How can Donald Rumsfeld, and his Torquemada, Mr. Cambione, still be in power as the Abu Ghraib scandal continues to unfold to expose the depth of hell and war crimes into which the increasingly unhinged and incredibly shrinking _resident's foolish military adventure has plunged us? To answer that question, you must ask some others...How can Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather sleep at night? What does Wolf Bluster tell himself when he looks in the mirror? What does the Editor-in-Chief of the NYTwits feel about his own humanity? What does the WASHPS Editor-in-Chief feel about the interior reality of the First Amendment to the US Constitution? The stench of Abu Ghraib is on the Bush White House, and the stench of the Bush White House is on Abu Ghraib. Is the "US Mainstream News Media" beyond redemption? Yes, tragically, it's the Media, Stupid.
William Rivers Pitt, www.truthout.org: The biggest
story of the Iraq war is not about missing weapons of
mass destruction, or about deep-cover CIA officers
getting their covers blown by vengeful White House
agents, or even about 896 dead American soldiers.
These have been covered to one degree or another, and
then summarily dismissed, by the American mainstream
news media. The biggest story of the Iraq war has not
enjoyed any coverage in America, though it has been
exploding across the international news media for
several weeks now.
The biggest story of the Iraq war is about the
torture of Iraqi children...
Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker reporter who first broke
the story of torture at Abu Ghraib, recently spoke at
an ACLU convention. He has seen the pictures and the
videotapes the American media has not yet shown. "The
boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling, and the
worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking,"
said Hersh. "And this is your government at war."
Hersh described the prison scene as, "a series of
massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and
the vice president, by this administration anyway,"
and that there has been, "a massive amount of criminal
wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command
out there, and higher."
Break the Bush Caal's Stranglehold on the "US Mainstream News Media," Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/072004A.shtml
Torturing Children
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 20 July 2004
The biggest story of the Iraq war is not about
missing weapons of mass destruction, or about
deep-cover CIA officers getting their covers blown by
vengeful White House agents, or even about 896 dead
American soldiers. These have been covered to one
degree or another, and then summarily dismissed, by
the American mainstream news media. The biggest story
of the Iraq war has not enjoyed any coverage in
America, though it has been exploding across the
international news media for several weeks now.
The biggest story of the Iraq war is about the
torture of Iraqi children.
A German TV magazine called 'Report Mainz'
recently aired accusations from the International Red
Cross, to the effect that over 100 children are
imprisoned in U.S.- controlled detention centers,
including Abu Ghraib. "Between January and May of this
year, we've registered 107 children, during 19 visits
in 6 different detention locations," said Red Cross
representative Florian Westphal in the report.
The report also outlined eyewitness testimony of
the abuse of these children. Staff Sergeant Samuel
Provance, who was stationed at Abu Ghraib, said that
interrogating officers had gotten their hands on a 15
or 16 year old girl. Military police only stopped the
interrogation when the girl was half undressed. A
separate incident described a 16 year old being soaked
with water, driven through the cold, smeared with mud,
and then presented before his weeping father, who was
also a prisoner.
Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker reporter who first
broke the story of torture at Abu Ghraib, recently
spoke at an ACLU convention. He has seen the pictures
and the videotapes the American media has not yet
shown. "The boys were sodomized with the cameras
rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the
boys shrieking," said Hersh. "And this is your
government at war."
Hersh described the prison scene as, "a series of
massive crimes, criminal activity by the president and
the vice president, by this administration anyway,"
and that there has been, "a massive amount of criminal
wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command
out there, and higher."
Reports of abuses at Abu Ghraib and other American
prisons have been public knowledge since the release
of the Taguba Report. Recently, however, some 106
annexes to the report, previously classified, have
also been released. U.S. News and World Report
detailed the sum of what is contained in these annexes
in an article titled 'Hell on Earth.'
In it, U.S. News says, "The abuses took place, the
files show, in a chaotic and dangerous environment
made even more so by the constant pressure from
Washington to squeeze intelligence from detainees.
Riots, prisoner escapes, shootings, corrupt Iraqi
guards, unsanitary conditions, rampant sexual
misbehavior, bug-infested food, prisoner beatings and
humiliations, and almost-daily mortar shellings from
Iraqi insurgents--according to the annex to General
Taguba's report, that pretty much sums up life at Abu
Ghraib." According to coalition intelligence officers
cited in a Red Cross report from last May, between 70%
to 90% of Iraqi detainees held in these prisons were
arrested "by mistake." That means they were innocent.
The orders to treat prisoners in this fashion were
not manufactured by the few "bad apples" we have heard
about, but came from up on high. Brig. Gen Janis
Karpinski, former commander of Abu Ghraib and now
scapegoat for the abuses, says the truth about where
the orders came from would be revealed in the trials
of the accused soldiers. Memos ordering the abuse of
prisoners were signed off on by Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld. The Justice Department and Mr. Bush's senior
legal advisor went out of their way to craft arguments
justifying this, claiming that torture isn't really
torture and that the President is basically above the
law.
Mr. Hersh will revisit this issue within the next
several weeks. In the meantime, the American news
media has an obligation to report on this situation.
Photographic and videotape evidence of this torture is
currently in the hands of the New Yorker, the
Washington Post, the U.S. Congress and the White
House. It must be released.
We invaded a country based upon the false claim
that Iraq was allied with al Qaeda. We invaded a
country based on the false claim that there were
weapons of mass destruction which needed to be
destroyed. We promised freedom and democracy, and
instead installed a CIA-trained strongman named Allawi
who has all but created a dictatorship in Iraq, and
who has been accused of killing Iraqi prisoners by his
own hand. 896 American soldiers have died so we could
do this.
We took thousands of innocent civilians off the
streets in Iraq and threw them into hellhole prisons,
where they were beaten, raped, and killed. This story
has faded from public view because no new pictures of
the abuses have come out in the last several weeks.
Those pictures are out there, and they show the rape
and torture of children. The international media is
reporting on it. Coalition ally Norway may be
preparing to flee Iraq because of the allegations
regarding these children.
Where is the American news media? Where are the
pictures? Who is responsible for this abomination?
Torturing children in the name of freedom? Is this
what we have become?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and
international bestseller of two books - 'War on Iraq:
What Team Bush Doesn't Want You To Know' and 'The
Greatest Sedition is Silence.'
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