As a special Ramadan present, US officials in Iraq waved goodbye to 500 Abu Ghraib prisoners after giving them going-away presents: a Koran, $25, and clean white shirts. That brings the total catch and release number in October to 1,500.
All 1,500, who also received traditional white shirts, were released after their cases went before an Iraqi-led review board and were found not to have committed serious or violent crimes, the U.S. military said in a statement.
“These detainees have confessed to their crimes, renounced violence and pledged to be good citizens of Iraq,” it said.
That’s all it takes? I wonder if the US Justice Department will run a similar program in the US as a Christmas present for prisoners in their jails.
Oh…and in the meantime…two more terrorism experts are saying that Bush is losing the war on terrorism. They obviously hate America.
But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Ejmw, you scoff with your “big brother” talk, but these 500 peaceful souls will return to their homes and neighborhoods, and spread the joyous word about the U.S. military and the terrible insurgents with whom they had to share cells…. never more to cause any strife or to come to the attention to the U.S. military.
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Interested in view on whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden :: Audio Live
BBC World Live – Audio
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
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Maybe they are trying to make a legal precedent for Scooter Libby.
That’s very amusing.
No, they were trying to make room for Scooter and all the other anticipated administration officials that will require space there.
Why does the Inquisition and Witch Burning come instantly to mind?
Never mind…need alcohol in my coffee (or instead)
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AMAZING ARTICLE ::
By chance came across this article today, I haven’t completed reading it, but it has a lot of traction IMO.
by E. Michael Jones, Ph.D.
“This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation. . . . [This is] good old American pornography.”
Rush Limbaugh in response to a caller discussing the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, on May 6, 2004.
“Americans . . . should not flinch from this fact: That pornography is, almost inevitably, part of what empire looks like. . . . Empire is always about domination. Domination for self defense perhaps. Domination for the good of the dominated arguably. But domination.”
George F. Will, “Who has paid for mistakes?” SBT, 5/12/04
Quote from one part of article —
Rush Limbaugh had much the same thing to say. America means pornography. That means that liberated soldierettes like Lynndie and Sabrina Harman, also facing a court martial, were just “people having a good time.” Have you, Limbaugh asked a caller, “ever heard of emotional release? You heard of need to blow some steam off? This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time.”
For Rush Limbaugh “the whole purpose here, which has been said, was to humiliate these prisoners. And there’s no better way of doing it than what was done. These are Arab males – what better way to humiliate them than to have a woman have authority over them? What’s the purpose here? What’s the objective of this? The objective is to soften them up for interrogation later, later on. As I said, there was no horror, there was no terror there was no death, there was no injuries, nothing.”
Rush Limbaugh’s assumption that Lynndie and Sabrina were just having a good time was contradicted by their own account of events. According to their reports, they were just following orders. In an interview with Brian Maass of Denver CBS station KCNC-TV, Lynndie England claimed that her actions were dictated by “persons in my higher chain of command.”
“I was instructed by persons in higher rank to stand there and hold this leash and look at the camera,” she said.
According to the CBS report, “England said the actions depicted in the photos were intended to put psychological pressure on the Iraqi prisoners.” England claimed that the photos were taken “for psy-op reasons. And the reasons worked. I mean, so to us, we were doing our job, which meant we were doing what we were told, and the outcome was what they wanted. They’d come back and they’d look at the pictures, and they’d state, ‘Oh, that’s a good tactic, keep it up. That’s working. This is working. Keep doing it. It’s getting what we need.'”
Sabrina Harman was one of two soldiers seen smiling in a widely published photograph, in which she crouched behind a cluster of naked Iraqi detainees stacked in a pyramid. Harman, now known as the army’s Queen of S & M, said much the same thing: “They would bring in one to several prisoners at a time, already hooded and cuffed,” she told the Washington Post. “The job of the MP was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk.” Harman said she took direction “from the military intelligence officers in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison and from civilian contractors there who conducted interrogations,” but she would not get specific about who ordered the treatment.
Which leads us to the question which got posed to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld when he appeared before Congress to testify on the abuse at Abu Ghraib: “who was in charge?” Evidently it wasn’t Brig. General Janice Karpinski.
“These acts of abuse,” Sen. Carl Levin said at the same hearings, “were not the spontaneous actions of ranking enlisted personnel who lacked the proper supervision. These attempts to extract information from prisoners by abusive and degrading methods were clearly planned and suggested by others.”
But who?
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
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Jeroen Bosch (1450-1516) is a painter in the period between Middle-Ages to the Renaissance, and certainly one of the most intriguing painters of his generation.
Jeroen Bosch Paintings on Birds
Wikipedia Jeroen Bosch
The original painting “Hell”, the right panel from the triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights.
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY