Subscribe"Rumsfeld did not describe the photos, but U.S. military officials told NBC News that the unreleased images showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi female prisoner and “acting inappropriately with a dead body.” The officials said there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys."
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. And one linguistic reform is in any case already much overdue. The silly word "abuse" will have to be dropped. No law or treaty forbids "abuse," but many conventions and statutes, including our own and the ones we have urged other nations to sign, do punish torture—which is what we are talking about here at a bare minimum.
In any case, they went into the prison. Very tough orders were given. We're going to use coercion, if we have to; and we're also going to use sexual blackmail. We're going to get these Baathist Sunnis. Rusted [Rumsfeld] was calling them, by that time last fall, "The Dead-enders. " These are the Baathist Sunnis, supporters of Saddam, that we thought were the core of the insurgency that we could not find.
But the goal is to go into the prison population, get these guys if we have to blackmail them by putting in compromising, sexual positions, do it. We all have gone through the ritual, Amy, of how terrifyingly taboo it is in Islamic society for men to appear naked before other men, really. And we were going to do that: threaten to take the photographs of them and distribute it in their neighborhood to their families, to their mothers and fathers and wives or whatever, totally embarrassing them.
And I think the goal is to: a) try and get some people to tell us what they knew, and, b) try and convince some people to go and leave the prison and go back into the Sunni community and spy. But whatever it was, it quickly got out of control. By late October, I’ve been told, the CIA had some people involved in this program. They pulled out. They pulled out all of their people involved in the interrogation process at Abu Ghraib. Their general counsel said, "this is nuts." They pulled out, and the program went along, out of control, basically, until it started getting in trouble earlier this year.
my question is "what does the press know that they're not telling us?"
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"Debating about it, ummm ... Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."
"It's impossible to say to yourself how did we get there? Who are we? Who are these people that sent us there? When I did My Lai I was very troubled like anybody in his right mind would be about what happened. I ended up in something I wrote saying in the end I said that the people who did the killing were as much victims as the people they killed because of the scars they had, I can tell you some of the personal stories by some of the people who were in these units witnessed this. I can also tell you written complaints were made to the highest officers and so we're dealing with a enormous massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there and higher, and we have to get to it and we will. We will. You know there's enough out there, they can't (Applause). .... So it's going to be an interesting election year."
posted by dejah420 at 1:21 PM on July 15, 2004