Shocking ‘new’ revelations that the additional Abu Ghraib pictures include horrific rapes and other abuse. Horrifying, but not exactly news – Swopa commented on allegations of Abu Ghraib prison rape years ago.
Jeremy Scahill of AlterNet claims that torture and brutality are alive and well at Gitmo under Obama:
“…IRF teams in effect operate at Guantánamo as an extrajudicial terror squad that has regularly brutalized prisoners outside of the interrogation room, gang beating them, forcing their heads into toilets, breaking bones, gouging their eyes, squeezing their testicles, urinating on a prisoner’s head, banging their heads on concrete floors and hog-tying them — sometimes leaving prisoners tied in excruciating positions for hours on end.”
And speaking of Obama carrying on evil Shrubyian policies, in spite of his attempt to suppress the release of the additional Abu Ghraib torture photos from yesteryear, some of them have been leaking out. Follow this link if the ‘classic’ Abu Ghraib pics didn’t make you queasy: http://www.smh.com.au/ftimages/2006/02/15/1139890768716.html.
With all the hubbub about the inauguration, it took me a few days to catch up with overviews by Reuters and Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post regarding the coming provincial elections in Shiite-dominated southern Iraq.
Visiting areas where various factions are strong, Shadid interviews supporters of Moqtada as-Sadr in Nasiriyah and notes that they also govern the province of Maysan (whose capital is Amarah). Further, he notes dissatisfaction with the religious parties of the national government in Basra, where as Reuters explains, “the Fadhila Party is in charge.”
All this was in the back of my mind when I read yesterday’s Reuters story about the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison, and caught these passages:
[Deputy Justice Minister Busho] Ibrahim said the newly renovated prison would house just 13,000-14,000 prisoners, including 3,500 with long sentences who would be gathered from all over Iraq. . . .
“This prison will solve many problems for us — huge problems,” he said. “We are suffering from inflation of the prison population in Nassiriya, Basra, Amara and some Baghdad prisons. All those people will be brought to this prison.”
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the places Ibrahim described as having overflowing prisons were pockets of opposition political support. Or maybe it just falls under the heading of how the national government is “preparing” for the upcoming elections.
I already wrote last month about the initial Abu Ghraib scandal being propelled by the inevitable release of other photographic and video evidence.
Looks like it’s about to happen again. As Christopher Hitchens (of all people) writes in Slate:
It is going to get much worse. The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long. And, if you wonder why formerly gung-ho rightist congressmen like James Inhofe (“I’m outraged more by the outrage”) have gone so quiet, it is because they have seen the stuff and you have not. There will probably be a slight difficulty about showing these scenes in prime time, but they will emerge, never fear. We may have to start using blunt words like murder and rape to describe what we see.Hitchens has been a shameless apologist for the war, so if he’s throwing out warnings like this, the evidence must be both truly awful and just about to hit the airwaves.
I’d advise not reading his full article, though, unless you’d like too much information about Hitchens’ idle daydreams involving Osama bin Laden and pigs. (He does make a worthwhile point, though, about torture being a worthless interrogation technique, as demonstrated by the British experience with Irish Republican Army terrorists. Just, uh, skip over the Osama part.)
Remember when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testified before Congress a couple of weeks ago about the Abu Ghraib torture scandal?
In a much-belated burst of candor, he told the panelists, “”There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist … If these are released to the public, obviously it’s going to make matters worse.”
The candor was short-lived, however, as the Pentagon/White House chickened out of releasing the newfound evidence.
Didn’t matter. The Washington Post already has it:
In a collection of hundreds of so-far-unreleased photographs and short digital videos obtained by The Washington Post, U.S. soldiers are shown physically and emotionally abusing detainees last fall in the Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad.Also coming soon to a cable news channel near you, I’m sure.
The new pictures and videos go beyond the photos previously released to the public in several ways, amplifying the overt violence against detainees and displaying a variety of abusive techniques previously unseen. They show a group of apparently cavalier soldiers assaulting prisoners, forcing detainees to masturbate, and standing over a naked prisoner while holding a shotgun. Some of the videos echo scenes in previously released still photographs — such as the stacking of naked detainees — but the video images render the incidents more vividly.