I seriously do not understand these requests for cites.
Do you guys question the statement that “hills of Kentucky = hick,” or that she was born there and has a low IQ? The former is just Pit insult talk. Obviously there is no legitimate cite that will substantiate that. But it was reported in hundreds upon hundreds of media stories that she was low-IQ, possibly borderline-retarded; and that she was born in some small town in the backwoods of some rural state. What’s there to cite about this? It’s like asking for a cite that Stephen Hawking is smart.
Intelligent people put in the same circumstances have done the same acts. She did not resist what was happening. It is difficult to stand against the mistreatment of prisoners . She does feel singled out. The generals were the people responsible but they are above the law. Her acts were disgusting but many could have and should have been charged.I understand why she feels screwed .
Jimmy Dugan: Are you cite-ing? Are you cite-ing? ARE YOU CITE-ING? There’s no cite-ing! THERE’S NO CITE-ING IN the PIT!!
Doris Murphy: Why don’t you give her a break, Jimmy…
Jimmy Dugan: Oh, you zip it, Doris! Rogers Hornsby was my manager, and he called me a talking pile of pigshit. And that was when my parents drove all the way down from Michigan to see me in the pit. And did I cite?
Evelyn Gardner: No, no, no.
Jimmy Dugan: Yeah! NO. And do you know why?
Evelyn Gardner: No…
Jimmy Dugan: Because there’s no cite-ing in the pit. THERE’S NO CITE-ING IN PIT! No cite-ing!
I do not live under a rock, under a cave, or in Amish country. I do steer clear of TV as much as possible; I read Time for pretty much all of my news. All I know about Lynndie “dirty whorebag” England is that she’s a sick bitch with no conscience. This thread is the first I’ve heard of her origins or her IQ. So, I think it’s not exactly the most common of knowledge.
It’s funny; I’m from Tennessee, and I’ve known a number of folks from West Virginia and Kentucky who were neither inbred nor hicks. I guess I’m just an inbred hick and I don’t know it. Well shucks! Ah reckon me n ole Lynndie is kinfolk in there somewheres.
Or maybe it’s different in Tennessee. I guess we get to claim exemption from our reputation as inbred hicks, but we can still paint others with that broad, unfair, stereotypical brush. :rolleyes:
I think it’s ridiculous to blame her places of origin, her IQ, or her breeding. She’s a whorebag bitchface, and that’s reason enough for me.
Actually, I think the press handled the whole situation very, very badly. Let me get one thing out of the way up front: What happened at Abu Ghraib was WRONG and it should be condemned in the strongest possible terms, those responsible deserved to be arrested , tried and punished. Are we clear on that point? This post is in NO WAY,SHAPE, OR FORM AN EXCUSE FOR ABU GHRAB, if you’re thinking of casting my words that way, forget it, that dog won’t hunt.
What occurred at Abu Ghraib was about 90% abuse and maybe 10% torture. It was reported, however, as torture, torture, torture. U.S. TROOPS TORTURE IRAQIS screamed headlines. Articles titled WAR ATROCITIES REVEALED AT ABU GHRAIB PRISON CAMP hearkened back to the days of Auschwitz. The army was in panic mode, frantically trying to run down what happened. The public was incensed, how could our boys and girls be torturing people? We’re the good guys, right? The press was in a frenzy, fueled by a strong anti-war bias and an appetite for ratings. The perfect media storm built and built and finally broke with the release of the pictures from inside the camp. America held it’s collective breath, peeked between it’s fingers at these horrible, horrible images and saw…
Iraqi men forced to make human pyramids…wha?
A naked man humiliated by being ridiculed by a woman…that’s not good, bu…
A prisoner on a leash…well that’s just wrong…
Dogs barking and straining at the leash towards cowering prisoners…that’s scary…
A hooded man on a box with his genitals wired…See, now that’s just wrong, that IS torture…but electricity was never applied, the man was not harmed…wait, wha?
and so on. In other words, what we saw was the abuse of prisoners. Abuse is bad. Abuse needs to be investigated, stopped, and the abusers need to be prosecuted and punished. Abuse is also endemic to the human condition. Anytime you have one group of people completely in charge of another, abuse is going to occur, be it a small minded guard in a well monitored American prison tripping a manacled prisoner just because he can, a couple of sick cops sodomizing a helpless man with a nightstick or gulag guards gleefully torturing and killing political dissidents in Siberia, it’s going to happen. You can no more prevent it than you could isolate a group of man and women and expect them not to have sex. Prisoner abuse is endemic to the human condition, and most people who have not lived in a cave for 50 years recognize this fact. This does not mean they condone abuse, of course, but they recognize that it’s going to happen, and when it does it needs to be dealt with. Abuse, however, is an entirely different thing than torture, and THAT was the problem. Americans had been promised torture, and what they got was abuse, and what was worse, it completely discredited the anti-war faction that was trying to make political hay with the pictures. They were screaming TORTURE! TORTURE! TORTURE! WHY ARE YOU NOT OUTRAGED???, most people saw abuse, something to be condemned and corrected but not worthy of the vitriol coming from the left, and so they walked away “Yea, sure, it’s terrible dude, whatever” And that, right there, is *the tragedy of the press coverage of Abu Ghraib. * Goaded by both anti-war activists and Democrats seeking to take the White House in 2004, the press went right for the brass ratings ring: Torture. The true tragedy here is that by doing so prematurely they alienated exactly the people that they are supposed to inform, and as the investigation continued and things that actually were torture (or mighty close to it) were discovered, those who weren’t already on board with the anti-war cause tended to ignore it as a “fool me once” situation. Because the coverage was not nuanced at all, it went right to “OMG TORTURE!”, the press lost the ability to truly report events as the investigation unfolded, Dan Rather couldn’t come on the nightly news and say “The investigation into the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib by Army Reservists took an ominous turn as investigators discovered the bodies of several prisoners who appear to have been actually tortured to death and then buried in shallow graves. We go now to Stone Phillips, Live at…” when he’s already told us a dozen times that the abuses we already know about were torture. Since the abuse that we’ve seen pictures of clearly isn’t torture, then in most people’s minds this must be more of the same, and the discovery of actual torture victims is lost in the hubub of the boy who cried wolf. That’s the tragedy of Abu Ghraib and that’s where the press failed IMO
It doesn’t take an idiot to follow orders. The original “teachers” in Milgram’s experiment were drawn from New Haven, Connecticut - a town not generally considered particularly backwards. The experiment was repeated in Hartford and Cambridge, Princeton, Munich, Rome, South Africa and Australia, with levels of obedience registering even higher than in New Haven with the most obedience exhibited by a group of nurses in Bridgeport. Higher education and intelligence are no guarantee of empathy or the wisdom to refuse bad orders.
She may or may not be an idiot. It’s easier for the supporters of the war if she was, then they can claim she was just a “bad apple”…as opposed to the truth, which was that people were brought in to teach these techniques and that the orders to do so came from the very top. How in the hell does a girl who probably never met a Muslim know about their specific religious and cultural taboos in order to violate them?
Now that Weirddave has, is his depressingly finite wisdom, informed us that there was no torture after all, i guess this thread is moot. :rolleyes:
Of course, if he had actually read some reporting on the issue, and some of the statements (pdf) made by some soldiers, he would know that the treatment at Abu Ghraib included routine beatings, sleep deprivation, having cigarettes put out on their ears, and other techniques designed to inflict physical pain and psychological terror on the prisoners.
This information is readily available to anyone who actually cares enough to look. The fact that he chooses to focus on the most lenient possible interpretation of a few particular images, and to discount all subsequent and supplementary information about Abu Ghraib, suggests that he might not be the most reliable person to ask when looking for the distinction between abuse and torture.
