Why on Earth should we waste time providing cites for things that are common knowledge for anyone who’s read a newspaper during the last week?
As ofr the OP, I’ll just take it as the official moment when conservatives dropped the ridiculous pretense that the attack on Iraq had anything to do with bringing human rights to Iraq. Of course, that leaves the question off just what was the reason for attacking Iraq, but somehow I doubt that I’m going to get an answer.
Yet, some want to accuse the whole US military, all the way up to Rumsfeld, for some abuse (not slicing someone’s head off though) … just don’t get it.
They want to accuse the top brass because there’s strong evidence that reports of these abuses were consistently ignored by everyone in charge, right up to Rumsfeld.
Please be advised that we dropped those bombs on a nation which had not surrendered to us. Those citizens who happened to be fighting for that nation and who had surrendered to our military or otherwise fallen into our custody were entitled (and for the most part received) humane treatment in accordance with the rules of war.
In other, possibly realted news, I’m not aware that that the Japanese (or the Iraqis, for that matter) were or are materially gloppier than Americans, so I’m not sure where their viscosity comes into play.
“U.S. military officials” saying that the unreleased images showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi female prisoner and “acting inappropriately with a dead body.” [And that] …there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.
…the implied minimum of at least two murders, three rapes, one severe beating, and “inappropriate” acts with a dead body…
There’s not much to debate when one side of the argument is so rooted in illogical hatred that it sees drowning hundreds of people who have not yet even been given trials.
Not just abuse- rape and murder. RAPE AND MURDER. Who’s job do you think it is to make sure that POWs are not raped and murdered. Especially when most of them were probably just innocent bystanders who got swept up in raids.
Actually, according to the Taguba report, it’s unlikely that the MPs who committed the abuses had any way of knowing whether the people they were abusing were in fact captured in combat. Mixed in with the prisoners of war in those camps were quite a few of what the British refer to as “ordinary decent criminals” and not a small number of people who had merely had the misfortune to be caught up in a general sweep and who should have been released but for a major general in command who simply refused to authorize it. And the Army’s recordkeeping was so poor that they didn’t know who was who or even what camp they were at.
So, for all we know the “poor abused prisoners” were in fact innocent citizens pulled of the streets of Baghdad, or Basra, or Fallujah.
Let’s not forget that Nick Berg himself had been “briefly” interred – he was mistakenly arrested and held for 13 days, causing him to miss his flight home and indirectly leading to his capture and eventual death. By your logic, Mr. Berg (as a detainee) was obviously a terrorist arrested while trying to kill US soldiers, and thus his death was just desserts.
Not the whole military–just the military chain of command that has oversight of the prisons, the chain of command that has been receiving explicit complaints from the Red Cross since March of 2003, (i.e., before Mr. Bush made his notorious carrier landing and “Mission accomplished” speech), the chain of command that has had two separate internal reports indicating that the conditions in the prisons were being mismanaged, and the chain of command that had the responsibility to prevent or avoid the calamity that this has become in terms of the Iraqi-on-the-street viewing us as simply the strong-armed replacement for Hussein and his Ba’athist buddies if we really wanted to establish Iraq as the new model democracy in the Middle East (the way that Wolfowitz and Bush have claimed).