Re: Starr's bizarre reporting - a big WTF?
http://www.alternet.org/story/32321/Missing the Scandal at Abu GhraibBy Jeremy Scahill, AlterNet
Posted on February 16, 2006, Printed on February 16, 2006
CNN's Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr should be given some kind of award for the most outrageously off-target reporting on the newly released photos and videos of U.S. torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
- snip -
"Let's start by reminding everybody that under U.S. military law and practice, the only photographs that can be taken are official photographs for documentation purposes about the status of prisoners when they are in military detention. That's it. Anything else is not acceptable. And of course, that is what the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal is all about."
What? Here I thought the "scandal" was that the U.S. military was systematically abusing prisoners. These new photos, with their documentation of violently inflicted open wounds, obliterate any notion that what occurred at Abu Ghraib was anything short of torture by all accepted definitions of the term. They reveal some horrifying scenes of naked, humiliated, bloodied prisoners, some with apparent gunshot wounds. In a video broadcast on Australia's SBS, naked, hooded prisoners were seen being forced to masturbate in front of the camera.
- snip -
The release of the photographs will spark the violence? No -- U.S. torture of prisoners sparks massive outrage and justifiably so. Moreover, this outrage should not just be confined to the "Arab world" but should be felt everywhere, particularly in the United States. Besides, Pentagon lawyers have already tried this defense in federal court, and a judge ruled that fear of facing the consequences of your actions is not a legitimate defense.
MORE