OK, serious question. Why am I not appalled at the site of US soldiers humiliating nude Iraqi prisoners in Iraq?
Ok, maybe I should be appalled, and deep down inside, maybe I am appalled, but its not easy for me to get there because I am not the least bit surprised that this was going on.
” … a prisoner stands on a box, his head covered, wires attached to his body. The news show said that, according to the army, he had been told that if he fell off the box he would be electrocuted. Other photographs show male prisoners positioned to simulate sex with each other.
"The pictures show Americans, men and women, in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners," a transcript said.
"And in most of the pictures, the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing or giving the camera a thumbs-up."
I’m not surprised. Is this the price for being so cynical?
Without making excuses for what they did I all I can say is that war is ugly.
War brings out the worst in people.
Why was I not surprised? Remember I am an American. I live here.
How are you going to beat into our heads in the media that the Iraq people are the enemy but then expect us not to fuck with them when we get a chance?
Immediately after 9/11 people around here wanted to drive over to Dearborn , Michigan and burn the city to the ground.
What was their reasoning?
Arabs live there.
Yeah, Arab Americans do live there. What's your point?
America is just racist that way. It's just the way we are.
And being racist is a product of looking at the world in black and white, right and wrong, no shade of gray terms.
If there is one thing that characterizes an American I would say it's his burning desire to see everything as black and white.
He tried to make enemies of the French, Germans and Russian (remember freedom fries) simply because they didn't buy Dubya's weak ass WMD argument against Iraq. How did we react?
"You are either with us or against us."
I don’t have faith that I can get pulled over by a cop 20 minutes in any direction outside of my hometown and catch a fair break because of the color of my skin so why would I assume that if you send that same good ole boy over to Iraq he is going to treat them with any more dignity than he treats a fellow American with a short in his taillight?
But I am supposed to believe that you can send this same redneck cop that has me laying face first on the asphalt on a routine traffic stop in broad daylight; tossing all of my shit all over the street to Fallujah and he isn’t going to wipe a buger on somebody’s head when he gets a chance?
Donald H. Rumsfeld called the acts "shameful and appalling" and stopped just short of offering an apology.
What I find “shameful and appalling” is that this kind of stuff only comes out once the press gets a hold of it. If CBS or Time Magazine doesn’t run a story on it then the US government doesn’t mention it.
I would just for once like to see them out themselves. That might help go along way towards me believing that they are “shamed and appalled” by what goes on out there.
And sure, I know that the vast majority of American soldiers are not participating in shit like this.
But don’t act like the world should treat us as individuals and not villianized the US as a whole when we don’t extend that same courtesy to military personnel of other countries.
If a Serbian soldier had a US POW in one of his jails doing hand stands naked with a bell tied around his balls the US would swear up and down that order came directly from Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic himself and the entire Serbian army was behind it and be calling for Milosevic to be brought up on war crimes.
If anyone in the world calls for Dubya to be brought up on war crimes for this shit, we’d look at them like they were nuts.
When we get caught doing something like this, we go out and immediately assure the outraged public that that “those 7 or nine individuals responsible will be brought to justice but this in no way is a reflection of our armed services.”
The New Yorker Magazine reported that an internal U.S. Army report completed in February cited that detainees were subjected to "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses."
That was in February. I missed Rumsfeld's shamed and appalled speech then. Did anybody catch it?
Then just last month it was reported how even serial rapists in the US military serving in Iraq were getting slaps on the wrists for assaulting Iraqi women.
Are we going to need film footage of that too before Rumsfeld tells us that is shameful and appalling as well?
One US soldier has already been convicted of murder for shooting an Iraqi prisoner to death at a detention center in Iraq and another prisoner was killed two months later by a private contractor working for the CIA.
I bet you didn’t know that? We are hiring private contractors to interrogate Iraqi prisoners.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan was quick to try to switch all of this back to Saddam, remember it is always smart to help the Americans draw distinctions, "Saddam Hussein encouraged and tolerated this kind of behavior — the U.S. does not," McClellan said.
Whether it is “tolerated or not” I look at it like this, when you get captured by the enemy expect to be asked to play a few rounds of naked twister so that they can laugh at your expense. Hey, that is a lot better than getting shot dead by a contractor you've got to admit.