Bush: Iraqi prisoner abuse on Arab TV
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| Wed, 05-05-2004 - 10:17am |
Bush to address Iraqi prisoner abuse on Arab TV.
President Bush will give interviews to two Arab television networks Wednesday about reports of U.S. military personnel abusing Iraqi prisoners, the White House said.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the 10-minute interviews with Al-Hurra, a U.S.-sponsored network, and Al Arabiya will take place about 10 a.m. ET (1400 GMT) in the Map Room at the White House.
"This is an opportunity for the president to speak directly to the people of Arab nations and let them know that the images that we all have seen are shameful and unacceptable," McClellan told reporters during a Bush campaign tour.
Referring to photographs that have surfaced showing Iraqi prisoners being abused McClellan said, "The images do not represent what America stands for, nor do they represent the high standards of conduct that the military is committed to uphold. The U.S. believes in treating all people with dignity and respect."
Asked why Bush would not meet with the Arab network Al-Jazeera, McClellan would only say the other two networks "reach a wide range of people in the Middle East."
McClellan said the actions of the accused soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq "do not represent what 99 percent of the men and women in the military stand for." (Full story)
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said Tuesday that he would take "all measures necessary" to ensure that abuse of detainees in Iraq "does not happen again."
Rumsfeld defended the Defense Department's handling of the matter in the face of congressional criticism, noting that a criminal investigation by the Army was under way and publicly disclosed three months before what he called "deeply disturbing" photographs were broadcast last week.
"This is a serious problem, and it's something the department is addressing," he said at a Pentagon news briefing. "The system works. The system works."
Rumsfeld said the criminal investigation was one of six launched since January.
More..............
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/05/05/iraq.abuse.main/index.html


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>"maybe even get him re-elected"<
Say it isn't possible.
Not four more years.
Doesn't matter.
We were there to liberate the Iraqis FROM these men. They murder the innocent. They attack our military unexpectedly and against cease fire agreements. These men are murderous thugs. It is wrong that they were mistreated because America is good and our people are good and will not stand for this kind of thing. But it CERTAINLY ISN'T OK for them to murder us either. I am sick and tired of hearing "we were there to liberate them but we tortured them." That is hogwash. We were there to liberate the OPPRESSED - NOT the oppressors...
Minie, this is really one of the worst posts I have seen on this topic.
James
janderson_ny@yahoo.com
CL Ask A Guy
I just don't remember this much media coverage over Iraqis abusing US troops. And my guess was that MORE abuse took place against Americans.
Considering the vast number of Iraqis being detained compared to any American soldiers taken prisoner, I seriously doubt that.
Well said!
And, if we haven't welcomed you to the board yet...then
Op-ed: Bush And Blair Facing Last Chance.
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=b0a4221a1c5c5177
Just when things could not get any worse in Iraq, they do. The Washington Post's disgusting new pictures Thursday presage as many more horror stories as there are civilians randomly killed and people imprisoned or disappeared without explanation. Desperate families outside jails, waving bits of paper with names and begging for news, have had their pleas ignored for a year by the powers that invaded on a promise to bring the rule of law and human rights.
The systematic torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere is so poisonous in its symbolism that not even America's mortal enemies could have devised such a PR coup. Sexual abuse and humiliation of naked Muslim prisoners, urinated on and sodomised, and orders from US intelligence to "soften up" victims in Saddam's old torture chamber almost defies belief.
Except it doesn't. Atrocities are entirely predictable wherever absolute power holds the utterly helpless in secret: that is a universal law of human nature. In peace, that is as true of old people, the mentally ill and children in institutions hidden from view. In war, degraded captives bring out an instinctive disgust, contempt and violence in the captors who degrade them. That is why habeas corpus was the founding principle of British justice, even before Magna Carta, banning the holding of people uncharged, unseen without trial.
"Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people," said President Bush plaintively. Indeed, but it is in the nature of the circumstances that Bush has authorised for holding 10,000 prisoners without trial, many in unknown, secret prisons. "That's not the way we do things in America," he says. Indeed, it is only the way America does things when it goes abroad; the American constitution protects its own citizens. The self-blinding American myth is that a "freedom-loving nation" built on the ideals of Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson could never do such things.
But it was Tony Blair's foreign policy adviser, Robert Cooper, who elevated double standards into a doctrine, declaring human rights are only for the civilised: "Among ourselves we keep the law but when operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle." That is a self-defeating way to bring civilised values to those whose hearts and minds are the real battleground of "the war on terror".
Invading armies always commit atrocities - often not revealed until years later. Where they can no longer discriminate friend from foe in a sea of alien faces, they are bound to kill indiscriminately. Warning bells rang when, even after the regime fell, UK and US forces still refused to count civilian deaths.
Few of us who argued against this war imagined things would be this bad. As the president begs Congress for another $25bn in the shadow of this chaos, the rubble of neo-conservative strategy lies all about him. The dream that this expedition would herald a new era of democracy across the Middle East is dead on his lips. Essential contractors have quit as insurance brokers declare Iraq the most dangerous place in the world to business. A Gallup poll in Baghdad, taken just before the torture pictures appeared, showed only 10% of Iraqis had a favourable opinion of the US.
In a majestic lecture Thursday night at the LSE, Professor Fred Halliday, a foremost Arab expert, described the full seriousness of what he called this "crisis of our times".
He says,"the USA has destroyed the goodwill it initially enjoyed" in the days after Saddam fell. Now "the situation is quite literally out of control", with no coherent policy. Paul Bremer in his bunker leaves the initiative to military commanders who have no sense of politics or diplomacy. The US has alienated its allies across the region with its reckless endorsement of Sharon and helped to awaken a transnational army of jihadis. Its traditional allies, "the corrupt, weak dictatorships of the region", have been left angry and vulnerable. The "shock and awe" of American global dominance turning into a daily spectacle of ineptitude and failure.
Halliday puts what shreds of hope he retains in the UN's Lakhdar Brahimi, as the last chance to avoid total conflagration and the triumph of extremists. But he doubts Washington now is capable of listening to Brahimi. The US now needs the UN, but still refuses to bow sufficiently to the only hope left of rescue.
The neo-conservative dream of total American hegemony without need of allies or international law has been exposed as impossible as well as undesirable. All this causes much smirking satisfaction in the more rabid anti-American camp. But the effect of an Iraq meltdown could have ominous global repercussions. A US retreat into isolationism is no answer. The US is the only superpower: the UN and the world have as much need of it as ever for humanitarian interventions.
For example: Human Rights Watch on Friday published a damning report on Sudan, where government-backed militias in Darfur are accused of ethnically cleansing an entire district - the Arabs expelling, burning, killing and raping hundreds of thousands of Africans from fertile lands. Watching the TV pictures, the impulse is to cry out: "Do something, someone!" But who? The UN? On Monday Sudan was elected to the UN Commission on Human Rights, put there by the African regional group. Cuba and Zimbabwe have also just been elected, and Libya chaired the commission last year. No wonder the US walked out.
But for all its need of reform, the UN is all there is, and Brahimi is Iraq's last best hope. If Tony Blair wants to save what is left of his fearful Iraq error, now is the time for him to put loud pressure on Bush to guarantee the UN a central role after the June 30 handover, with command over the military, and drawing in Turkey and Arab nations under a UN banner. All prisoners must be handed over to UN authority to be dealt with transparently under international law. Otherwise Blair should warn that Britain will follow Spain, Bulgaria and Poland in ordering a withdrawal of troops. Demanding a UN handover is his last chance to do the right thing.
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