War.

Give us your historic perspective, what you saw, what you reported in Vietnam, and what you're reporting now in The New Yorker magazine.

HERSH: Oh, there's no -- we're talking about in My Lai shooting people in cold blood. We're not -- that did not happen.

BLITZER: As far as you know, no one was killed at Abu Ghraib, is that what you're saying?

HERSH: No, that's not true. There were people killed, yes, but not by the soldiers, not by the reservists. There were people killed -- I can tell you specifically about one case. One of the horrible photos is a man packed in ice. You want to hear it? I'll tell it to you.

They killed him -- either civilians, the private guards, or the CIA or the military killed him during an interrogation. They were worried about it. They packed him in ice. They killed him in evening. They packed him in ice for 24 hours, put him in a body bag, and eventually at a certain time -- don't forget, now, the prison has a lot of other Army units about it, and they didn't want to be seen with a dead body.

So they packed him in ice until it was the appropriate time. They put him on a trolley, like a hospital gurney, and they put a fake IV into him, and they walked out as if he was getting an IV. Walked him out, got him in an ambulance, drove him off, dumped the body somewhere.

That literally happened. That's one of the things I know about I haven't written about, but I'm telling you, that's where you're at. There was bloodshed on the other side of the... BLITZER: We heard from Dan Senor earlier in this program, suggesting he said he didn't know of anyone who died at Abu Ghraib prison.

HERSH: I have some photographs I'll be glad to share with him anytime he wants to know.

BLITZER: It sounds as if you've got more information that you're ready to release at some point as well, that this article in The New Yorker is not everything you know?

HERSH: Of course not.

BLITZER: What are you waiting for?

HERSH: I have to prove what I believe to be true. I have to get it proven. I believe this is more extensive, yes. I believe there are other things. I believe General Karpinski, as much at fault as she was, this was on her watch, I believe there's a point to what she says. I believe there's a point to what the soldiers say.

Again, not to excuse them. I would be shamed forever having participated in taking pictures, but there was a lot of pressure on these people to get interrogation. The whole system had been turned into basically an interrogation center.

And, again, I'm telling you, we're not talking about prisoners captured in Afghanistan who are trying to kill us. We're talking about people picked up at random.

And they lost control of the system. And the Army can talk about it all they want, but they lost control.

BLITZER: But on this specific point, and we are almost out of time, there were different sections of the Abu Ghraib prison, where there were minimal security, maximum security, then there were the real hard-nosed, kind of, potential terrorists that were presumably subjected to this kind of alleged abuse.

HERSH: General Taguba says the differentiations almost didn't exist. There were no quantifying ways to differentiate. And one of the problems they had in the prisons -- and General Karpinski, I think, is right about this. There was no -- under the Geneva Convention, you would pick somebody who was a civilian, you have to process him within six months, charge them or do something. This wasn't happening. People were being kept indefinitely. They weren't allowed visits.

It was a violation -- look, we went to this war because Saddam Hussein was doing this in the same prison. And we ended up replicating it in a way -- of course it wasn't the same kind of atrocities as he was doing, but nonetheless we have different standards here in our country.

And, you know, as a citizen, it's -- I wish General Myers had read the report. I absolutely believe him, he's an honorable man, I know, that he hadn't read it. I think he should have. I think it's a terrible thing for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to go on television one day after my story's out about a report that's making news all over the world, I think it's a terrible thing for him to go on and say, "I haven't read it."

You know, we all lead by example. I was in the military. If you have good officers who do the job right, you will do it right. And I think he inadvertently, I'm sure he's an honorable man, it's a terrible example. He's saying that the prisoner issue wasn't that important until just the other week.

BLITZER: Seymour Hersh, he's got a powerful piece in The New Yorker. Thanks very much.

HERSH: You're welcome.

- tom moody 5-03-2004 11:59 am

I am so sick over this. I can barely talk about it. But here's two quick things:

1) The civilian "contractors" involved obviously have to be turned over to local Iraqi's for prosecution. U.S. citizens who commit crimes in foreign countries are subject to local laws. That is just obvious. Why is no one suggesting this? The media just keeps saying that the U.S. military has no jurisdiction. Fine, but clearly the Iraqi's have jurisdiction! (Yes, I know this will never happen, but I can't believe no one is calling for this.)

2) Someone needs to ask Bush for his opinion on what the reservist M.P.s should have done. In other words, someone should ask the president: "In your army, what should a soldier do if a superior tells him to commit an act that the soldier knows goes against the Geneva Convention? Should the soldier still commit that act? I mean, the buck fucking stops with you George, what do you want your men and women to do?"

Avital Ronell has written that 'Humanity' is a "term which acquired the prestige of its contemporary usage at the Nuremberg trials." By this she means to point out that the prosecution of Nazi officers for war crimes was not averted by their claims to have been just following orders. And that this assignment of responsibility to the individual actually allowed the modern idea of the individual to take shape. Humanity as we know it, or at least hope to know it, has it's modern roots in this particular assignment of personal responsibility. From then on, we are all now responsible. I wish we could learn our lessons.

I should have done more to stop my country. And I'm not alone. Let's bring our troops home and start with the reparations.

We need something like the Hippocratic Oath for foreign policy. First, do no harm...
- jim 5-03-2004 5:04 pm

...the Hippocratic Oath for foreign policy

wasnt that covered in washingtons farewell address?
- dave 5-03-2004 5:38 pm

You're thinking of the hypocritic oath.
- alex 5-04-2004 5:19 am

From some recent sampling of hate radio, their reaction is to discount the severity of these actions. For those wingnuts who say "this is no big deal", I'd prefer to hear their opinions after they have been subjected to similar psychological torture.
- mark 5-04-2004 9:46 am

On Fox News, Dick Cheney's favorite TV network, a military guest on Hannity and colmes tried to minimize the torture by comparing it to a "frat hazing". Yeah, if by "hazing" you're talking about the guy who was beaten to death, packed in ice for 24 hours, and then given a fake IV drip so he could be wheeled out of the prison as a "medical emergency."

Then there's Victor Davis Hanson's softpedaling in the Wall Street Journal, as summarized by Antiwar.com:

It takes Victor David "VD" Hanson four paragraphs of mild angst over the Abu Ghraib atrocities to segue into his apologia. The rationalizations for American torture of Iraqi prisoners are in five bulleted points. I'll sum them up so you don't have to read it.

--There's an investigation going on! Nothing's proven.

--Bush and Kimmitt are mad about it and boy, are those very few soldiers who did it in trouble.

--Worse things happened in history!

--The media is blowing this out of proportion, especially the Arab Press, those Osama-lovers!

--Those guys naked in human pyramids with bags on their heads were probably terrorists who deserved it!

Conclusion: People are just picking on America for this because they're mean hypocrites and don't understand America's moral superiority! Don't forget the rest of the world, especially Arabs, are much worse than us, so go nag on them.

On the other hand, if you say the torture is like a frat hazing, you can't say, like Nazi blogger Instapundit does, that it will serve as a warning to our other enemies abroad (sorry, I'm not linking to this shite):

THE VALUE OF AN EXAMPLE:

North Korea, probably the world's most secretive and isolated nation, has offered an olive branch to the US by promising never to sell nuclear materials to terrorists, calling for Washington's friendship and saying it does not want to suffer the fate of Iraq.

Hmm.

UPDATE: Tim Blair: "Maybe it was those prison photographs that scared 'em."

More like: North Korea has promised to build nuclear weapons to avoid suffering the fate of Iraq. (Calpundit)

While following the intertwined threads, I wandered into Tim-Blair-Land. That site seems to show that while not all idiots are wing-nuts, most wing-nuts are idiots.

And one more aside. While reading wingnut reaction somewhere, I saw a remark that went something like "What does it matter how this plays in the Arab press? They hate us and lie about us all the time. So for once they have something true. So what?" Moral relativism in action.
- mark 5-05-2004 10:15 am

Crossing the Line by Laura Robinson is a book about rampant sexual violence and humiliation rituals within the self-contained heirarchy of professional hockey.

The abuse takes many forms. It may be overtly sexual. It may be an overwhelming pressure on players – removed from the support of their families and often living far from home – to perform and to fit in. It often takes the form of degrading hazing rituals, many of which have violent sexual overtones, designed to take the players beyond their inhibitions and the normal limits of their aggression. Robinson shows how the institutionalized abuse in hockey turns the players themselves into abusers.

Milgram and Zimbardo.
- sally mckay 5-08-2004 10:16 am