Troops don't recall abuse at Iraq prisons

[UpInArms]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apus_story.asp?category=1110&slug=Prisoner%20Abuse%20Guards

PHILADELPHIA -- Some soldiers who have returned home from guarding enemy prisoners in Iraq describe detention camps there as hard, dirty places, plagued by overcrowding and violence, but say the vast majority of U.S. troops treated prisoners humanely.

None said they saw the type of abuse depicted in recently uncovered photographs showing soldiers apparently tormenting prisoners, or posing next to piles of hooded and naked inmates.

<snip>

Mead said "you'd hear the stories" about soldiers or intelligence officers using force or humiliation to control problematic prisoners, but nothing like the type of abuse depicted in the photographs.

"It made me sick, what they did. I'm not condoning that in any way. That is some weird, nasty stuff," he said.

A member of another unit guarding Abu Ghraib said morale was so low among military police that when rumors started circulating about the abuse scandal, "there was nothing anyone could have done to shock us at that point."

...more...

[DulceDecorum]

1. Ronald Reagan

has the exact same difficulty remembering things,
especially anything related to Iran/Contra.

[Zero Gravitas]

9. I don't remember, I don't recall...

I've got no memory of anything at all.

[saigon68]

11. "THERE'S ONLY A COUPLE BAD APPLES" D. Rumsfeld

Count the bad apples in this shot. Don't count the POW'S being tortured on the floor.


http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/images/I6126-2004May06L


Looks like 9 to me

[0007]

12. ....just one or two and we're going see that justice takes care of those..

Americans aren't indeed like that. Americans are good folks who love justice.

Gotta a bad link saigon68

[saigon68]

13. LINK WORKS FOR ME 0007

ITS THE DIRECT LINK --- ITS SLOW TRY IT AGAIN

[Leezamarie]

14. Yes even that clerical guy with the piece of paper is a felonious

bad apple in my book. Here we call it "accessory before and after the fact" which is pretty much complicity. In this occupation type situation Mr Goingaboutmyclericalbusiness should be facing a life sentence and be overjoyed if he gets only 15 years.

[qb]

2. I can't believe people still use the lame "don't recall" line.

Everyone knows it's code for "I'm guilty as sin and this is the only way I can think of to avoid accountability."

[eleonora]

4. lol

I was just thinking that....
Despite proof of the contrary, the accused did not recall committing the murder.

[TahitiNut]

3. Maybe if they remembered, they'd have been "stop lossed"?

After all, we sure don't want to send the "good soldiers" home, do we? :eyes:

[ConcernedCanuk]

5. "there was nothing anyone could have done to shock us at that point."

.
.
.

That's scary!

What does it mean?

That so much ELSE was going on that this abuse scandal just sorta "fit right in" ???

I think that there's one fuckofabig "iceberg" here

and why was the morale so low BEFORE the scandal?

It just gets worse and worse,

how long before "abuse" stories get to be "normal"

gawwd - this is all so sick - -

[Kinkistyle]

8. A VERY important and telling line!

What the guy is saying is that things are SO bad in Iraq and troops are under such mental and physical stress that they just couldn't give two sh*ts that a couple of Iraqi's are getting tortured. Our troops are not in a good way. The fact that they are resorting to such tactics should IMMEDIATELY set off alarms of "My Lai" in everyone's minds.

[comsymp]

6. Just another misleading headline...

Another case in which the wording of the headline doesn't reflect the thrust of the story.

Just read it twice and nowhere is the word "recall" (or remember, recollect, etc) used.

It's a good story, however- well worth reading in its entirety, for what it does say.

[Voltaire99]

7. Colonel Ho-o-o-gan! I know nut-zink! Nuttttttttt-zink!

A member of another unit guarding Abu Ghraib said morale was so low among military police that when rumors started circulating about the abuse scandal, "there was nothing anyone could have done to shock us at that point."


Nice job reporting it, buddy. Silence is complicity.

[progressivebydesign]

10. This is very telling:

""you'd hear the stories" about soldiers or intelligence officers using force or humiliation to control problematic prisoners"

I supposed the elderly women stripped naked and forced to give "donkey rides" to US soldiers was a problemtic prisoner.

[Leezamarie]

15. Source of Donkey story is suspect - Ann Clwyd

This UK "human rights" advocate is also the source of the "Saddam's people shredder" story, which was bunk.
MEET ANN CLWYD, FUNDED BY UNCLE SAM

If you think the UK is somehow different from other US infiltrated countries, consider the case of the Blairite MP Ann Clywd who runs Indict, described as a human rights organisation. In fact Indict was only ever concerned with indicting America's new enemies, Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party in Iraq. It has now been wound up, acording to Clwyd's office because its job is over.

Clwyd was once a hero of the left who boosted her career with opposition to Cruise missiles in the 1980s. Now she is a leading warmonger, credited with swinging twenty Labour MPs into supporting the war with her denunciations of Saddam Hussein (and indirectly helping to pollute Iraq with tonnes of depleted uranium dust).

Recently The Observer ran a glowing interview with Clwyd, the sort of puff normally reserved for celebrities in reviews sections. Clwyd was so brave that she was even prepared to be a favorite of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in the cause of human rights. (You might wonder why she was not calling for their indictment as the people who aided and abetted Saddam's worst crime: the launching of the 1982 war of aggression against Iran)

What The Observer failed to mention is that Clwyd's organisation is FUNDED by the US State Department. The grants, under the Iraq Liberation Act, started within six months of the founding of Indict. Clwyd's key allegation against Saddam Hussein, that he was putting people live through mincing machines, now seems about as likely as the 1991 lies about the Kuwaiti babies, or for that matter the 1914 lies about the Germans. If you think this is so grotesque it has to be true, think again.

On the day of the Iraq House of Commons vote Clwyd's claim ran in Murdoch's Times under the headline ‘See men shredded, then say you don’t back war’. Challenged by The Spectator magazine, Clwyd now describes these statements as reports. It was not her job to verify them, she says, and nobody did. The researcher who came up with them in `Northern Iraq` (aka Kurdistan, not occupied by Hussein's forces for over ten years) is `unavailable`.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/spectator/spec239.html

Meanwhile children are certainly shredded by Clwyd's cluster bombs, but that's different, it's an accident. Clwyd's office does not know what proportion of Indict's income came from the State Department or whether she has anything to say about the routine hooding of Iraqi suspects by British troops, a practice borrowed from Israel and generally considered to amount to torture. Clwyd is the Blair-appointed chair of the Commons Human Rights Committee but as the Blair-appointed special envoy to Iraq she is in Iraq and not available for comment. Any comment we receive from Clwyd will be reported in the next newsletter.

It seems that the further away the human rights villain, the braver Clwyd and The Observer become