Antiwar.com Blog

Rumsfeld says White House lawyers are claiming that it is “illegal” to release additional photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison.

U.S. administration lawyers are advising the Pentagon not to publicly release any more photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused by U.S. soldiers, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at the outset of a hastily arranged visit to Iraq aimed at containing the abuse scandal.

“As far as I’m concerned, I’d be happy to release them all to the public and to get it behind us,” Rumsfeld told reporters travelling with him from Washington. “But at the present time I don’t know anyone in the legal shop in any element of the government that is recommending that.”

The government lawyers argue that releasing such materials would violate a Geneva Convention stricture against presenting images of prisoners that could be construed as degrading, Rumsfeld said en route to the Iraqi capital on a trip that was not announced in advance due to security concerns.

I’m sure there’s nothing self-serving in such legal opinions.

The end of the myth of Saddam
Charles Krauthammer

December 19, 2003

WASHINGTON — The race is over. The Oscar for Best Documentary, Short Subject, goes to … “Saddam’s Dental Exam.”

Screenplay: First Brigade, U.S. 4th I.D.

Producer: P. Bremer Enterprises, Baghdad.

Director: the anonymous genius at U.S. headquarters who chose this clip as the world’s first view of Saddam in captivity.
[…]
We Americans don’t do it that way. Instead, we show Saddam — King of Kings, Lion of the Tigris, Saladin of the Arabs — compliantly opening his mouth like a child to the universal indignity of an oral (and head lice!) exam. Docility wrapped in banality. Brilliant. Nothing could have been better calculated to demystify the all-powerful tyrant.

Photos of Nick Berg’s beheading weren’t shown to the general public, but a colleague of mine nonetheless remembered something similar she saw during the Bosnian War. Apparently, decapitation of captured Serb soldiers and civilians was rather common for the mujahedin fighting for the Bosnian Muslims. These photos were never published, either, not because they were too graphic, but because they were politically incorrect. The executioners were designated victims by most international media, while the victims were considered genocidal aggressors. Ten years later, the pictures survive – an eerie parallel to what is happening in Iraq.

Juan Cole is sounding the alarm here. He points to an AP report about heavy fighting in Karbala.

The US used heavy firepower in the sacred Shiite city, destroying half of the historic al-Mukhayyam Mosque not so far from the shrine of the Prophet’s martyred grandson, Imam Husain. For Shiites, this is as though a Muslim army was fighting in Vatican City and damaged a Renaissance-era church near the basilica of St. Peter. You wonder if the US can survive its victory in Karbala.

Read the rest….

On the Nick Berg Beheading

Col. Lounsbury writes what I think may be the definitive post here.

Lounsbury quotes the Washington Post:

The persistent violence contrasts sharply with U.S. officials’ optimistic calls for private companies to invest in Iraq. Over the past year, the Commerce Department has conducted a three-continent campaign to promote investment and reconstruction opportunities.

It was at one of those conferences that Berg was inspired to go to Baghdad, his family said. He dreamed of building radio towers in Iraq that would beam reports from a free press.

According to his family, Berg met businessmen at the conference who asked him to inspect radio towers damaged in the war. Berg hoped to make a bid for his company, Prometheus Methods Tower Service Inc., to provide parts and repair services.

Berg’s mother said she had begged him to change his mind about the trip.

But Berg, whose family described him as a bit of a rebel, decided that the potential business was worth the risk. He took a flight from New York to Amman, Jordan, on March 14 and then traveled on to Iraq. He did not have a security guard, translator or driver lined up, his mother said, and he decided to stay at smaller hotels not frequented by foreigners..

Emphasis Lounsbury’s. Bottom line: Berg may as well have been wearing a sign on his back reading “Clueless American – Kidnap Me.” Of course, Lounsbury says this much more emphatically and entertainingly.

Aside: Don’t visit Lounsbury’s site if graphic language offends you.

Another aside: Berg’s body was discovered sans head.

Tacitus makes a good point:

The pornography of violence in the form of taped executions (Fabrizio Quattrocchi) and especially beheadings (Daniel Pearl, the infamous Russian conscript decapitation) is a staple of Islamist propaganda, and will continue to be even in the absence of crimes on our part. Which is not to excuse or apologize for those crimes — merely to point out that there’s cause and effect here only on a very shallow level.

I agree in part. If not for the prison scandal, Berg would probably have been executed the same way for another “reason.” There exists no shortage of grievances that would resonate for the real audience for this video, the Arab street. For the Western audience, it was sufficient to shock them with barbarity with the added bonus of giving Western contract employees added incentive to leave.

Here’s an interesting tidbit that Lounsbury throws into a later post:

On the other hand, I note my local shopkeeper (who likes me, I don’t think he knows where I am from come to think of it – he also has a pictures of Yassine and Co. up in his shop) showed me a weekly yesterday. It had, in connexion with the Abu Ghrieb incidents, a picture – genuine? who knows? – of an American soldier (art claimed from the prison, whatever – with a tatoo of the Israeli flag on his arm, along with some American stuff. Maybe a roughneck Jewish sort. In any case, that is an angle being highly played, that there is an Israeli connexion to this, that Israelis are helping. Unforunately there may be some truth to this.

Not surprising that this angle is being played up in the Arab media. Too bad most Americans are too clueless to realize how inflammatory this imagery is to Arabs.

Just as a quick footnote to the April 29 article about Balkans and the EU: the BBC reported that EU’s Commissar – er, Commissioner – Chris Patten was in Belgrade pressuring Serbia to submit to ICTY’s demands.
“He said compliance with the court was a key step on Serbia’s path towards becoming a member of the European Union”, says BBC (my emphasis).
So this wonderful new mega-state considers its fundamental values to be expressed by submission to an illegitimate, politically motivated, criminally abusive and unprofessional kangaroo court? What more incentive does one need to bid it good riddance?

Spearheading the movement that clamored for US (and Western) intervention in Bosnia in the early 1990s – and Kosovo in 1998-99 – has been a diverse group of people united around a desire to stamp out “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”. Naturally, their definitions of these terms have been rather flexible.
While I don’t think these voices have been the prime mover behind the American Empire, they have certainly been its useful idiots during the Clintonian era. While under George the Lesser their influence seems to have waned in favor of the bloodthirsty oil imperialists, they have by no means vanished.
Witness one Melanie Kintz, who offered an attempt at sarcasm Monday while trying to cajole students of Western Michigan University to oppose ethnic cleansing… Continue reading “Genocide crusaders at it again”