Sick, Sadistic *&%*&^&

[on-ramp]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=2&u=/nm/20040510/ts_nm/iraq_abuse_dc

[techweenie]

So there are more (and worse) photos. The one yesterday with the naked guy menaced by dogs is the 'before'. The 'after' shot shows his leg torn & bleeding and a soldier with his knee on the guy's back.

John Warner (R) has argued against release of more photos because they are "of a classified nature." Right.

Now some are blaming the kids at the bottom of the command chain. This is going to get uglier.

[350HP930]

I heard a radio interview with a congressman who has seen the photos who states that there are also videos of severe beatings and rape.

His quote was 'you aint seen nothing yet'.

[on-ramp]

didn't "we" remove Saddam for similar reasons, ie. prison abuse, as Bush had told us thousands of time before the war?

and now the US is committing the same abuses. I find this mind-blowing.

and no wonder the rest of the world thinks "we're" all a bunch of arrogant hypocrits.

[WOODPIE]

Mind-blowing?

[on-ramp]

Originally posted by WOODPIE
Mind-blowing?

ok, how about appalling? is that a better adjective for you?

[campbellcj]

"WAR IS HELL"

Frankly I think this kind of thing is to be expected and virtually unavoidable in any large-scale conflict. As William T. Sherman said, "There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell."

The BIG question is -- what the F are we doing over there in the first place, and why are we still there after our primary objective was supposedly accomplished 14 months ago?

I fully support and appreciate our troops' efforts -- don't get me wrong on that as I view them as the real patriots (unlike the majority of our professional PAC and lobbyist-funded politicians) -- but let's bring 'em home, already!

[campbellcj]

By the way -- I think that the entire conflict and this whole "war on terror" thing could have, and should have, been circumvented years ago by a few select strategic assasinations. Unfortunately our elite national intelligence and security forces seem to be hamstrung by BS political pressures from really doing the jobs that they are trained and funded for.

[WOODPIE]

I don't have a problem with "mind-blowing" at all. In fact, it's sort of quaint, in the old fashioned sense of the word.

But mind-blowing indicates to me you were surprised by all this. Is that true? Were you surprised? Was this sort of thing totally unexpected?

Ed

[campbellcj]

Another Gen. Sherman quote that seems appropriate --

"War is cruelty. There's no use trying to reform it, the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over."

[lendaddy]

Can't you feel the hate!

[350HP930]

As much as the bush administration tries to deny it, this is standard operating procedure when it comes to fighting insurgents.

I am not suprised about any of this, just disgusted.

As far as the above pic, the locals reaction to our soldiers will be specific to their location. Its much like what our own police in this country have to deal with. The reaction of poor people in the projects is dramatically different than how suburbanites react to 'the man'.

[lendaddy]

Thanks for the update from someone who's been there. errr wait. nevermind

[WOODPIE]

on-ramp, i agree, it is a terribly disappointing revelation. I think it points to the fact that we, as a society, have not really advanced that far ahead of others as we would like to think. Plus, putting people in great unfamiliar and stressful situations has no certain or predictable outcome, regardless of the training.
And yes, lendaddy, random acts of kindness occur as well.

campbellcj, in my neck of the woods, Sherman is still depicted with horns on his head. Yes, the Great Satan, 140 years ago!

Ed

[techweenie]

"Frankly I think this kind of thing is to be expected and virtually unavoidable in any large-scale conflict. "

I would have less touble with this if it were 'enemy combatants'. Unfortunately, a large percentage of the people we have in prison over there are just random people picked up on the streets. For some reason, processing them is taking 4/5/6 months. Naturally, the ones who are not "insurgents" are likely to be more aggressibley tortured, since 'I don't know anything' is not the kind of answer intelligence people like.

[lendaddy]

I heard that the pictures are from the section of the prison which housed the "worst" of the detainies. And I SERIOUSLY doubt a LARGE percentage were "random people picked up on the streets" I mean really, what would be the motivation? There are plenty of people shooting at them to pick from, why enprison likely innocents? Even if you heard that somewhere, the fact that you easily accept it as fact is troubling.

[techweenie]

"And I SERIOUSLY doubt a LARGE percentage were "random people picked up on the streets" I mean really, what would be the motivation?"

This is extremely well documented.

Raids on civilians are conducted by kids with no training in investigation or police backgrounds. There's at least one verbatim report of a raid on an empty house. When the neighbor came out to find out what was going on, he was taken.

And of course, the prison guards are not trained, either. As an officer recently said: you tell a 19-year-old clerk that he's now a prison guard and his task is to keep a prisoner awake, he will find a creative way to do so.'

I know some Cons here find it impossible to believe almost any source other than Limbaugh, so I dug up the most conservative report I could find in 40 seconds of searching:

http://www.cpt.org/iraq/detainee_summary_report.htm

[350HP930]

Originally posted by lendaddy
I heard that the pictures are from the section of the prison which housed the "worst" of the detainies. And I SERIOUSLY doubt a LARGE percentage were "random people picked up on the streets" I mean really, what would be the motivation? There are plenty of people shooting at them to pick from, why enprison likely innocents? Even if you heard that somewhere, the fact that you easily accept it as fact is troubling.

I guess you also missed the statements of one of the interrogators who has worked at both gitmo and in iraq who is stating that a large number of detainees are innocent of any crimes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1211374,00.html

Witness: private contractor lifts the lid on systematic failures at Abu Ghraib jail

Julian Borger in Washington
Friday May 7, 2004
The Guardian

Many of the prisoners abused at the Abu Ghraib prison were innocent Iraqis picked up at random by US troops, and incarcerated by under-qualified intelligence officers, a former US interrogator from the notorious jail told the Guardian.
Torin Nelson, who served as a military intelligence officer at Guantánamo Bay before moving to Abu Ghraib as a private contractor last year, blamed the abuses on a failure of command in US military intelligence and an over-reliance on private firms. He alleged that those companies were so anxious to meet the demand for their services that they sent "cooks and truck drivers" to work as interrogators.

"Military intelligence operations need to drastically change in order for something like this not to happen again," Mr Nelson said. He spoke to the Guardian in a series of interviews by phone and email.

He claimed that "many of the detainees at the prison are actually innocent of any acts against the coalition and are being held until the bureaucracy there can go through their cases and verify their need to be released."

"One case in point is a detainee whom I recommended for release and months later was still sitting in the same tent with no change in his status."

Mr Nelson said that the same systemic problems were also responsible for large numbers of Afghans being mistakenly swept into Guantánamo Bay. He estimated that "30-40%" of the inmates at the controversial prison camp had no connection to terrorism.

"There are people who should never have been sent over there. I was involved in the process of reviewing people for possible release and I can say definitely that they should have been released and released a lot sooner," he said.

The former commander of the Guantánamo Bay Camp, Major General Geoffrey Miller, was transferred to Iraq a month ago to overhaul the prison system there, although he has been criticised for his recommendations last year that US prison guards in Iraq help "set the conditions" for interrogations by softening up detainees.

Such allegations have been made before by victims' families and human rights groups but Mr Nelson's story represents the first insider's account by an American interrogator. It amounts to an indictment of a system gone awry, and contradicts claims by the White House and the Pentagon that Abu Ghraib does not represent a systemic problem.

Mr Nelson denies any involvement in the physical and sexual abuse of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, and is listed in the official military report into the scandal as a witness rather than a suspect. He says he resigned from his job in February in fear for his life, because Abu Ghraib was coming under increasing attack by Iraqi insurgents, and because of his disillusion in the military leadership there. He is now working for a private contractor - but not as an interrogator - in another country that is part of the US "global war on terrorism". He did not want his whereabouts published.

Mr Nelson said he had come forward to speak now because he believed that military intelligence was seeking to blame the Abu Ghraib scandal on a handful of soldiers to divert attention away from ingrained problems in the military detention and interrogation system.

As a witness in an ongoing investigation, Mr Nelson said he could not talk about the abuses of specific prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but he said the nature of the detention system makes the imprisonment and abuse of innocent people all but inevitable.

"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home. They take it out on the nearest person they can't understand."

"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, "the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him," he said.

According to Mr Nelson's account, the victims' very innocence made them more likely to be abused, because interrogators refused to believe they could have been picked up on such arbitrary grounds.

"Now, whether the detainees are put into the general intelligence holding area, where they rot for a few months until final release, or if they are placed in solitary confinement because their story seems unbelievable is completely in the hands of the interrogator's opinion," he said. "It is in solitary that the abuses can be committed. So, in theory it is in fact very possible that purely innocent Iraqis could be placed in an environment where they could be brutalised, abused, "softened up" or even killed."

"At Abu Ghraib there were plenty of detainees talking or wanting to talk, but the leadership was focused on the "hard" targets of high-value," Mr Nelson said. "This was mainly because the leadership was almost completely focused on getting the highest ranking Ba'ath party members still in hiding. And many of the interrogators were anxious to "go after" the difficult eggs. They wanted to be the one interrogator who broke the linking detainee and found such and such high value target. They weren't interested in going through the less glamorous work of sifting through the chaff to get to the kernels of truth from the willing detainees, they were interested in "breaking" the tough targets."

Much of the problem lay in the quality of US interrogators, Mr Nelson said, explaining that only the youngest and least experienced intelligence officers actually question detainees.

"Once you get up to a level of NCO [non commissioned officer] or warrant officer you generally get moved into administration. You are taken out of working as an interrogator," he said.

As the number of suspects sucked into the system exploded, the Pentagon came to rely increasingly on interrogators from private contractors to question them. Mr Nelson was one of a team of roughly 30 in Abu Ghraib employed by a Virginia-based firm, CACI International. He believes his decade of experience in military intelligence made him well-qualified to do the job, but he had growing doubts about his colleagues.

"I'd say about of the contractors that it's kind of a hit or miss. They're under so much pressure to fill slots quickly... They penalise contracting companies if they can't fill slots on time and it looks bad on companies' records," Mr Nelson said. "If you're in such a hurry to get bodies, you end up with cooks and truck drivers doing intelligence work."

"There was someone was hired as an interrogator or screener whose previous job was a truck driver. That was pretty close to when I was leaving," Mr Nelson recalled. "My eyes went really wide at that point - really scraping the bottom of the barrel."

CACI International did not respond to a request for comment on Mr Nelson's account. The firm has told other reporters that it has not been contacted by military investigators about the work of its employees at Abu Ghraib. Its recruitment notices seeking interrogators state that the job "requires a top secret clearance" and note that the successful applicant would operate "under minimal supervision."

Mr Nelson worked at Guantánamo Bay as a senior interrogator attached to the Utah National Guard. He said that most of the interrogators there were military professionals, but that by the time he left in early 2003, private contractors had begun to arrive.

There is no evidence of abuses on the scale of Abu Ghraib being committed at Guantánamo Bay, but Mr Nelson said that like the Iraqi jail, it was packed with innocent people, who are only now being released.

"Mistakes were made and people who should never have been sent there ended up there, and it's taken this amount of time to get people to take the decision to get these people out of there," Mr Nelson said.

"All it takes is the signature of a low ranking NCO to send someone right around the world and have them locked up indefinitely but it takes the signature of the secretary of defence to let them go."

[techweenie]

And there's this, although not as 'scientific' as the CPT report:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1208408,00.html

[lendaddy]

Not that it discredits him, but intersting that this is what I got from a quick google.

The Guardian tells us nothing about his credibility or biases. But, thanks to Utah for Dean, we know that Nelson is a passionate supporter of the former anti-war candidate -- so much so that he walked 2,347 miles to raise money for the campaign last October. The Salt Lake City Weekly describes his political activism, then adds:

In a coffee shop in Holladay, Nelson prefaced an interview saying he has yet to find an issue that he disagrees with Dean on. During the course of his 45-minute stump speech, Nelson used a handful of catch phrases lifted verbatim from televised interviews with Dean or from his Website deanforamerica.com.