Ciao, Marcello!
Ciao, Guiletta…
Well, it is interesting to see that even this appears to keep the Right unmoved. And to think, it was just a few short months ago that they were bleating on about liberating the poor downtrodden Iraqis. But you know, we gotta torture them to liberate them.
Anyway, from the Financial Times, by way of regurgitating a Wall Street Journal revelation, cited above in this very same thread, (both of these being wildly leftist newspapers, you know?) and covering a press conference that was called by the Red Cross as a result of the WSJ story, comes this:
So much for Karpinski’s alibi.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
We know now that terrible things happened, terrible things that were perpetrated by people in our employ. Our taxes payed those soldiers; our votes put their leaders in power. I don’t know what we could have done differently, but I know that we should have done things differently. Our anguish and our shame is that we didn’t see, or at least we didn’t see far enough. Not voting for Bush doesn’t absolve us, and I’m not sure that voting for Bush in and of itself condemns us. We have to take responsibility for the atrocities committed on our watch and find ways to prevent them from recurring. The alternative is to throw up our hands and say, “evil exists, these things happen, there’s nothing we can do to stop it.” That is unacceptable to me. That’s why I’m sitting here in my cosy little American apartment weeping over the actions of my countrymen and women.
It’s that last that tears me apart. Having for so long supported the rights of women to serve their country, I think I always had in the back of my mind the idea that women would be better, more thoughtful soldiers, less driven by machismo and aggression. A foolish idea, now irretrievably proved wrong. Young American women soldiers participated in the very worst and least human activities. To use the French term, that is insupportable.
Are there souvenir photographs of these atrocities available?
Is it now wrong to express outrage over the existence of US military programs that take decent american kids, and turn them into sadistic monsters?
Has the worldwide appeal of American values sunk so low that we must resort to torture in order to spread our culture?
Is that a price you’re willing to pay in order to promote freedom and democracy?
In order to defeat the enemy we had to become the enemy…
This vicious circle must stop, yesterday.
This is Great Debates, rjung. Yet we see that the title to this thread is about unsubstantiated BS that the lefties are trying to glory in: By further beating your collective breasts and crying “Mea Culpa” yet another time.
This whole thread if filled with WAG’s about how bad it’s gonna’ get and so forth. Don’t give me G.D. rules here, in this thread. Just read back a post or two, if you haven’t troubled to. You’ll see no debate, great or otherwise. What’s good for the goose and all that.
alaricthegoth: I see that now you’ve decided that posting a link wasn’t sufficient, and you’ve copied and pasted the entire story. That’s OK. I do notice, however, that this troubling statement remains:
"The allegations cannot be verified independently…
The best and only information about this comes from an angry former prisoner? Hardly an impartial source.
You offer wine and beans for dinner? Um, Dude! If you’ve got an outside grill, I’ll be glad to bring some steaks. And potatoes for baking. And a pound of butter. And bread for Texas Toast. And a fifth of Jack Daniel’s for after dinner. I like my steak rare, how about you?
Well, Martin Hyde and Tigers2B1, y’see, there are people who feel that what has taken place, not, take note, what has allegedly taken place, is pretty disturbing and disgusting. And I gotta say that since the “everytime you catch something, it has happened 100 more times without you knowing it” line is widely used by law enforcement, it’s not the sort of thing I might expect from a buncha “lefties”.
And Martin: be careful your knee doesn’t swing so high that you kick your own face when you post such asinine drivel as:
M’kay?
Waste
I think media restraint is definitely part of our problems, not only in this Iraq war but in many other events they report on. The mainstream media in the USA, in an attempt to not alienate any readers and to maintain what they consider to be public decency, generally don’t search out and/or refuse to run stories/photo’s that would upset many people. When they do run something like the “torture” photo’s, they wait for someone else to do it first and then commonly print some disclaimer/warning about graphic images that may upset children and others. And it’s not only graphic photo’s as most of the media also refuses to print the 7 “nasty” words as defined by the FCC and a few others, again supposedly to protect our sensibilities.
IMO, were the media to regularly run photo’s of people with various body parts blown away, bleeding and clearly in pain, then maybe the American public would get the true picture of the cost of war and that “war is hell”. I don’t know anything about torture, other than what I have read, but it seems that torture has been with us throughout mankind’s history. Not only has torture existed in every war that has been fought, it has historically been used freely against those who didn’t toe the dominant religious line. I don’t believe there is such a thing as “civilized war” and I doubt that there will ever be a war where torture will not be used, to one extent or another (unless we switch to robots to do all the fighting).
However, in today’s world, perhaps if the media would show graphic war photo’s in full color, it would burn the images into people’s brains, making it more difficult for us/anyone to undertake a war for other than the most serious reasons. In our visual oriented society, merely reporting that 3, 5, 10 (or whatever number) of people/soldiers were killed/injured without showing photo’s just doesn’t effectively communicate in a way that many people can easily grasp. The Bush administration recognizes the power of photography, which is why they have fought so hard to keep the coffin photo’s out of the media under the false pretence of “respect” for the families of the dead.
In today’s world, all you have to do is say “I’m sorry” and “I take full responsibility”. All is then better and let’s move forward, forgetting what went before. At a minimum, Rummy shouldn’t just offer his resignation, he should give it and walk out, regardless of how much Bush begs him not to (after all, who else could Bush put in to that position on short notice?). That would show that he really takes “full responsibility”. Of course, were this medieval Japan, he would commit seppuku by running a sword through his belly. Now THAT would be accepting “full responsibility”!
None of these mention that al-Mada, has actually produced the documents the Economists says al-Madaq has “claimed to have found in Iraqi oil ministry.”
Do you have any citations for the documents having been shown to anyone outside of the IGC and al-Mada yet? Someone like investigators, auditors etc?
alas the steaks would clash with the “fava beans and a nice chianti”…;
Just, bring yourself.
Here’s a couple of interesting stories from the today’s Information Clearing House newsletter:
Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S.:
Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.
===
Torture as Normalcy: As American as Apple Pie:
In recent years the United States has been charged by the UN and also by human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International with tolerating torture in US prisons
http://www.counterpunch.com/cockburn05082004.html
Yep. From MEMRI, Dr. Nimrod Raphaeli testified before Congress regarding ‘The List’.
I’m not sure that Hankes-Drielsma, the guy in your first cite, counts as someone “outside of the IGC”.
He’s lying about KPMG, too. The CPA wouldn’t allow Chalabi to pay KPMG out the Iraq Development Fund, and so I don’t think KPMG has actually done anything yet.
I don’t know who the second guy is. Is he the same nimrod who wrote the original article in Al-Mada?
Different nimrod, apparently. This particular nimrod does actually work for MEMRI, which is some neo-con/zionist propganda outlet:
The first site also states that:
Whats-his-nuts was just ‘among the first to see the list’.
KPMG was preparing a report regarding this issue, but has stopped until the CPA unfucks itself long enough to pay for it.
How is that ‘lying’?
Dr.Nimrod Raphaeli is a Jew, so I have a tough time envisioning him writing for the Iraqi paper Al Mada.
Bonus: A link to the Congressional investigation of the Oil-for-Food scandal.
You certainly have a responsability to do whatever you can to prevent them from recurring, indeed. I only meant that your personnal responsability in what already happened is very limited. You weren’t actually on watch, let alone in charge, and you can’t carry on your shoulders the “sins” of the whole mankind, not even of your countrymen.
You might have held unrealistic expectations about both your countrymen and the female half of humanity. But you shouldn’t be broken apart by these new realization. As you wrote above, you rather should try to do something to prevent such events from happening again. You were wrong? And then? All of us are seriously wrong at some point or another, and awake one day to displeasant surprises.
Way better to feel the way you do than to react by denying reality like some posters seem to be willing to do.
It’s irrelevant that the WSJ opinion editor has also seen the list. Everyone’s seen the list. The question from SimonX is about the documents supporting the list. The Al Mada suddenly sprung to life late last year, and originally published it.
There’s a critical difference between the statement “Hankes-Drielsma said the accounting firm KMPG was preparing a report the world body would receive” and the correct statement “the accounting firm KPMG had been approached about preparing a report some time in the future which the world body would receive”.
Taking just one early allegation, the one against George Galloway: this has been proven a forgery and the Christian Science Monitor was forced to publish a retraction
To my knowledge, nobody has seen any real documents of the latest allegations. I’m not even sure if they exist. The facts as reported so far seem exceedingly weak. A spreadsheet? Gimme a break. Anybody can type up a spreadsheet. But then, real paper documents have this inconvenient property, of being hard to forge and easy to prove a forgery…
To be sure, I consider it proven that Saddam benefited by exploiting the Oil for Food program. However, I consider the al Mada list of alleged participants hightly dubious.
Clash? Nay nay! Fillet Steak with Green Beans and Fava beans
Since I’ve never known anything that clashed with a good chianti, we may be making progress here.
Although, why anyone would want to cut a perfectly good steak into strips and pour beans over it does escape me. I’ll try most anything once, but I now suspect that some of you guys are even more strange than I thought.
Pour a bean mix over steak? Or worse, eat a bean meal with no steak at all? :eek: