Civilisation returns to Iraq (1 Viewer)

[pete]

A US general has been suspended in Iraq over the alleged abuse of prisoners by US troops in jails she ran.

...

The army confirmed the suspension after US television broadcast images of US soldiers allegedly abusing inmates at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

CBS TV says it has "dozens" of pictures showing a wide range of maltreatment. Taken by US troops, many of the pictures show American troops watching in apparent approval.

...



CBS says the pictures it obtained show a wide range of abuses, including:

• Prisoners with wires attached to their genitals
  
• A dog attacking a prisoner
  
• Prisoners being forced to simulate having sex with each other
  
• A detainee with an abusive word written on his body.

...



The military police officers have been charged by the US Army with crimes ranging from assault and maltreatment to indecent acts against prisoners. The soldiers in question reportedly were assisting interrogators from US intelligence agencies.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3669331.stm

 

[Latex lizzie]

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

 

[Latex lizzie]

these people I suppose
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm.../wl_afp/iraq_us_jail_abuse&cid=1512&ncid=1480

 

[pete]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3675215.stm

 

[pete]

i suppose we're expected to think that these are the only times anything like this has happened and it's just an amazing coincidence that photgraphs were taken and another amazing coincidence that the photos were leaked.

yes.

 

[Pantone247]

Piers Morgan

So, is Piers a sensation hungry hack who would have stuck a childs crayon drawing of a moo cow on the cover and called it abuse just to sell papers in wake of the media frenzy over the American torture pictures.

Or is he a bit of a misguided fool, who's going be yet another media scape goat (in the vein of the BBC chairman and director general after the Hutton Report into Dr David Kellys suicide) to take the heat away from the British goverment... Which incidently also works out nicely as they get too rid the media of the biggest anti-war editor in the UK.

Intersting to note the only people losing their jobs over this war are Journalists accused of lying... not politicians, who actually were lying.

And should we all note that Blair, in wake of the pictures admitted there was abuse being reported by British soilders, which wether the pix were fake or not, is an addmission that surely still stands.

 

[Thomas Brunkard]

Re: Piers Morgan

Sting them all up by the nuts and beat them silly with bags of frozen jelly beans I say. (Dishonest journos and warmongering saxons alike).

Whether any potential good came from a lie is irrelevant. Its still a lie. The media should not be allowed lie on matters so serious regardless of the potential positive consequences. Relativism on matters of truth rarely works to the universal benefit of all.

Regarding Morgan, he's been a journalist long enough to have known the consequences of running that story and those pics and should have been smart enough to check their validity before making a front page sized deal of them.

 

[kraster]

Re: Piers Morgan

Sting them all up by the nuts and beat them silly with bags of frozen jelly beans I say. (Dishonest journos and warmongering saxons alike).

Whether any potential good came from a lie is irrelevant. Its still a lie. The media should not be allowed lie on matters so serious regardless of the potential positive consequences. Relativism on matters of truth rarely works to the universal benefit of all.

Regarding Morgan, he's been a journalist long enough to have known the consequences of running that story and those pics and should have been smart enough to check their validity before making a front page sized deal of them.

But the other side (the political) has been engaged in its own relativism ie. lying through its teeth long before the War started. Who's gonna hold them accountable?

 

[spiritualtramp]

Re: Piers Morgan

apparently , after refusing to apologise , Piers was " immediately escorted from the building by security guards" .

 

[the strange guy]

Re: Piers Morgan

The UK admitted thatit knew of abuses since February. It's possible they faked the photos themselves to discredit any future allegations. I wouldn't put it past them. Fucking Brits.!ironyyy

 

[pete]

Re: Piers Morgan

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact

 

[MDR]

Re: Piers Morgan

But the other side (the political) has been engaged in its own relativism ie. lying through its teeth long before the War started. Who's gonna hold them accountable?

The electorate?

 

[MDR]

Re: Piers Morgan

Now that Piers Morgan is at a loose end, could I nominate him as moderator of the new Arts and Culture Board?

 

[oh shit]

Re: Piers Morgan

The electorate?

hows that going to happen when politicians are basically writing the news?

next thing you'll be telling me we're all free. ha!

 

[Thomas Brunkard]

Re: Piers Morgan

But the other side (the political) has been engaged in its own relativism ie. lying through its teeth long before the War started. Who's gonna hold them accountable?

Presumably an objective press but if the press pursues an agenda through lies it can't be trusted ergo the only way you will be able to have any epistemological surety of the state of play in Iraq is to hope on a plane and find out for yourself. If the press can't be objective carriers of truth then we may as well sign up for political solipsism and just stick to what we know!

What I'm really saying is we need Super Man as the objective guarantor of truth.

 

[MDR]

Re: Piers Morgan

hows that going to happen when politicians are basically writing the news?

next thing you'll be telling me we're all free. ha!

You think you're the only one who can tell what's what in the media? People are not as naive as you think and can make up their own minds.

In any event, to say that the Government writes the newspapers is simplistic and in my view, paranoid.

 

[Pantone247]

Re: Piers Morgan

Sting them all up by the nuts and beat them silly with bags of frozen jelly beans I say. (Dishonest journos and warmongering saxons alike).

Firstly Piers Morgan was Anti-War, very strongly Anti-War and the Mirror reflected this view. If you are looking to string up the 'Warmongering Saxons' well you may have lost a strong allie there. No other paper is going to stick it's neck out like Piers was willing too.

Whether any potential good came from a lie is irrelevant. Its still a lie. The media should not be allowed lie on matters so serious regardless of the potential positive consequences. Relativism on matters of truth rarely works to the universal benefit of all.

The Mirror didn't lie, Piers Morgan didn't lie. Lets clear this up here, Piers published the story with good intentions, as far as he was concerned the pictures were real, they were supplied directly from two Territorial Army soliders. The Mirror were lied too and lead astray by these men, these men should face the firing squad. But Piers is in no way guilty of lying, no more then the Sunday Times were when they printed, unwittingly, the fake Hitlers diaries.

Regarding Morgan, he's been a journalist long enough to have known the consequences of running that story and those pics and should have been smart enough to check their validity before making a front page sized deal of them.

Well, see above, and also keep in mind that we are talking about the Mirror here, no one is so stupid that they'd mistake a red top for a serious news paper, it's a reactionary rash style of journalism which will slaughter someone on page one today and apologise for getting it wrong on page 15 tomorrow.

But I believe that printing these pictures did more good then bad, it made the goverenment admit to abuses known and unknown, okay it's not perfect, but I think we have nothing to gain and everything to lose by this continured policy of sacking jounralists and press exectutives who are, in Blairs goverenments opinion, poking their noses where they don't belong.

Yes, it would be great if the press didn't lie, but they do, so Caveat Emptor! But I think there is a bigger issue at hand, that of the intimidation of the free press in Britian.

 

[Pantone247]

Re: Piers Morgan

apparently , after refusing to apologise , Piers was " immediately escorted from the building by security guards" .

They tired to confiscate his car, believing it too be a company car.

It wasn't, it was his own.

 

[LMD64]

Re: Piers Morgan

hows that going to happen when politicians are basically writing the news?

next thing you'll be telling me we're all free. ha!

I'M certainly not free. Cheap, maybe, but not free.


anyway, peers moregan was a bit of a smug, smarmy shit, even if he was the editor of one of the few papers to stand up to the warmongering of the uk government.

 

[pete]

Re: Piers Morgan

SAVANNAH, Georgia (AP) -- A U.S. soldier who left his unit in Iraq rather than fight for what he called an "oil-driven war" faces a court-martial Wednesday on a desertion charge.

Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, 28, of Miami Beach, Florida, could go to prison for a year and receive a bad conduct discharge if convicted by a military jury at Fort Stewart.

The Florida National Guardsman left his unit in Iraq in October on a two-week furlough to the United States. He was gone for five months before turning himself in to the Army in March.

He said his war experience made him decide to seek conscientious objector status.

The infantryman said he believes the war is unjust because it is about control of oil supplies. He also said he was upset over the death of civilians.

He said he was particularly upset over an incident in which his unit was ambushed and civilians were hit in the ensuing gunfire, and another in which he said an Iraqi boy died after confusion over which military doctor should treat him.

He also claimed he saw Iraqi prisoners treated "with great cruelty" when he was put in charge of processing detainees a year ago at al-Assad, an Iraqi air base occupied by U.S. forces.

Mejia filed the statements March 16, before the Iraqi prisoner scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison became public. Fort Stewart officials said they have forwarded his account to the Army.

In his objector application, Mejia said detainees were kept blindfolded and troops were ordered to use sleep-deprivation tactics to aid with interrogations.

He said prisoners were kept awake for up to 48 hours at a time, often by yelling at them or having them sit and stand for several minutes.

"When these techniques failed, we would bang on the wall with a huge sledgehammer ... or load a 9 mm pistol next to their ear," Mejia wrote.

"The way we treated these men was hard even for the soldiers, especially after realizing that many of these `combatants' were no more than shepherds."

http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/05/18/antiwar.soldier.ap/index.html