Bush and Rumsfeld knew that a lot of the prisoners at Abu Graib had important intelligence which could potentially affect the security of the United States, and yet they did not know the conditions under which those prisonere were being held. Does anybody believe this? The military command and the CIA knew exactly the sort of conditiions that would cause those guards to become sadistic and they went about creating those conditions so they could have prisoners tortured without taking free responsibility for it . The guards were kept under stress for months at a time. Many were poorly trained and they were not given a copy of the geneva conventions. They had free access to prisoners who were under their complete control and they were ordered to soften the prisoners up for interogation. What happened there is exactly what you would expect. Bush and Rumsfeld ordered this and should be held responsible for it.
Got any um proof there Bobby? um no? okay then? Back to the indymedia for you? Did you know that Berg was a CIA-Mossad agent who wasn’t really killed? And Bush ordered the 911 attacks to distract public attention from his affair with Monica Lewinsky? What? Clinton? Well whatever.
As with all other alleged acts of misconduct from the BushCo White house, it’s always the butler in the library with the candelabra who is the guilty one.
it’s fascinating how you absolve the soldiers involved of any wrongdoing in one stroke and blame it all on bush. they were sadistic because the cia tricked them into it! bravo! goodness knows if there are assholes in the us military, it’s because bush made them that way. 
Interesting article in the Taipei Times today by a former specialist interrogatotwith the 142nd Military Intelligence Batallion, US Army National Guard.
“Ultimately, what gives rise to abuses such as occurred at Abu Ghraib is a policy of deliberate ambiguity concerning how to handle detainees. The pressure in a war to get information that could save lives is immense. But, just as understandably, senior political and military officials - particularly in democracies - prefer to avoid any association with torture. Ambiguity is thus a political strategy that encourages the spread of implicit, informal rules of behavior, thereby shifting responsibility onto the lowest ranking, least powerful, and most expendable soldiers.”
Michael Manning, Taipei Times, 19 May 2004
Thanks butcher boy. Flipper and Fred should find that enlightening. I am not sure I want to absolve anybody of responsibility but the fact is that most people in the same situation as those soldiers would have done the same or worse.
the military is rife with such ambiguities. lotsa manuals instruct us to shoot for the knee and injure the enemy instead of kill em for a myriad of good reasons. but dead guys can’t shoot back. one sure is nice on paper but becomes less wise in a command situation often.
every US soldier receives training on the geneva convention and the UCMJ in basic training. been there, received it, retained it. the excuse “nobody told me” doesn’t work in the military.
gen. karpinsky seems to be in the clear of charges as it wasn’t her part of the prison compound. if not her’s, then whose?
who gave the orders to tighten the screws? the NCO chain of command, where was it? where was the top and master sgts? seemingly these high level NCO’s are nowhere to be found. where have they gone?
just because you can see yourself smiling as you humiliate and torture prisoners under those conditions, don’t assume that most other people would as well.
“There’s definitely a cover-up,” the witness, Sgt. Samuel Provance, said. “People are either telling themselves or being told to be quiet.”
Provance, 30, was part of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion stationed at Abu Ghraib last September. He spoke to ABCNEWS despite orders from his commanders not to.
“What I was surprised at was the silence,” said Provance. “The collective silence by so many people that had to be involved, that had to have seen something or heard something.”
Provance, now stationed in Germany, ran the top secret computer network used by military intelligence at the prison."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/WNT/Investigation/abu_ghraib_cover_up_040518.html
[color=blue]
"WASHINGTON
No expert on this and it’s quite some time ago but we studied in school how easy it is to influence people. In particular if there is a (higher) authority it seems easy get them to do things they normally wouldn’t do.
I remember that one scientific experiment we studied involved 3 people, a scientist/professor as instructor, a ‘teacher’ and a student. Aim was to make the student learn faster by punishing him with pain (electrical shocks). The prof would instruct the teacher to punish the student if he failed to complete a task and where “necessary” ask the teacher to increase the shocks beyond levels he would go by himself.
The trick was of course that it was not the student who was tested (he was an associate of the prof) but the ‘teacher’ as to show how easy you can get normal people to be cruel if commanded to do so by some higher authority (the prof).
And I have no doubt that the same can be applied to the military when your officer commands you to do something, most people would probably comply without opposing the instruction / command.
Strange Rascal:
We have all been trying to browbeat you into submission. After all, you are dominated 10 to 1 by the pro-Bush brigade here and yet you seem to maintain an independent voice. Care to explain how you are able to do so? Strong genes? Rebellious personality? Confidence in one’s abilities? Training?
Integrity?
Integrity? Good word spook. One that I love to hear. Integrity involves individuals taking responsibility for their actions no? That means not blaming others or the system with the oft heard refrain: But we were only following orders. Good. Glad to see that we are in complete agreement here. Reassuring to see that talk does actually achieve a meeting of minds once in a while.
[quote=“Rascal”]No expert on this and it’s quite some time ago but we studied in school how easy it is to influence people. In particular if there is a (higher) authority it seems easy get them to do things they normally wouldn’t do.
I remember that one scientific experiment we studied involved 3 people, a scientist/professor as instructor, a ‘teacher’ and a student. Aim was to make the student learn faster by punishing him with pain (electrical shocks). The prof would instruct the teacher to punish the student if he failed to complete a task and where “necessary” ask the teacher to increase the shocks beyond levels he would go by himself.
The trick was of course that it was not the student who was tested (he was an associate of the prof) but the ‘teacher’ as to show how easy you can get normal people to be cruel if commanded to do so by some higher authority (the prof).
And I have no doubt that the same can be applied to the military when your officer commands you to do something, most people would probably comply without opposing the instruction / command.[/quote]
i don’t disagree with that, but i’ll withhold judgement on whether these soldiers were commanded to do what they did. so far their explanations have been a little sketchy. “well, they told us to be tough with the prisoners, so i thought that meant i was supposed to force him to stick his finger in his anus and lick it afterwards.”
i know there was an ambiguous situation involving troops who were overwelmed, but i am not yet convinced that they were ordered to do what they did.
I am in no way suggesting that those gaurds should avoid punishment. In fact I am so mad that I think we should turn them over to the Iraqis and let them cut their heads off!..sorry. Got carried away there. What I suspect actually is that the military identied soldiers with sadistic tendencies and then made them gaurds. They are still sadistic bastards. Or rather they are more sadistic than average. We all have it in us if the circumstances are right. Don’t doubt for a second that this whole thing was orchestrated. I just think it is the conducters that should realy get it.[/code]
Orchestrated? Let’s wait and see. Could be. No proof yet. Remember as Rascal always says. Where’s the proof? WHERE?
I agree, didn’t want to imply otherwise but just clarify that you do not need to be sadistic to torture others.
Of course there are people who do like it and thus act accordingly on their own.
What applied to the soldiers we will hopefully learn soon (not that I do trust the military’s own investigation …)
Interesting. Where is the outrage involved in the UN Oil for Food Program? Lots of world leaders involved. Lots of corruption. Lots of deaths in Iraq. Mostly wailing women and shrieking children, who died of malnutrition while Saddam built palaces. Also notice that the UN knew about this problem last year. Why is this not a source of outrage. Obviously, the UN was covering things up right? So why no beef for this? Hmmm. We have nine people involved in torturing and abusing what 20 Iraqis? AND here we have a UN that killed hundreds of thousand of babies. Get it? Babies. I know how much everyone on this forum cares about babies and other innocent life so what about the UN and its MURDER of innocent INFANTS?
An internal United Nations audit from 2003 found significant problems with the international organization’s Iraqi oil-for-food program, revealing that millions of dollars went unaccounted for.
The 23-page audit by the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services (search) into the program
Hmmm lookee lookee. Wonder where Alien could be with her readily packaged and ready to open outrage? Women abused? Yup. Children abused? Big Time and BY MEN!!! But sigh. No outrage here. Just another day fucking children and raping imprisoned women at the UN.
From Mark Steyn…
But let’s go to the next stage. What do the “Bush’s boast rings hollow” crowd want for Iraq? Usually, they want the UN to take over. Is the UN perfect? No. Is the UN good? Well, I’m not sure I’d even say that.
But if you object to what’s going on in those Abu Ghraib pictures - the sexual humiliation of prisoners and their conscription as a vast army of extras in their guards’ porno fantasies - then you might want to think twice about handing over Iraq to the UN.
In Eritrea, the government recently accused the UN mission of, among other offences, pedophilia. In Cambodia, UN troops fueled an explosion of child prostitutes and AIDS. Amnesty International reports that the UN mission in Kosovo has presided over a massive expansion of the sex trade, with girls as young as 11 being lured from Moldova and Bulgaria to service international peacekeepers. In Bosnia, where the sex-slave trade barely existed before the UN showed up in 1995, there are now hundreds of brothels with underage girls living as captives.
The 2002 Save the Children report on the UN’s cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa provides grim details of peacekeepers’ demanding sexual favors from children as young as four in exchange for biscuits and cake powder.
“What is particularly shocking and appalling is that those people who ought to be there protecting the local population have actually become perpetrators,” said Steve Crawshaw, the director of Human Rights Watch.
By now you’re maybe thinking, “Hmm. I must have been on holiday the week the papers ran all those stories about ‘The Shaming of the UN.’”
In the last few days, The Daily Mirror has had to concede that their pictures of members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment committing atrocities are all fakes. The Boston Globe has admitted that their pictures of US troops sexually abusing Iraqi women are also phony. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has apologized for claiming that Israel was implicated in the events at Abu Ghraib. Why would these big-media fact-checked-to-death news operations get suckered so easily?
Because, to the great herd of independent minds, these stories conform to their general view that all the ills of the world can be laid at the door of Bush, Blair, and Sharon. Are the media perfect? No. Are the media good? After these last two weeks, I think I’ll pass on that one.
Fred we all know that terrible things happen in the world but Bush and Blair are justifying their occupation of that country on the premise that they are helping to put a stop to it. Their credibility is seriously undermined when it comes to light that they are letting low ranking soldiers take the fall for abuses that they knew would happen. Yes THEY KNEW WOULD HAPPEN. They may not of known excatly what those guards would do but of course it would be really bad. They were told to take all of the prisoners clothes and to prepare them for interrogation. It’s practically carte blanche. The soldiers were put in a position where they were encouraged to be brutal against people they saw as the enemy. Bush, Rumsfeld and the CIA should be punished and be seen to be punished for this if for no other reason than to minimize the hostility that it will generate aginst the western world. God I would be ashamed to be an American right now.