Rice in TV plea over abuse photos
US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice took to Arab airwaves to appeal for trust from a sceptical public after a scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in US custody. "We have a democratic system that holds people accountable for their actions," Rice said on Al-Jazeera satellite television station, which is widely seen across the Arab world and by Arab and Muslim communities elsewhere. "The president guarantees that those who did that be held accountable," Rice said in remarks dubbed into Arabic by the station.
US troops 'told to abuse prisoners'
Abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers may be widespread and orchestrated by US intelligence agencies including the CIA, it has been claimed. A secret investigation by a US General into abuse allegations uncovered "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" of prisoners to soften them up for interrogation. Meanwhile, lawyers for some of the soldiers shown humiliating Iraqi detainees in photographs claimed that the service men and women were following orders.
There's more in the extended text. But clearly the US is not being spared. The snips are from a Blair-friendly Brit paper (PA via the Times). If this is how our best friends see us... and we ourselves? From the WaPo:
A Wretched New Picture Of America
Among the corrosive lies a nation at war tells itself is that the glory -- the lofty goals announced beforehand, the victories, the liberation of the oppressed -- belongs to the country as a whole; but the failure -- the accidents, the uncounted civilian dead, the crimes and atrocities -- is always exceptional. Noble goals flow naturally from a noble people; the occasional act of barbarity is always the work of individuals, unaccountable, confusing and indigestible to the national conscience.
This kind of thinking was widely in evidence among military and political leaders after the emergence of pictures documenting American abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. These photographs do not capture the soul of America, they argued. They are aberrant.
This belief, that the photographs are distortions, despite their authenticity, is indistinguishable from propaganda. Tyrants censor; democracies self-censor. Tyrants concoct propaganda in ministries of information; democracies produce it through habits of thought so ingrained that a basic lie of war -- only the good is our doing -- becomes self-propagating.
But now we have photos that have gone to the ends of the Earth, and painted brilliantly and indelibly, an image of America that could remain with us for years, perhaps decades. An Army investigative report reveals that we have stripped young men (whom we purported to liberate) of their clothing and their dignity; we have forced them to make pyramids of flesh, as if they were children; we have made them masturbate in front of their captors and cameras; forced them to simulate sexual acts; threatened prisoners with rape and sodomized at least one; beaten them; and turned dogs upon them.
For more American update, see:
Army Discloses Criminal Inquiry on Prison Abuse
Rice Issues Public Apology for Iraqi Prisoner Abuse
But this war is lost. In fact, it is an unmitigated disaster. Bush has lost the NY Times, the WaPo, the gang of 500 (the pundits), and so much more. To salvage anything, Congress and the WH need to immediately sacrifice the folks in charge, especially Gen. Meyers and Rumsfeld for sitting on this and/or allowing it to happen.
What are the chances?
That's page C1 Style, mind you from the WaPo,
not A1, but the WaPo frequently starts back in the paper and moves the bad news up slowly.
As noted yesterday by many posters, they've already lost George Will. From Times (UK) comment:
(...)In his admirable Moral History of the 20th Century, the philosopher Jonathan Glover points out that soldiers fighting far from home experience "an erosion of moral resource". They take on the colouring of those they fight. Liberal use of aerial bombardment has made what once seemed medieval and abhorrent, the mass killing of civilians, a commonplace. The American and British decision to visit "shock and awe" on Baghdad last year was a calculated massacre. Then and since, some 10,000 Iraqi civilians are believed to have died at the hands of the coalition, mostly from bombs and long-distance shells, crushed or blown apart with a brutality that makes My Lai seem a precision operation. Yet by killing from afar, commanders and their soldiers seem able to avoid moral dirt. They need not see the bodies.
No such licence is given to infantry, let alone to prison guards. In Iraq the latter are untrained, often reservists working in terrible conditions. They cannot kill or maim from air-conditioned cabins or lofty cockpits. They must look "the enemy" daily in the face and must never show sympathy. There is as yet no rule of law. Yet if the guards overstep the rules one inch they will be roasted by the media or some congressional inquiry. A snapped neck cannot be dismissed as collateral damage from a cluster bomb.
Of course there is no excuse for what happens in Iraq's jails. But who needs excuses amid this rush to violence? Iraq was invaded illegally on the excuse that someone in London and Washington thought the country posed an immediate threat. Anarchy was created in Iraq on the excuse that Ahmed Chalabi boasted he would be welcomed as a liberator. Torture is committed in jails on the excuse that a link must be found with al-Qaeda. Is blinkered idiocy by châ teau generals more "excusable" than obscene antics by prison guards?
When I see gruesome photos, real or faked, I can be duly revolted. But these are moral flesh wounds on the decaying corpse of American and British operations in Iraq. And let us leave America out of this for a change. I am writing this in Britain, a full member of the coalition, jointly in command and jointly accountable. We should ask Tony Blair, Jack Straw and Geoff Hoon what they knew of these abuses and what they did to stop them.
We should be asking the same here of our people.