posted on May 23, 2004 03:53:08 PM new
Rumsfeld bans camera phones in Iraq:
LONDON (AFP) - Cellphones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in US army installations in Iraq (news - web sites) on orders from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a business newspaper reported.
Quoting a Pentagon source, The Business newspaper said the US Defense Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.
"Digital cameras, camcorders and cellphones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq," it said, adding that a "total ban throughout the US military" is in the works.
Disturbing new photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse, which the US government had reportedly tried to keep hidden, were published Friday in the Washington Post newspaper.
The photos emerged along with details of testimony from inmates at Abu Ghraib who said they were sexually molested by female soldiers, beaten, sodomized and forced to eat food from toilets.
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If it's really "common" sense, why do so few people actually have it?
posted on May 23, 2004 04:54:29 PM new
So, we now censor phones and cameras just in case the torture of POW's does not end. That, along with our violation of Geneva convention, and our violation of international law should illustrate to the mid-east, Democracy in action - per Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz.
posted on May 23, 2004 07:15:15 PM new
Great, now the abuse can continue in private. Well, he will now make people more suspicious of him than ever. The administration keeps digging a deeper and deeper hole. Guess I'm not going to complain. Will make a win for the Dems all that easier in November!
posted on May 23, 2004 09:02:23 PM new
Unfortunately other pictures like this wall mural may stay for awhile in Iraq.
A mural by an Iraqi artist in Sadr City, Iraq, Baghdad's largest Shiite neighborhood, depicts America's Statue of Liberty at left, flipping the electrical switch on wires attached to a detainee of Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison, Sunday May 23, 2004. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim)
posted on May 23, 2004 09:31:56 PM new
That torture is also compared to the crucifixion.
Forced to stand on a box with wires attached to your fingers, toes and penis all night long. Just something that Spec. Sabrina Harman dreamed up in Abu Ghraib prison? Think again.
This torture is well known to intelligence agencies worldwide. The CIA documented the effects of forced standing 40 years ago. And the technique is valued because it leaves few marks, and so no evidence.
Forced standing was a prescribed field punishment in West European armies in the early 20th century. The British Army called it Field Punishment No. 1, though the soldiers referred to it as "the crucifixion." The French Legionnaires called it "the Silo."
By the 1920s, forced standing was a routine police torture in America. In 1931, the National Commission on Lawless Enforcement of the Law found numerous American police departments using forced standing to coerce confessions.
In the 1930s, Stalin's NKVD also famously used forced standing to coerce seemingly voluntary confessions for show trials. The Gestapo used forced standing as a routine punishment in many concentration camps. It even created small narrow "standing cells," Stehzelle, where prisoners had to stand all night.
In 1956, the CIA commissioned two experts, Harold Wolff and Lawrence Hinkle, who described the effects of forced standing. The ankles and feet swell to twice their normal size within 24 hours. Moving becomes agony. Large blisters develop. The heart rate increases, and some faint. The kidneys eventually shut down.
The American soldiers performed the torture, but someone taught them the parameters.This kind of torture is not common knowledge, and if it were not for the photographs, no one would know that it had been practiced.
posted on May 23, 2004 09:32:11 PM new
I realize that we are in a military action there, but in my mind what is happening to the prisoners is not very different that what Saddam has done. We were supposed to be there to help those people. What a black eye on the US.
True Americans do not exclude anybody. They recognize that everyone should have the same rights. Bigotry, intolerance and hatred are cancers of the mind.
posted on May 23, 2004 09:33:11 PM newPeople who have nothing to hide, hide nothing!
True Americans do not exclude anybody. They recognize that everyone should have the same rights. Bigotry, intolerance and hatred are cancers of the mind.
posted on May 24, 2004 01:35:40 PM new
Conviently you forget, (since you never served), military service is not a democracy. You follow orders & do you job.
Photos taken by on base visitors or disgruntled personnel can compromise military training exercises & place the lives of our military in further peril. Military service is inherently dangerious and any action that makes it more dangerious should be stopped.
Get over the photos. The only reason they were published in the first place was for self serving profit.
--------------------
Press can't let abuse story go
By Jennifer Harper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Accounts and graphic photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse persist in the press despite the fact that the story has run its course.
The world already knows salient details of the prisoner humiliation and nudity, the causes of the abuse are under official investigation, and the courts-martial have begun. Yet, the caterwaul in the press against the American military and the war in Iraq continue.
"U.S. faces growing fear of failure," noted one recent Washington Post headline.
ABC was the first to air yet another set of photos these showing two U.S. soldiers grinning next to the body of an Iraqi at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Al Arabiya, an Arabic broadcaster, also aired the photos of Army Spc. Charles A. Graner and Spc. Sabrina D. Harman both facing a court-martial for prisoner abuse.
As usual, the source of the photos remained unidentified. ABC billed them as "an exclusive" and noted that the soldiers were "posing over the body of a detainee who was allegedly beaten to death by CIA or civilian interrogators in the prison's showers."
Positive human-interest accounts about the armed forces are rare. The press tends to ignore battlefield vignettes from military news services, which could offer an expanded perspective to the public.
For example, 30 U.S. airmen and soldiers delivered school supplies and toys gifts from American children to an Iraqi village on Monday. Yesterday, Air Force medical teams airlifted a critically ill Iraqi infant and her mother to an Ohio hospital for treatment.
The news focus is elsewhere.
Earlier this week, Reuters news service announced that three of its "journalists" actually two Iraqi cameramen and a driver under contract had been beaten and taunted by Army paratroopers in January.
But an Army investigation released yesterday cleared the soldiers of charges and categorized the incident as "a closed case."
The report noted that "the soldiers clearly believed that these same Iraqis had attacked them previously" and pronounced that the charges of humiliation made by the Iraqis against the soldiers "are not credible."
Tim Graham of the Media Research Center (MRC) noted yesterday that the "gay marriage story" overtook the prisoner abuse story in the press, but only for a day.
"This abuse story is just not going away. It's still the first topic on most network news," Mr. Graham said. "And there's strong focus on the court-martials, on the bad apples it's as if those troops represent the military at large, as far as the media is concerned. That is very discouraging."
The center has been following "the bias problem" among broadcasters who use the abuse story to build a case against the war in Iraq and the Bush administration. As a sample, the group tracked abuse stories from April 29 through May 11 on NBC and found that the network aired 58 stories on the abuse in that period.
The MRC also found, however, that in the past year, NBC had aired only five stories on mass graves found in Iraq from the Saddam Hussein era.
Contact Jennifer Harper at
[email protected] or 202/636-3085
"The Secret Service has announced it is doubling its protection for John Kerry. You can understand why with two positions on every issue, he has twice as many people mad at him." Jay Leno
[ edited by BEAR1949 on May 24, 2004 01:43 PM ]
posted on May 24, 2004 01:45:09 PM new
Your source, Bear...the Washington Times is run by the controversial Unitarian church, headed by Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
Moon has been described by critics as a billionaire industrialist and a cult leader who "brainwashes" his followers to extract money from them and to use them as a political footsoldiers. Moon has also been linked to other controversial figures such as Jerry Falwell and to conservative civic organizations allied politically with Washington, D.C. evangelicals. His followers love him in spite of the criticisms, which they have often portrayed as an organized smear campaign.
Some critics continue to advance the claim that Moon's church originated the term "Moonies". Church sources deny this claim, maintaining that the American press invented the term. In the '70s, the term was soon associated popularly with other new religious movements, such as the Jonestown suicides. The church did not protest the use of the term until the 1990s, when it publicly rejected it as pejorative and viewed its use by opponents as a deliberate attempt to tarnish their image.
And while the movement is out of the public eye, it has risen as an influential force in American civic life. Shunned as a convicted felon by Japan and the European Union, Moon has come to be seen as a martyr by his followers and even by some outside conservatives. By 2003, Unificationist missionaries were working for their longtime goal of sex purity in New Jersey public schools, on a government abstinence-based sex education grant.
After the end of the Japanese occupation of Korea, Moon learned first-hand to despise the brutal excesses of North Korean communism. His experiences inspired a lasting hatred of Communism that helped him forge a powerful political alliance with the Reagan administration. Moon has spent a billion dollars to run the conservative, influential Washington Times, which in 2002 he called "the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world." And decades after Congressional scrutiny and a prison term for tax fraud, his generosity to the New Right (including opening an account for the "Contra" part of the Iran-Contra equation) has earned him a world of deference from his former enemies.
posted on May 24, 2004 07:02:14 PM new
Once again Helen, your ignorance of military matters is only surpassed by your love of denouncing opinions you disagree with.
"The Secret Service has announced it is doubling its protection for John Kerry. You can understand why with two positions on every issue, he has twice as many people mad at him." Jay Leno
posted on May 26, 2004 06:38:54 AM new
Nice one Fenix,
Remember everyone,
If you can't see it, it didn't happen. Right?
You know, if a tree falls in the forest.....Blah.
Regards,
Adrian
posted on May 26, 2004 10:02:10 AM new
Bear, it's not just the photos that are disturbing, it's the fact the Pentagon knew about this stuff 6 months ago and did nothing, which might lead one to believe it was A-OK with them.
If the photos were of Americans being tortured by the Iraqi's would you also say get over it? How much more stuff has to come out before people start to realize none of this is right?
