Although reading the 53 pages of the Taguba report released initially thru MSNBC or the report released by the ICRC, both alluded to incarceration of and abuse and/or torture of women and children, reading
Juan Cole today and, even more so reading the article he links to in the
Pak News, it feels as though it is only a matter of time before the release of photos of women prisoners occurs.
Below is a bit from each, Juan Cole and Pak News.
Abuse of Women Detainees from JC:
"Iraqi women were also abused at Abu Ghuraib, according to the Taguba report and reports of photographs seen by the US Congress. ... Although, of course, the soldiers who behaved this way and the officers who authorized or allowed it were not "crusaders," as the article alleges, the abuse of women was designed to take advantage of Muslim and Arab ideas concerning female honor.
A scandal that has not yet broken in the press is the story of how many women ended up in US prisons. The fact is, few were suspected of having themselves committed a crime or an act of insurgency. Rather, they were taken as hostages or potential informants because their husbands or sons were wanted by the US military.
This kind of arrest, however, is a form of collective punishment and not permitted under the Fouth Geneva Convention governing military occupations of civilian populations. The sexual abuse of these women is therefore a double crime.
Eventually these photographs of abused or tortured Muslim women are likely to leak, and the reaction in the Muslim world will be explosive. One shakes one´s head in bewilderment as to what the Bush administration thought they were doing. William Polk´s guest editorial today is all the more a propos in light of these revelations."
. . . . . .
It is wise of Juan Cole that he rejects the appellation of "crusader" for the invasion forces and the prison personnel. I have given up on that for myself tho.
. . . . . .
And from Pak News:
''[A]lthough it took photographs to wake the world's attention to the shenanigans, within the cells, it was actually a letter scribed by a woman prisoner that first exposed what was going on in the infamous prison. The contents of a note that was smuggled out of the prison were so shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the jail found them hard to believe. It claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees. Several of the women were now pregnant, it added.
...
Swadi, one of seven female lawyers now representing women detainees in Abu Ghraib, began to piece together a picture of systemic abuse and torture perpetrated by US guards against Iraqi women held in detention without charge.
This was not only true of Abu Ghraib, she discovered, but was, as she put it, "happening all across Iraq". In November 2003, Swadi visited a woman detainee at a US military base at al-Kharkh, a former police compound in Baghdad.
"She was the only woman who would talk about her case. She was crying. She told us she had been raped," Swadi says.
"Several American soldiers had raped her. She had tried to fight them off and they had hurt her arm. She showed us the stitches. She told us, `We have daughters and husbands. For God's sake don't tell anyone about this.'"
...
The Taguba inquiry has corroborated the contents of the letter smuggled out of Abu Ghraib by a woman known only as "Noor".
...
Taguba discovered that guards have also videotaped and photographed naked female detainees. Bush refused to release other photographs of Iraqi women forced at gunpoint to bare their breasts (although Congress were shown them) - ostensibly to prevent attacks on US soldiers in Iraq. However in reality this is merely to prevent further domestic embarrassment.
...
Several women are housed in solitary confinement, within cells 2.5m long by 1.5m wide. There remain extremely troubling questions as to why these women came to be classified as "security detainees" - a term invented by the Crusaders to justify the indefinite detention of prisoners without charge or legal access, as part of the war on terror.
According to Swadi, who managed to visit Abu Ghraib in late March, the allegations against the women are "absurd".
...
The horrific abuses that are taking place in the prisons of Iraq have come to symbolise the horrific nature of the Iraqi crusade in general. ...
Bush may claim that these abuses have only been committed by six sick individuals and their behaviour "does not represent the America that I know," as he proclaimed on Arabic television.
All the evidence now points to the facts that Donald Rumsfeld, authorised physical coercion and sexual humiliation in Iraqi prisons.
America's political establishment actively encouraged the abuse. Donald Rumsfeld was hand picked by Bush, who was chosen by a minority, and a Court, to be the president of the USA. Therefore the behaviour of the six is wholly representative of the American way, in this author's opinion."'
Again, Rum must go. The whole world is watching. As carefully as the world watches our political process, as knowledgeable as they are about our systems of government, this is America's war and soon these photos or ones just like what Bush has suppressed (and I heard both Delay and Hutchinson discount the horror of what they saw privately) will be released... one way or another, then the photos of children, then god knows what.
I am convinced that the longer Rums stays, the infinitely worse the perception of America in the eyes of the world.