(Standard lefty site warning would be offered but this exceeds the bounds of politics. Links to original sources are offered therein…)
It appears, if this be true, that some of the photos that were withheld were withheld because they show American personnel committing rape. Given what we already have seen, it makes sense that this might be true, since it would take something really pretty awful to be worse.
And this is it? Lord, I hope not, I hope that this is all a fabrication, a total propaganda lie cooked up by people who hate our freedoms.
I Pit this because debate is impossible, only horror is possible. But if these pictures are not to be released, for plausible reasons, then we must demand, in no uncertain terms, that everyone who committed these acts, and every one who knew about them and did not intervene, be prosecuted fully and openly and publicly.
But these were high-value terrorists, right? And they were only raped when all other methods of interrogation failed to produce intelligence, right? And they were terrorists, right? And there was probably a ticking time bomb, right?
The pictures should be released because your imagination might envision something worse. The pictures are not the problem. It is the acts that were performed. To clean up the mess, you have to be open and honest. We should prosecute the perpetrators and the brass that allowed it. Then some of the world may be on our side. If we shovel it under the rug, we will be the hated torturers are rapers forever.
America is a country that tortures. America is a country that covers up rape of prisoners. Is that who you want to be?
One of the problems is that the United States invasion of Iraq was supposed to be about bringing American-style freedom and democracy to the Middle East. Now we find that this American freedom and democracy includes “torture, abuse, rape and every indecency”. Is is surprising that many reject it?
And President Obame can’t hide it, because the cats are out of the bag. It needs to be properly investigated, and those responsible need to be held accountable.
Although what we previously saw previously from Abu Ghraib involved a lot of sexual abuse, if these photos show outright rape, it will make Obama look awfully Clintonesque when he tries to explain how he wasn’t lying when he said these new photos were “not particularly sensational.”
I remember reading years ago (I think it was from Sy Hersch) that soldeiers at Abu Ghraib had videotaped the rape of a teenaged boy. I believe the rapist in that story was an Iraqi guard, though. None of this surprises me. In the Stanford Experiment it took less than a week to turn normal college students into power drunk sadists. Add in the heightened emotions, anarchic conditions, a military culture which is, frankly, already prone to attract anti-social, violent and sociopathic personalities and basically give them tacit permission to do whatever they want to people they believe are “evil” (never mind that by the military’s own estimate, 70%-90% of the prsioners at AG were innocent civilians), and it would be a miracle if stuff like this did NOT happen.
In his defense, he can always say, with some validity, that he wanted to downplay his characterizations of the content so as not to enflame things any more in Iraq. It would be kind of defeating the purpose to say, “I don’t want to give fuel to the terrorists by realeasing these pictures, but holy FUCK are they bad.”
This is horrifying, and makes me want to punch people who called Abu Graib “frat-boy pranks” even harder than I already wanted to punch them.
This is no defense of Abu Graib whatsoever, and in fact can be read as a further statement of its horrors - - there are reasons to believe now that the SPE was cooked, and it was undoubtedly unscientific and invalid as a study.
Do you have a cite for this? I have read that this experiment was repeated a number of times, but always had to be terminated early because the “guards” became too brutal with the “prisoners”.
One does wonder why, if there is photographic evidence of soldiers raping prisoners, there have not been court martials, convictions, and serious punishments.
It is worth noting that under the UCMJ, rape is a capital offense. Why are these charges not being laid?