If Bush approved of the torture, why did Centcom launch its investigation against his wishes and charge the torturers with crimes? Also, who were the 12-year-old boys who were fucked up the ass?
His approval or acquiescence is evident in his lack of any attempt, even now, to do anything at all that might be even vaguely interpreted as being aimed at preventing a recurrence.
I think charging Bush with approving of the torture really does take it one step too far. He does still seem to buy the idea that he was given this mission by God and that we are always the good guys. While I highly doubt he wasn’t told, I suspect they did keep the pictures from him. Without the graphic evidence it is pretty easy to convince oneself that the abuse was exagerated, or missinterpereted, especially if that is what you want to believe.
I know that this kind of thing happens in all wars, but i wonder if this has an added edge because of how unprepared our troops were were for the reality of the situation. These were people who were told they were going in to liberate the people. They were told that they would be welcomed as heros. They believe they are risking their lives for the benifit of the Iraqis. That perception of ingratitude may be a contributing factor.
Any study of the region’s history should have told someone the Iraqis would just let someone inhabit their country, no matter how good the intentions, but then again no one seems to have studied much about the region besides its oil deposits. They walked into this war with lots of petrolium engineers contracted to help and almost no translaters.
A very good point. Makes a lot of sense.
The Boston Globe newspaper carried a story recently on the death of a local soldier in Iraq. The young man’s grief-stricken mother was quoted as having said of the Iraqis “How can they be so ungrateful?”
I can see that you’re buying into the “isolated incident”, “few bad eggs” story, furlibusea.
That just ain’t how it went down.
I am not sure we are saying dissimilar things Desmostylus. It is systemic because the soldiers are unprepared, uneducated, undermanned, undersuppervised, and underequipped. The very lack of knowledge of the culture and the history of the country they are dealing compounds abuse that always happens in war anyways. Making it possible for ordinary men and women to go kill many other human beings seems to be a process of dehumanising the “targets,” and almost any interview you hear with returning soldiers seems to show this dissapointment that the Iraqis didn’t seen ti appriciate our effort.
Well to be fair to the staff, when told that the President should be made aware of these developements, they did what they normally do, they informed Cheney.
Easy mistake.
Only if the smart American public allows them too.
And that worries me, because I meet stupid people everyday.
We’re saying slightly different things. I don’t disagree with what you’ve said, but I’d go a step further and pin the blame a bit higher up. I’m of the opinion that the torture was a deliberate policy decision on the part of Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney.
Look, the establishment of Guantanamo Bay was a major step. It wasn’t a minor thing that Rumsfeld did, that Bush and Cheney were unaware of. That had to have been approved at the very highest level.
Sending Miller, the guy in charge of Guantanamo Bay, over to Iraq last September to set up the interrogation process might have been something that Rumsfeld did on his own.
But at this late stage, sending Miller back to Iraq, ostensibly to sort out the problems at Abu Ghraib, is a firm stamp that the treatment of the prisoners there is being conducted according to official policy.
The same sort of thing is happening here with the Liberal sponsorship scandal. Basically, the new Prime Minister is claiming that he didn’t know the teeniest little thing about major disbursements of funds, many of which happened while he was finance minister. So either 1) our prime minister is lying through his teeth, or 2) our prime minister used to be a finance minister who had no idea where hundreds of millions of dollars was going.
I wonder how much the high ups knew of this,
Was this during Clintons reign or Bush ?
All the same, you would have thought the FBI must have notified to senior levels, and surely if terrorists threats were to be takne seriously, someone would have tried to recruit the subject to gain some details as to how significant this threat was.
It does give the lie to the idea that those whose role it was had no idea about 9/11 prior to those events.
There does seem to be a policy of cluelessness, perhaps deliberate, or maybe incompetance.
Sorry casdave can you say what we need to get out of that link, I am afraid I can’t do another paid subscription this month.
Is the link not working ?
What I’m trying to say is that not all information gets up the chain to the top, and sometimes it can be absolutely crucial stuff.
When 9/11 took place, there was an inquiry into the affairs of counter-terrorist organisations, and I would have thought the FBI would be included in this.
Somehow the information in the link I posted did not seem to get to that inquiry.
I would have thought that this would appear to be a deliberate omission, or whatever purpose.
Was Rumsey aware ?
How did this not make the inquiry?
Had this matter been raised at the inquiry, then surely the agency that did not investigate the matter further would have had to account for its behaviour.
It may point to concealment of relevant facts, but on whose authority ?
We non-Brits must pay in order to see much of the Time’s content.
I see, well I guess I’ll have to post some of that link.
I must point out that this publication is slightly right of cnetre in its worldview but is generally regarded as being accurate, if not slightly dull and unsensationalistic.
It seems on rereading the article that an inquiry has indeed raised this issue, I am surprised it is not making as much headlines as perhaps it might, but then Sunday is often not the biggest news day of the week.
Iraqi guards ?
There say now that there were Iraqi guards in that prison (or in others)?
Since when do the occupyers employ (read: trust) Iraqi guards for guarding the “dangerous Iraqis”?
And Iraqi guards were raping young boys?
Well, call me incurable sceptical, but unless the occupyers rounded up some Iraqi pedophiles or frustrated homosexuals or some ex-Sadam-torturers or some people belonging to the mini-mini minority of non Muslim population, I think I shall need to see the evidence of such a claim before I can imagine myself that Muslim Iraqi guards can be ordered by the foreign occupyers to rape young boys.
If there were Iraqi guards effectively doing this, I would vote for the ex saddam torturers. Seems very consistent to me with the US policy there.
As for Bush and Rumsfeld being so stupid to openly declare that they did not see “any pictures” until a few hours before they said they didn’t see them: If they think that is a good PR show, they “ain’t seen nothing yet”.
Making such a claim only adds to the impression that they by all means want to cover up the Cover Up.
In addition they come across as extremely stupid in handling this covering up the Cover Up. If they were not in the least interested in seeing the pictures about the abuse they were informed about months ago, it means that the whole thing had not a shred of their interest and was considered as the normal procedure for “handling” prisoners.
Transfer these feelings to Iraq and the rest of the region and you get an idea why those pictures keep showing up in the media, why Bush’s patethic arrogant paternalistic monologue had nobody’s interest and why his pictured is carried around with “Terrorist Die” as decoration.
Salaam. A