[CanYoAssDigIt] Mission Accomplished

How about a giant statue of Patrick McGohan at Abu Chraib? or maybe
the star of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? If people felt that
trivialized what is going on there, would they be over-reacting?

****

Two years after "Mission Accomplished", whatever moral stature the
United States could claim at the end of its invasion of Iraq has long
ago been squandered in the torture and abuse and deaths at Abu Ghraib.
That the symbol of Saddam Hussein's brutality should have been turned
by his own enemies into the symbol of their own brutality is a
singularly ironic epitaph for the whole Iraq adventure. We have all
been contaminated by the cruelty of the interrogators and the guards
and prison commanders.

But this is not only about Abu Ghraib. There are clear and proven
connections now between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the cruelty at
the Americans' Bagram prison in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
Curiously, General Janis Karpinski, the only senior US officer facing
charges over Abu Ghraib, admitted to me a year earlier when I visited
the prison that she had been at Guantanamo Bay, but that at Abu Ghraib
she was not permitted to attend interrogations - which seems very odd.

A vast quantity of evidence has now been built up on the system which
the Americans have created for mistreating and torturing prisoners. I
have interviewed a Palestinian who gave me compelling evidence of anal
rape with wooden poles at Bagram - by Americans, not by Afghans.

Many of the stories now coming out of Guantanamo - the sexual
humiliation of Muslim prisoners, their shackling to seats in which
they defecate and urinate, the use of pornography to make Muslim
prisoners feel impure, the female interrogators who wear little
clothing (or, in one case, pretended to smear menstrual blood on a
prisoner's face) - are increasingly proved true. Iraqis whom I have
questioned at great length over many hours, speak with candour of
terrifying beatings from military and civilian interrogators, not just
in Abu Ghraib but in US bases elsewhere in Iraq.

At the American camp outside Fallujah, prisoners are beaten with full
plastic water bottles which break, cutting the skin. At Abu Ghraib,
prison dogs have been used to frighten and to bite prisoners.

How did this culture of filth start in America's "war on terror"? The
institutionalised injustice which we have witnessed across the world,
the vile American "renditions" in which prisoners are freighted to
countries where they can be roasted, electrified or, in Uzbekistan,
cooked alive in fat? As Bob Herbert wrote in The New York Times, what
seemed mind-boggling when the first pictures emerged from Abu Ghraib
is now routine, typical of the abuse that has "permeated the Bush
administration's operations".

Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CanYoAssDigIt/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
CanYoAssDigIt-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/