Abu Ghraib: The Full Aussie TV Show

15 Comments

1. 

   Dean Pajevic on February 17, 2006 at 12:06 pm

   LINK TV is a major reason i’d never go back to cable.  But DirecTV satellite doesn’t air Free Speech TV.  So I went with DISH, since it carries both LINK TV and FSTV as well as many other wonderful, off-beat stations, like the Univ. of Calif./Santa Barbara’s great channel that features speakers like Sy Hersh.

   LINK TV is entirely subscriber supported — and a lot of celebs like Harry Belafonte and Bill Cosby head its fund drives.  It’s based in Marin County, California.

   It also airs a half-hour daily news show from the Middle East, called Mosaic.  You can watch Mosaic on LINK TV’s Web site.

   I doubt that LINK TV will have this SBS Dateline program for online viewing.

   LINK TV has aired other SBS Dateline programs, including lengthy interviews with released Guantanamo prisoners.

2. 

   Jersey Joe on February 17, 2006 at 12:13 pm

   mp4 and bittorrent copies of the Dateline show can be downloaded from Dahr Jamail’s website here.

   • 

     Dean Pajevic on February 17, 2006 at 12:24 pm

     That’s cool.  Are those copies permitted by SBS and legal?  

     I’d assume they have LINKTV pay them something for reairing these shows.

     • 

       Arcturus on February 17, 2006 at 1:27 pm

       It could be argued that the publication of these pictures violates the DOJ’s 2257 regulations which include in their draconian purview any “sadistic or masochistic abuse.”

       Following the logic of DOJ’s interpretation of their regulations (despite an appeals court ruling in Denver to the contrary) anyone publishing these pictures could be considered to be a “secondary producer” who is required to have full documentation to insure that none of the “models” are minors.

       O wait! some of them are . . .

3. 

   soj on February 17, 2006 at 12:40 pm

   You can find a list of downloadable links to watch the SBS video here in a variety of formats and speeds.

   For the Salon gallery, see here.

   For anyone who hasn’t seen the SBS video – let me warn you that it contains footage of prisoners forced to masturbate and other footage which is very disturbing.

   Pax

   • 

     Dean Pajevic on February 17, 2006 at 12:47 pm

     Soj, i was kind of miffed the other day because I’ve so been looking forward to Rumsfeld having to be humiliated by being forced to reelase these images/videos under court order…. which they’re appealing now.

     But, do you think that some people who were “holding” the imges/videos felt that that might never happen, and so they wanted to expose these imagse?

     Otherwise, I wish we’d waited until the Bush administration was forced into it.  Just for the pure pleasure of watching them squirm and bloviate and minimize before the entire world.

   • 

     Dean Pajevic on February 17, 2006 at 12:50 pm

     My other motive in this story is to promote LINK TV to people … since it’s a marvelous channel that airs so much worthwhile programming that is just not seen elsewhere, and we need more such channels available to people.  I find it astonishing that satellite customers all have access to this channel which, hopefully, a few have discovered.  It’ll open their world…. they also air Amy’s show every day, a German news show, etc., etc.  Just super.  And they’re completely dependent on donations since Directv and Dish don’t pay them to be aired.

     • 

       soj on February 17, 2006 at 1:24 pm

       I’ve never seen LINK tv but I’m sorry all of you can’t watch the news on RAI (Italian), TV5 (France), RTS (Serbia), TVE (Spain), Realitatea (Romania), Euro News, and all the other channels we have here.

       There’s also some German and Hungarian news but alas I can’t understand those languages 🙁

       One day…

       Pax

       • 

         Dean Pajevic on February 17, 2006 at 1:50 pm

         Well, LINK TV — wtih its daily Arab news show done by Arab news anchors, its German news show, its airing of Democracy Now!, and more … is a start. And all of its daily news shows aer in English, very helpful for us language-disadvantaged Americans.

         I wrote to DISH Network and have asked them to be sure to add Al Jazeera’s new English 24-hour news show to our lineup.  (And I hope other DISH subscribers will do the same.)  (WHEN is that launching?)

         We can get overseas packages — Arab, Chinese, South American, African (!),

         I wish we could buy a Canadian/UK package.  We get no Canadian programming, and we only get BBC America, which sucks … it just airs all those old BBC comedies and a couple sadistic crime dramas, plus their stable of reality shows. BBC America NEVER shows any of its great documentaries.  Jeeeez.

         OKAY — I just went to DISH.  We can order these international packages:

         African   
         Arabic   
         Armenian   
         French
         Japanese   
         Russian   
         Chinese   
         German
         Greek   
         Korean   
         South Asian   
         Italian
         Polish   
         Urdu    Farsi    Israeli
         Portuguese
         Tagalog
         Caribbean     

4. 

   Arcturus on February 17, 2006 at 1:07 pm

   Best part of Amy’s show this morning was her interview with Alfred McCoy, author of the forthcoming A Question of Torture, an account of “how monstrous CIA-funded experiements on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950’s turned into a template for what he calls ‘no-touch torture,’ based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain” according to Naomi Klein in US has been using torture for decades.

   • 

     Dean Pajevic on February 17, 2006 at 1:52 pm

     Oh yeah … i meant to send that to Real History Lisa and JPol since they both have researched what the CIA did.  Thanks for reminding me.

     Also, Amy’s show (Democracy Now!) is on at 3pm, followed by the Aussie Dateline at 4pm.  My neighbor saw my story, and he’s sending an alert to all of his local friends who also have DISH … kewl … a lot of people will be seeing this program.  And I mentioned to him he should try to catch Amy’s show one hour before.  (She’s so good.)

     • 

       Arcturus on February 17, 2006 at 2:57 pm

       from teh Kelin article cited above:

       According to declassified training manuals, SOA students — military and police officers from across the hemisphere — were instructed in many of the same “coercive interrogation” techniques that have since gone to Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib: early morning capture to maximise shock, immediate hooding and blindfolding, forced nudity, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep and food “manipulation”, humiliation, extreme temperatures, isolation, stress positions — and worse.

       In 1996 President Clinton’s Intelligence Oversight Board admitted that US-produced training materials condoned “execution of guerillas, extortion, physical abuse, coercion and false imprisonment”. Some Panama school graduates went on to commit the continent’s greatest war crimes of the past half-century: the murders of Archbishop Oscar Romero and six Jesuit priests in El Salvador; the systematic theft of babies from Argentina’s “disappeared” prisoners; the massacre of 900 civilians in El Mozote in El Salvador; and military coups too numerous to list here.  {snip}

       It’s a history exhaustively documented in an avalanche of books, declassified documents, CIA training manuals, court records and truth commissions. In his forthcoming book, A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy synthesises this evidence, producing a riveting account of how monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for what he calls “no-touch torture”, based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix programme and then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training.   {snip}

       let’s be clear about what is unprecedented: not the torture, but the openness. Past administrations kept their “black ops” secret; the crimes were sanctioned but they were committed in the shadows, officially denied and condemned. The Bush administration has broken this deal: post-9/11, it demanded the right to torture without shame, legitimised by new definitions and new laws.

       . . . It is this departure from clandestine etiquette that has so much of the military and intelligence community up in arms: Bush has robbed everyone of plausible deniability. This shift is of huge significance. When torture is covertly practised but officially and legally repudiated, there is still hope that if atrocities are exposed, justice could prevail. When torture is pseudo-legal and those responsible deny that it is torture, what dies is what Hannah Arendt called “the juridical person in man”.  [reading Hannah as a kid, I never imagined her writing would be so frighteningly applicable to the society I live in today – A].    {snip}

       And in Iraq the dirty work is already being handed over to Iraqi death squads, trained by the US and supervised by commanders like Jim Steele, who prepared for the job by setting up similar units in El Salvador. The US role in training and supervising Iraq’s interior ministry was forgotten, moreover, when 173 prisoners were recently discovered in a ministry dungeon, some tortured so badly that their skin was falling off. “Look, it’s a sovereign country. The Iraqi government exists,” Rumsfeld said. He sounded just like the CIA’s William Colby who, asked in a 1971 Congressional probe about the thousands killed under Phoenix, a programme he helped launch, replied that it was now “entirely a South Vietnamese programme”.

       As McCoy says, “if you don’t understand the history and the depths of the institutional and public complicity, then you can’t begin to undertake meaningful reforms.” Lawmakers will respond to pressure by eliminating one small piece of the torture apparatus: closing a prison, shutting down a programme, even demanding the resignation of a really bad apple like Rumsfeld. But he warns, “they will preserve the prerogative to torture.”

       Riding Shotgun With the Bad Boys: The Salvador Option

       • 

         BrendaStewart on February 17, 2006 at 6:05 pm

         …and we have porter goss leading the NEW CIA…what irony

5. 

   BrendaStewart on February 17, 2006 at 6:03 pm

   I am reading the book called “bush on the couch” by Justin Frank, MD.  It is quite interesting, if you like psychoanalysis principals,  I find it very interesting and to the point and very accurate.

   Ms. Kline is mentioned in this book too.  You know, I have to thank GEEw for one thing….I am reading more these days…:o)

6. 

   ghandi on February 17, 2006 at 8:11 pm

   I have the video from Dateline here in Flash and downloadable as a Real Media file (available at the Dateline website in Australia)

   http://www.abu.chris-floyd.com

   as well as BBC, CNN and Rueters coverage. And the images.