COMMENTS:
You're way off. The US Army isn't killing, mutilating, burning and then hanging its prisoners. What those few moronic US soldiers did was not condoned by their superiors - unlike the actions of the Iraqis. As a matter of fact, the US soldiers will be court-martialed and probably do time. When the Iraquis do much worse, they're cheered. So yes, there is a big difference between us and them.
Bostonian, you can't get "a little pregnant". Rumsfeld and the gang's days are numbered- thank god.
by LCD on Sat May 08, 04 7:02pm
[+]
You can't get "a little pregnant", but you can get "a little injured" or "a little offended" or "a little tired." Not everything in life is black and white.
And don't hold your breath for "President Kerry." It's a long way off till election day.
I like Rumsfeld, even though he lies alot. He's a true political warrior.
We win: everyone gets to live happily ever after.
They win: all the radical muslims get to live, all of you jews, christians, pagans, atheists, moderate muslims, buddhists, hindus, etc, get to head off to the ovens.
Yeah, I don't see any difference at all.
And BTW, stripping someone down and taking pictures of them is a frat prank, and in no way can be compared to actual torture and murder. You know, the things the terrorists are famous for. Let me ask you, who would you rather be captured by; al qaeda or the US military?
Why is it always "radical muslims"? There are MILLIONS of peaceful muslims in the world that are hardly more religious than nominally Christian westerners. For fuck's sake, get a grip & stop sucking so hard on the gutter media's tits.
And, herzog, would it have been a frat prank if some Arab with an AK had done the same to US prisoners? Or would it have been a clear demonstration that they are animals and do not have the same values or moral standards as us?
Be honest with yourself for once.
If I were captured by these animals and all they did was strip me down naked and take pictures I'd count myself lucky. Ask Daniel Pearle what usually happens to americans when they fall into these guys' hands.
** karma **
But the US was claiming the moral high ground, as self-proclaimed champions of freedom & democracy.
That's why it's absolutely unacceptable that it was caught torturing prisoners for fun & holiday snaps. The US involvement in Iraq was questionable right from the start, now it just reeks of lies & hypocrisy.
Whatever reasons the US had in occupying Iraq, it's set relations between the Islamic world & the West back decades by its sheer bungling incompetence.
First of all, 'america' wasn't caught abusing anyone, a handful of soldiers were. And they are going to be punished accordingly.
Second, the arab world doesn't give a damn about human rights, democracy, freedom, or any of that. They respect force, nothing more and nothing less. OBL said himself that the US retreat from somalia played a major part in forming his strategy. We were seen as weak, and therefore a good target. Now that we are retaliating we are beginning to see more cooperation from the various islamofacist governments in the region.
Ahhh, I see.
Then surely the invasion of Iraq should have been called "Operation Smash the Arabs" instead of "Operation Iraqi Freedom"?
I agree, 'operation iraqi freedom' is a stupid name. We shouldn't go to war to benefit the citizens of other nations. They DO benefit in the end, but that's a side-effect, not the main purpose.
But arguing semantics is tedious. We went into Iraq for our own reasons. The US is better off because of it, and incidentally so are is the middle east and iraq.
bostonian, your analogy of little injured,offended, or tired doesn't apply here, because I was referring to KILLING, which like pregnancy, either the person is dead or alive. apparantly US has photos of murder and torture, which the public hasn't seen yet. Blood Feud International is just not very appetizing unless you are the victor. thank god we live in US eh? But always remember, eye for an eye only results in a world of blind people.
by LCD on Mon May 10, 04 12:42am
[+]
Thanks for breaking it down so simply for us, herZOG. I am so glad I never grew up in America where people confuse frat pranks and torture.
herZOG. Why do you reckon Iraq and the middle east are better off after America's invasion when they are clearly not?
They (US military and Al Qaieda) are mirror images of eachother. The recent photos just confirm what everyone already knew.
as a proud american, i am gonna obviously say that our military and our troops fighting for our freedom overseas are doing the right thing. it's only a small number of bad apples that are abusing the iraqi prisoners. they don't represent what our men and women were over there to do. i think the prisoner abuse is horrible and the perpretraitors brought to justice. our military are good people, it's just sad that something like the prisoner abuse scandle had to happen.
Absolutely not! I mean there's a small difference between humiliating prisoners and targeting innocent civilians like in Spain and the WTC, but humiliation should not be tolerated. Those poor Iraqis have to live with that. Al Queda does them a favor and murders them without remorse. US & Al Queda - no difference whatsoever.
Killing people is wrong, ALWAYS. War always mean killing. War is wrong, ALWAYS.
Terrorism is just a cheap way of doing war.
Yes the US Milintary never flies planes into buildings or forces people to worship a demonic God called Allah. Unless you believe Bush planned 911...
by seon on Sat Jun 26, 04 10:29pm
[+]
everyone's bad.
I am just guessing here, but I'm betting most men would rather be forced to have sex with a woman soldier, and have embarrassing pictures taken of them than to being beheaded..of course, that is just a guess.
The US military, liek most national militaries, does as it is told.
Now the %$#@s that directed them to invade ... that is another question.
this (like many of the other polls on here) is ridiculous, why isn't there a simple yes or no answer?
The US military fights to defend freedom, democracy, human rights and religious tolerance and freedom of religious choice. Al-Quada fights to promote oppression, totalitarianism, fear, religious control through Islamic (domination) law.
The US military fights to support a bunch of crooks who believe in using oppression, totalitarianism, fear, and religious control through teaching hate of Islam, commies, or any other conveniently promoted fictional enemy. Al Queda is just another one of the tools of this elite bunch of crooks.
The US military has killed millions worldwide whereas Al-Qaeda has killed, hmmm... 3000. Not to mention that Bin LAden and his men were the puppets of the US during the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. Nuf said
U.S military is the best in the world....I don't know about that.But I sure hope they are better thatn those diaper heads
not only are their tactincs irrevocably inferior but due to abu gharib and Guantanemo bay, they are now loosing their moral superiority.
good luck guys, you'll need it.
The Scoreboard shows Al-Qaeda infront, 3000 to jackshit
3,000 at the WTC is helluva lot less than 30,000 killed by the USA and UK so far in Iraq since the invasion.
Are you assholes in the military? Don't compare what the military does to what terrorists do. al qaeda is too pussy to attack the military bases around the world. They had to attack thousands of civilians. We dont attack civilians. I have less of a problem with terrorists attacking soldiers rather than innocent civilians.
We don't attack civilians?
- Bullshit. Tell that to the people who will killed by the firebombings of Dresden, Tokyo, the nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the relatives of all those civilians killed in the most recent US military actions in Iraq. All those protestors killed at Falluja, the deaths of which started the uprising there. US military did a grand job of bombing wedding parties and schoolkids in Afghanistan too.
We are better than everyone/
Tell that to the thousands of civilians who have been killed by the USA in Iraq and Afghanistan. More civilians have been killed in Iraq alone by the USA than the number who died in the September 11 attacks. The same goes for Afghanistan. I'm all for the USA punishing those who are responsible for the attacks, but what does killing innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan prove, except to provoke people around
the world, not only in Muslim countries, but non-Muslim ones as well. In fact, the only country that supported invading Iraq in terms of the public was the USA. Every other country in the world, including US allies which helped in the War on
Iraq had the majority opposed. Even in the USA, the War on Iraq has lost support.
The USA is the most transparent major world power the world has ever seen. Whoever wrote this ballot obviously doesn't get out much. The incidents in abu ghraib were insignificant and goofy compared to real torture. Ask someone who was a pow in WWII, Korea, Vietnam. Ask a victim of the gestapo or other totalitarian secret police organizations (left and right). Ask someone victimized by the Chinese Secret Police. Ask these folks if what happened to them compares to what is described as happened at abu ghraib.
Ask these folks if what happened to them compares to what is described as happened at abu ghraib.
by exarmydude on Jan 03, 2005
ASK THESE FOLKS WHAT HAPPENED AT ABU GHRAIB;
A 35-year-old woman named Sundus (she asked that I use only her first name) was hired by Burke’s legal team last summer to meet with former detainees and find out about their experiences. A graduate of Iraq’s Al-Mamoun University College, where she studied English poetry and Shakespeare, she works to promote civil society in Iraq and is involved in election monitoring. “She’s among the new generation who’s trying to build Iraq through and civil society,” says Salah Aziz, president of the Tallahassee, Florida-based organization American Society for Kurds, who met Sundus in Iraq last summer when she attended his National Endowment for Democracy–funded workshop on NGOs. “She’s a strong lady.” Between August and December 2004, Sundus says, she interviewed 54 former detainees.
“I think many women who were held at Abu Ghraib were raped by Americans,” says Sundus. She wears a lilac hajib, which she fiddles with during interviews. She has received death threats because she works with Americans, and she says one Iraqi man told her that if she spoke negatively about the resistance, “‘We will put you in the back seat of the car like Margaret Hassan.’”
Sundus explains how Selwa and Selwa’s sister came to her office last August. Selwa said she wanted to speak about her detention privately. Her sister left the room. Then Selwa sat down with Sundus. “They did everything bad to me, and may God take them all to hell,” Selwa told her. “She began to weep bitterly,” recalls Sundus. “She didn’t tell the truth to her family.”
Male detainees, too, have described the abuse of women. A 42-year-old car broker, Saleh, who was held at Abu Ghraib from October to December of 2003, spoke with Huntington Woods, Michigan-based attorney Shereef Akeel, a member of Burke’s legal team, in March 2004. “He said he saw a woman being raped: ‘She was on all fours in a hallway outside my cell, and a soldier was raping her. She was looking at me, and I couldn’t do anything to help her. Her eyes looked dead,’” says Akeel.
Mahal, a 70-year-old tribal sheik who wears a charcoal tunic and has a gray-speckled mustache, told me he met a female detainee on May 4, 2004, the day they were both released from Abu Ghraib, on a bus ride home. “She sat two rows away from me,” he says. “She was wearing a hajib, and her face was completely dried up. It looked as though she hadn’t seen the sun in a very long time. ‘I’ve seen terrible things,’ she said. ‘We went through hell.’ She was crying and saying women had been tortured and raped.”
Nabil is a 37-year-old human-rights lawyer married to Selwa’s oldest daughter. He is a tall man with a high forehead, and he is dressed in a white shirt, cufflinks, a wool vest, and wire-rimmed glasses. (He asked me not to use his real name “so I can sleep soundly at night.”) He was arrested on September 28, 2003, and held at various detention facilities, including Abu Ghraib, until May 28, 2004. A military official confirms that Nabil was released from Abu Ghraib on that date.
“In November or December, I really can’t remember, I was in a room and could hear sounds coming from outside,” he says, drinking tea in an Amman hotel room. “The windows were broken, and they were covered with wooden panels. Sometimes I could hear screams and shouts. Women were calling for mercy. There were also children between the ages of 10 and 12. The children became hysterical. I was told the women were tortured in front of their children. One day, a sheik came back from a medical clinic where he’d been treated. He was in tears. ‘What happened?’ we asked. He told us he had seen a young girl, 15 years old, with internal bleeding. She had been raped over and over again by the soldiers, and she could no longer talk.
What you inaccurately claim our soldiers in the Middle East of doing is far more correct when describing Saddam Hussein and his cronies. Or worse yet, Adolf Hitler, who truly lived up to (or lowered himself down to, rather) those horrible, lowlife standards. You, sir, are wrong.
KY, what I put in my comment is what has actually been experienced and seen by witnesses and victims. There were people who were tortured to death at the US-military run Abu Ghraib prison, and many other US prisons in Iraq just like it. Many women were raped, and many still are being raped and tortured. These horrors are being committed by the US military, and by agents of the US govt. This is happening NOW and should be stopped NOW!
American legal investigators have discovered evidence of abuse, torture and rape throughout the US-run prison system in Iraq. A Michigan legal team meeting with former detainees in Baghdad during an August fact-finding mission gathered evidence supporting claims of prisoner abuse at some 25 US-run detention centers, most of them so far not publicly mentioned as being embroiled in the Iraq torture scandal.
"That list was something that we came back with -- we only knew of three prisons going there," investigator Mohammed Alomari told The NewStandard, referring to the few detention centers in Iraq where concerns over treatment of prisoners have already been raised publicly.
The list includes some actual prisons, such as Al-Salihiya Prison in Baghdad, the notorious prison in Abu Ghraib, and a prison at Camp Bucca, a Coalition-built POW camp in the southern port city of Um-Qasr. Other detention centers have been established at military bases, such as the US Military compound at Al-Dhiloeia, north of Baghdad; a US base outside Fallujah; and the Hilla military compound, a joint US-Polish base where Alomari said he has recently been informed of allegations against US and Polish personnel.
"Nobody talks about it. All everyone talks about is Abu Ghraib because of the pictures," said Alomari. "But in these other places, there's tons of acts of torture, abuse, rape."
Sure theres a difference. When al queerdas wanna do damage they use terrorist attacks and tell men they will be paid 3 dollars to do so. When the u.s needs to do damage we invade then defeat there military. Changing the country into a democracy so they can become richer. Look at germany, japan and all the other countries we have changed around. We are now doing it to Iraq.
|
