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by Hugh Cook |
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Section 110 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 May 08 Saturday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Given that I've been watching Japanese TV coverage of Iraq on NHK and American TV coverage on CNN and seeing stuff on the Internet and reading the International Herald Tribune on a daily basis, I thought I was pretty much up to speed with the growing scandal of the behavior of Anglo-American occupation forces in Iraq, but it seems I'm not. It's not just a matter of humiliating people: it's a matter of killing people. I found a bunch of links on a site called occupationwatch.org which includes a link to an article on the site of the British paper the Daily Mirror If you want atrocity pictures {link disabled: see UPDATE below then the above link takes you to an article on the www.mirror.co.uk site which currently features a range of photos showing "Rogue British troops" misbehaving in Iraq. |
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Whoops! Faked photos! |
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Update 2004 May 15 Saturday (Japan time): Daily Mirror editor fired, and the board of Trinity Mirror (the newspaper's owner) issues statement saying "there is now sufficient evidence to suggest that these pictures are fakes and that The Daily Mirror has been the subject of a calculated and malicious hoax."
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Nonetheless, a cloud still hangs over the regiment. The special investigation branch of the Royal Military Police is said to be close to recommending the prosecution of several soldiers accused of brutalizing eight Iraqi detainees arrested at a hotel in Basra last September. One of the prisoners, Baha Mousa, 26, a hotel clerk, died from his injuries after an all-night interrogation session. - from an article on the New York Times website by Patrick E. Tyler, dated May 14, 2004. |
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The wording of various {Daily Mirror photo captions includes "A British soldier urinates on an Iraqi prisoner" and "A rifle is cruelly jabbed in the young man's groin as his eight-hour nightmare goes on".
The {Daily Mirror article, by Paul Byrne, starts:- |
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A HOODED Iraqi captive is beaten by British soldiers before being thrown from a moving truck and left to die.
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Apparently, in regard to the individual above, "No one knows if he lived or died".
As we've heard on TV, some people in American custody definitely did die, but it was only today {2004 May 08 that I saw some detail about this. There's an on the site of the New York Times The article, which has the headline Photos of Dead May Indicate Graver Abuse, comes complete with a corpse photograph with the caption "A photograph of a dead man who had been beaten and placed in an unzipped body bag and covered with ice is one of a group of pictures taken at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and provided to The New York Times." The accompanying article, by James Risen and David Johnston, is datelined Washington, May 6, and starts:- |
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Grisly photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison of two dead men may indicate that the violence at the prison went far beyond degrading treatment of detainees. The Bush administration has provided only limited information about one of the men; the other remains a mystery.
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In the article, it is stated that the photograph tallies with an account in the diary of a certain prison guard who wrote of an "O.G.A." or "Other Government Agency" prisoner (a prisoner of the CIA or similar) who died under interrogation. The diary entry apparently says:-
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They stressed him out so bad that the man passed away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately 24 hours in the shower in 1B. The next day the medics came in and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took him away. This O.G.A. was never processed and therefore never had a number.
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Yesterday I tried to track down a copy of the complete text of the official American military report into events at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. If you haven't seen it yet, the item to search for is "Article 15-6 Investigation 800th
Military Police Brigade Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba". The following simplified Google search could be used:-
www.google.com/ search?q=Article+15-6+Investigation+800th +Military+Police+Brigade+Maj. +Gen.+Antonio+M.+Taguba&btnG=Google+Search A fast-loading copy of the report is on the site of www.globalsecurity.org at:- www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/reports/2004/800-mp-bde.htm In addition to a certain amount of stuff that most of us have by now seen on TV, the report includes allegations which do not yet seem to have hit the headlines yet, including allegations that what happened in Abu Ghraib Prison included the following:-
On top of that, the following recent comment by an American senator has been widely reported:- "We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges". That comment from Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In the Boston Herald in an article dated Saturday, May 8, 2004, an article by Noelle Straub, it is said that "that photos and graphic videotapes not yet made public show abuses more horrific than those already seen". The text of the article includes the following statement:- |
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The unreleased images show American soldiers beating one prisoner almost to death, apparently raping a female prisoner, acting inappropriately with a dead body, and taping Iraqi guards raping young boys, according to NBC News. |
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The bit about "taping Iraqi guards raping young boys" made my head swim a bit. I mean, Abu Ghraib is a prison for grown-up people, right? Or wrong? Yesterday I would have said that this allegation was simply just not credible. But, then, yesterday, I would have said that allegations of the rape of a female prisoner were not credible. And now it seems that it's safest to believe that they are. Near to winding up now. Here are a couple of links that I'm a bit ashamed of. The following site, judging by the amount of UFO stuff it carries, does not seem to be, in my opinion, a model of intellectual rigor. The site is:- rense.com When I look around the rense.com site I see, in amongst this fairly ecclectic collection, a bunch of stuff which I really wouldn't want to be personally associated with. So the link above does not imply approval. There is, incidentally, a critique of Jeff Rense on the Internet at:- www.realufos.com/rensefraud.shtml Having noted that I have reservations about the rense.com site, I have to admit that the rense.com site looks like fun, a kind of carnival of the lunatic fringe (though I appreciate that taking amusement in a visit to Bedlam seems shamefully anomalous in the present context.) Also, on a non-fun note, it has a page of links to material about The quality of the torture material seems to be a bit uneven, and so some of it should probably be approached with what we might call a cautious evaluative attitude. Links on the page include one reading (and the material linked to here looks reliable to me):- Our Reports Are Worse Than Torture Photos - Red Cross One link to close with. It's to Google news to search for breaking news of rape claims in Iraq, which is probably going to be a big news theme for the next few days:- news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&ie=ascii&q=rape+iraq |
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