Oh, great, we get to feel good about ourselves all over again.
A grim picture of the US and Britain’s legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.
Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
And the worst part is that we didn’t prosecute the people in charge. We left them to go around playing concerts and getting standing ovations.
You mean we weren’t welcoming liberators?
And you mean that people who aren’t Saddam Hussein, and are religious fundamentalists, are committing the same despicable crimes are about to take the keys?
So glad we invaded and told them to suck on this!
We were feeling good about ourselves? In that case I suppose “we” will continue to do so.
Ah yes, and this is back to back with Bush being interviewed today about his soon to be release memoirs wherein he says his biggest failure was not getting Social Security reform passed…
I’m willing to bet that Bush wrote these memoirs in the same way that he performed as President, ie, not really.
His name is on a piece of conservative propaganda. That’s all.
he was more interested in looking forward than looking backward?
Iirc, ‘we’ didn’t prosecute because ‘we’ are complicit.
And we are still complicit. From the Guardian article:
It’s easy to bash Bush, but this is a US foreign policy issue. We trained these guys, and we’re still funding them. And contrary to the Official Narrative, the war rages on.
Early on, candidate Obama was calling for a complete rethinking of American foreign policy assumptions. Never happened. So why is anyone surprised? Appalled, yes. But surprised?
And given what goes on with Blackwater, and other stuff we know, we don’t give a damn what we do over there.
What, again ? Still. The ‘framing’ of ’24’ popularized the ‘ticking time bomb’ fiction of ‘interrogation’. Never mind that torture does not produce ‘evidence’ recognized as such in courts for a very simple and sufficient reason : people are very creative and ‘motivated’ to produce any fiction or agree to any proposition to get the threat and pain to stop.
I don’t expect you’ve ever stumbled across my files about ‘Law’ at opitslinkfest.blogspot.com in the Topical Index. Here are a few special entries
American Service Members Protection Act 2002
Military Commissions Act of 2006 | American Civil Liberties Union
AMICC: Bilateral Immunity Agreements BIA
but booman, we must look forward, not back. because that would be politics as usual, remember?
and now we also get newspaper columns by John Yoo, don’t forget how much those add to the discourse.
by the way, if you wanna feel sick:
of course it’s being repeated. how could it not?
“Previously unreported instances” unless you were keeping up news reports on blogs drawn from the foreign media. Not all of the incidents were reported but the frequency of reports from 2004 to 2006 make the reported 681 cases of civilian deaths at checkpoints seem credible.
“Such killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country” Yep and it started when trigger-happy Marines fired on a demonstration in Fallujah early in 2004. And the publication of what was happening in Abu Graib accelerated it, which created the security lapse that allowed ethnic cleansing to start.
And why? Poorly trained troops. An interview with US soldiers after Fallujah demonstration had one of them say that they had been trained to kill people not just to wait around doing security. I found this mind-boggling, especially since the US was touting its new-found prowess in counter-insurgency. That told me things were going to fall apart rapidly after a year of relative quiet.
Look at it this way. It will be difficult to claim “state secrets” on this information.
No doubt some of the reports echo the Taguba Report of May 2004, which was dismissed as “a few bad apples”.
Now we have “the preponderance of the evidence”.
What bothers me also is all the crimes contractors like Blackwater are committing that we don’t even know about and will never know about.
We need to start putting some people in jail. Like the presidents of these banks doing all this mortgage fraud. The Countrywide guy-oh wait-he got a deal, these military guys could use some alone time in the brig.
But noooooooooooooooo.
We must move forward, not backwards.
Shoot me now please.
What I keep hearing about on the MSM is how the US occupiers knew about but ignored tortures, murders and other atrocities being committed on Iraqi detainees by American-trained Iraqi forces and police.
So, we are supposed to suddenly get all exercised because the American occupying forces allowed those Iraqis whom they trained to get away with the same shit Americans have been doing to Iraqi detainees and non-combatants since 2003?!
Gee, I wonder where those Iraqis learned how to treat detainees.