POLL: STILL Better Than Saddam!

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Al Hurra, the Pentagon funded US propaganda channel targeted at Arabs will broadcast photos and video of Saddam-era atrocities!

These should make all Americans feel better about their torture chambers, and the Arabs should realize once and for all that they have no claim to human rights. They should realize that if it weren't for the Americans coming to free them, their tortures would be these heavy-duty Saddam tortures, not that frat hazing the Americans do.

http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Abu_Ghraib:_Fraternity_'Hazing'%2C_a.k.a._'Not_as_Bad_as_Saddam'

So my question is: Splendid idea or American self humiliation?

Poll Information
This poll contains 1 question(s). 19 user(s) have voted.
You may not view the results of this poll without voting.

Poll Results: STILL Better Than Saddam! (19 votes.)

STILL Better Than Saddam! (Choose 1)
* Broadcasting Saddam torture pics is a cunning plan that'll sure make the Arabs see the US' deeper morality! - 16% (3)
* Broadcasting the pics is self-humiliation (when you need to compare yourself to a pig to look good) - 84% (16)

 

The new moral high-ground for the Neocons is a molehill, occupied by individuals with a mentality more reflective of 19 year old frat brats. Gone are the lofty pretenses of the rights of man and democratic principles. Now, it is only about winning the war against "the enemy." But who is the real enemy?

[ May 15, 2004, 16:33: Message edited by: Chandos the Red ]

 

Chandos makes a very good point. When I read that:

something just broke in me. What the hell? Emotional release? Is that a justification? Limbaugh should be locked in psychward if he thinks it is a justification. For me, it makes it even more condemnable. Torture for information is something I could reluctantly accept in circumstances compelling enough, but accepting torturing people for fun and as a means of releasing the tension puts a man out of the moral brackets for me. He needs his psyche medically examined.

Better than Saddam doesn't strike me as a particularly high moral ground.

 

What worries me is that some people can justify anything with little more than a shrug and get away with it. At least to me it looks like that.

'No WMDs? So what? They were only one out of so many reasons for this war. We wanted to bring democracy and human rights about.'
As if that inconsequence wasn't bad enough: 'Now tortures and vile humilations? Death of prisoners? So what? Some of that happens in american fraternities all the time ( ) and our soldiers just wanted to take out their frustrations and contempt on prisoners. And no, this wasnt ordered by superiors to subdue them and make prisoners malleable for interrogations.' Sure.
Btw, what causes the frustrations? Is it because there are no reliable postwar plans? And because the U.S. military is ill-prepared for peacekeeping and nationbuilding? That makes me think of the UNO who has been shut out, and allies who might have supported rebuilding Iraq that have been alienated. It reflects poorly on the U.S. administration, in my opinion.
Why the contempt for the iraqis? Payback on convenient victims for 9/11? Or is it they are perceived as an ungrateful irrational people? A people, mind you, that responds more and more hostile towards invaders who pay no heed to arabian customs, who use brutal force where careful negotiation and sensitivity is needed? Are the U.S. soldiers taught that arabians are unworthy of decent treatment? Why the contempt?

I mean, it gets worse and worse. The U.S. is descending ever deeper. The war on Iraq itself was damaging enough imagewise, but this is really harming the standing of the U.S. among the nations. And there seems to be no rock bottom that could be hit eventually. No one stands up and says 'That's enough, we accept our full responsibility for this. We are in the wrong here'. Instead there is weasling and manouvering, justifications, as far as I can tell.
There must be serious consequences, a clean break, or there will remain a harmful stain on the U.S. Not as far as the arabian people are concerned. That part of the world is lost for good to the West, I fear. But among the allies and friends of the U.S. its image will continue to suffer.
For what its worth - my thoughts on the matter.

 

I don't really see it as an America being out of hand, it is an administration unbound, and engaging in groupthink, the effect, sure, is that America is seen to be out of hand.

I read the transcript of the senate hearing of Cambone and Gen. Taguba and saw Taguga publicly contradicting his civillian master. Cambone, unsurprising, turned the heat on Taguba and said I didn't knew anything.

IMO it is significant to note that Rumsfeld and Cheney both served in the Nixon administration during Watergate. One lesson they seem to have learned from the Nixon debacle was ruthlessness. His collapse IMO confirmed in them a belief in the imperial presidency based on executive secrecy. One gets the impression that, unlike Nixon, they would have burned the White House tapes.

And that's where we are: The torture in Abu Ghraib were isolated incidents committed by "six morons". But the incidents appear neither isolated and the names of the six Morons are not Cheney, Perle, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feist and Libby.

Yesterday I read a US military intelligence NCO sounding off at Hackworth's SFTT:

Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker has made some investigations himself and came to a similar conclusion:

Isolated incidents my a**.

So Rumsfeld, just like Cambone and Wolfowitz, have lied to Congress and Senate. And, thanks to secrecy, Senate and Congress haven't been able to ask the right questions. But never mind that.

Rumsfeld, Cheney and crew are constantly denying responsibility, punishing people at the end of the chain of command, who might indeed have just followed orders (orders they would iirc have had the right to reject, as they were for criminal actions) to cover their asses. That's handy: You give an order, keep it secret, someone executes it, it becomes public, produces an outrage and bad press - and you have ... yes ... an isolated incident, and deniability - executive cowardice and hypochrisy.
The DoD is led by people who give a sh*t about their soldiers. For them the six soldiers from Abu Ghraib are expendable. Maybe as expendable as the 700 dead and 1500 mulitated their war in Iraq has produced already.

And on top a president who piously sais that all measures are ok while insisting in not to know what's going on, bad dreams and such - the top decisionmaker refusing to takle responsibility.

There is an administration fixed on never admitting mistakes, that has lied so often, and so outrageous in the last year, that Clintons lie about his sex-life, a thing very much irrelevant to national securtity, is a joke compared to it. It gives credit to the effectiveness of Bush's spin-mashine and boneheadedness of parts of the US electorate that he still has *any* support in the US.

But then, the fact that Gen. Odom spoke out against the war late, recognising that he would be clubbed to death in the atmosphere before the war, that he had to wait until this month, that underlines the public climate in the US. And even today, though Odom is heared, he is attacked by the right pundits as a traitor and worse - for speaking out the bloody obvious.

Democracy, even in the form of a representative republic, requires public discussion of urgent issues, and it requires checks and ballances to control the representatives.
That's where America today has a democracy deficit. Bush's crew basically does what they want and overwhelmed by spin his people watches puzzled, seemingly unable to cut and say: "WTF, enough is enough!". But seemingly it isn't enough, the pressure of misery isn't high enough yet.

So what we have here is decisionmakers misleading (at least) public and Senate and Congress - and get away with it, again and again. Fool me once blame on you, fool me twice shame on me.

[ May 16, 2004, 11:07: Message edited by: Ragusa ]

 

I suppose it's just as wrong to display these pictures as it is to display the prison pictures. And I don't see how it's US Self-Humiliation, really.

Also, I just felt like commenting: Rosh Limbaugh is by no means a representative of Conservatives in general; he's just a messed-up individual who has attracted a following. Like Manson, but much less so.

 

The conservative apologists for torture, who refer to Saddam's atrocities and claim that the Iraqis can be glad that it's America torturing them today (oblivious to the fact that something might be wrong with torture in principle) remind me of a rapist comparing himself to a paedophile, stressing that, at least, his victims were grownups, concluding that he's nicer.
In the essence the apologists say: Hey Saddam electroshocked and broke bones, heavy duty torture, we only create psycho wrecks - plain to see that we are the nice guys.

When you go to Iraq on a self-proclaimed quest for liberty and justice you are humiliating yourself making such a statement, but then, I doubt self humiliation is possible for low life scum like O'Reilly, Coulter, Limbaugh or Safire.

And the bits of info leaking out shed, unsurprisingly, a better light on the uniformed military, and underline the bad neo-con habits like self-delusion and stomping down dissent. As JAG lawyers insisted on humane treatment of detainees and prisoners they were subjected to standard neo-con procedure "how to deal with dissent":
JAG lawyers were sidelined, by no one less than Douglas Feist, already renowned for fabricating intel in his renowned Office of Special Plans.

I wonder what they meant ...

Predictably, Feist denied everything and replied with this attempt of a joke:

They "strongly support" the Geneva Conventions, they just don't think they apply to anyone they capture or detain. Paraphrase it as "I don't care and who can stop us anyway".
That means there basically is no difference in the treatment of an Iraqi peasant picked up randomly by US troops and a hardcore Al Quada terrorist. Well, then, everything's in apple pie order, right?

The folks in the pentagon, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feist, Cambone, Shulsky and Maloof, as well as Cheney, Libby and Hannah in their office think they can BS everyone. Till now they are vindicated. They have just started a cunning PR blitz in Iraq to win back hearts and minds of the Iraqis: US soldiers handing out cash to freed prisoners along with a note saying

Huh, that hooded guy with the wires attached standing on the battery will sure appreciate to learn that. Well, then, what is all the fuss about, nothing has ever happened, let's move on already
Scandal, what scandal?