0
   

THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ VI

 
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Fri 7 May, 2004 11:17 pm
ican711nm wrote:
CURIOUS

The time (assuming its standard time) stamped on all posts to this forum implies .....

.... what "Timezone" and "Date format" you have set in your 'Profile'.
(Mine e.g. is CET-summertime.)
0 Replies
 
McTag
 
  1  
Reply Fri 7 May, 2004 11:22 pm
ican711nm wrote:
We might say, you've got three choices:
Exterminate terrorists;
Get out of Town;
Shelter terrorists.


I might have to decline choice #2 because the liberating army have snipers who are shooting townspeople who venture into the open, and cars on the roads get shot up too. So, no real choice there, except to remain terrified. By terrorists.

"Liberals can sleep peacefully in their beds because there are rough people willing to commit violence on their behalf, and simulate acts of homosexual sex with their captives in violation of international law and any semblance of decency."
0 Replies
 
Kara
 
  1  
Reply Sat 8 May, 2004 11:24 am
Pogo said: We have met the enemy and he is us.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

May 8, 2004
PRISONERS
Mistreatment of Prisoners Is Called Routine in U.S.
By FOX BUTTERFIELD

Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.

In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation.

At Virginia's Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to crawl.

The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex.

The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system.

Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that says it is the third-largest private prison company, operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further action was taken.

In response to a request for an interview on Friday, Mr. McCotter said in a written statement that he had left Iraq last September, just after a ribbon-cutting ceremony to open Abu Ghraib.

"I was not involved in any aspect of the facility's operation after that time," he said.

Nationwide, during the last quarter century, over 40 state prison systems were under some form of court order, for brutality, crowding, poor food or lack of medical care, said Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group in Washington that calls for alternatives to incarceration.

In a 1999 opinion, Judge Justice wrote of the situation in Texas, "Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions."

In a case that began in 2000, a prisoner at the Allred Unit in Wichita Falls, Tex., said he was repeatedly raped by other inmates, even after he appealed to guards for help, and was allowed by prison staff to be treated like a slave, being bought and sold by various prison gangs in different parts of the prison. The inmate, Roderick Johnson, has filed suit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the case is now before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, said Kara Gotsch, public policy coordinator for the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Mr. Johnson.

Asked what Mr. Bush knew about abuse in Texas prisons while he was governor, Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said the problems in American prisons were not comparable to the abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib.

The corrections experts are careful to say they do not know to what extent the brutality and humiliation at Abu Ghraib were intended to break the prisoners for interrogation or were just random acts.

But Chase Riveland, a former secretary of corrections in Washington State and Colorado and now a prison consultant based near Seattle, said, "In some jurisdictions in the United States there is a prison culture that tolerates violence, and it's been there a long time."

This culture has been made worse by the quadrupling of the number of prison and jail inmates to 2.1 million over the last 25 years, which has often resulted in crowding, he said. The problems have been compounded by the need to hire large numbers of inexperienced and often undertrained guards, Mr. Riveland said.

Some states have a hard time recruiting enough guards, Mr. Riveland said, particularly Arizona, where the pay is very low. "Retention in these states is a big problem and so unqualified people get promoted to be lieutenants or captains in a few months," he said.

Something like this process may have happened in Iraq, where the Americans tried to start a new prison system with undertrained military police officers from Army reserve units, Mr. Riveland suggested.

When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to restore Iraq's criminal justice system last year, including Mr. McCotter, he said, "Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that freedom permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable criminal justice system based on the rule of law and standards of basic human rights."

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Monica Goodling, did not return phone calls on Friday asking why Mr. Ashcroft had chosen Mr. McCotter even though his firm's operation of the Santa Fe jail had been criticized by the Justice Department.

Mr. McCotter has a long background in prisons. He had been a military police officer in Vietnam and had risen to be a colonel in the Army. His last post was as warden of the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth.

After retiring from the Army, Mr. Cotter was head of the corrections departments in New Mexico and Texas before taking the job in Utah.

In Utah, in addition to the death of the mentally ill inmate, Mr. McCotter also came under criticism for hiring a prison psychiatrist whose medical license was on probation and who was accused of Medicaid fraud and writing prescriptions for drug addicts.

In an interview with an online magazine, Corrections.com, last January, Mr. McCotter recalled that of all the prisons in Iraq, Abu Ghraib "is the only place we agreed as a team was truly closest to an American prison. They had cell housing and segregation."

But 80 to 90 percent of the prison had been destroyed, so Mr. McCotter set about rebuilding it, everything from walls and toilets to handcuffs and soap. He employed 100 Iraqis who had worked in the prison under Saddam Hussein, and paid for everything with wads of cash, up to $3 million, that he carried with him.

Another problem, Mr. McCotter quickly discovered, was that the Iraqi staff, despite some American training, quickly reverted to their old ways, "shaking down families, shaking down inmates, letting prisoners buy their way out of prison."

So the American team fired the guards and went with former Iraqi military personnel. "They didn't have any bad habits and did things exactly the way we trained them."

Mr. McCotter said he worked closely with American military police officers at the prison, but he did not give any names.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Sat 8 May, 2004 11:31 am
As I've said many times on A2K, why are we trying to bring democracy to Iraq when we don't have "democracy" at home?
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Sat 8 May, 2004 04:19 pm
Quote:
WHAT ARE WE DOING THERE?

...

Why are we still there?

...

Why are we still there?

...



~~~~~~

Because it's still there! Arrow
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Sat 8 May, 2004 04:25 pm
Kara wrote:
Pogo said: We have met the enemy and he is us.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Which of us?
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Sat 8 May, 2004 04:44 pm
cicerone imposter wrote:
As I've said many times on A2K, why are we trying to bring democracy to Iraq when we don't have "democracy" at home?


Whatever it is we have at home is a lot better than whatever it is the Iraqi people have at home.

But if you still want to quibble: what do you mean by the word democracy? Then tell us why you think that what we have in the US is not that kind of democracy.

www.m-w.com
Quote:
Main Entry: de·moc·ra·cy
Pronunciation: di-'mä-kr&-sE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -cies
Etymology: Middle French democratie, from Late Latin democratia, from Greek dEmokratia, from dEmos + -kratia -cracy
1 a : government by the people; especially : rule of the majority b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
2 : a political unit that has a democratic government
3 capitalized : the principles and policies of the Democratic party in the U.S.
4 : the common people especially when constituting the source of political authority
5 : the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges


www.m-w.com
Quote:
Main Entry: pure democracy
Function: noun
: democracy in which the power is exercised directly by the people rather than through representatives


www.m-w.com
Quote:
Main Entry: social democracy
Function: noun
: a political movement advocating a gradual and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism by democratic means
- social democrat noun
- social democratic adjective


www.m-w.com
Quote:
Main Entry: Tory Democracy
Function: noun
: a political philosophy advocating preservation of established institutions and traditional principles combined with political democracy and a social and economic program designed to benefit the common man


www.m-w.com
Quote:
Main Entry: re·pub·lic
Pronunciation: ri-'p&-blik
Function: noun
Etymology: French république, from Middle French republique, from Latin respublica, from res thing, wealth + publica, feminine of publicus public -- more at REAL, PUBLIC
1 a (1) : a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government b (1) : a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law (2) : a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government c : a usually specified republican government of a political unit <the French Fourth Republic>
2 : a body of persons freely engaged in a specified activity <the republic of letters>
3 : a constituent political and territorial unit of the former nations of Czechoslovakia, the U.S.S.R., or Yugoslavia
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Sat 8 May, 2004 04:54 pm
ican, We don't need you to post a definition of "democracy" from the dictionary. We are capable looking it up; trust me on this one! To make an attempt to compare American-style democracy and what we're trying to "enforce" on the Iraqi people is laughable. We've selected their leadership; if you want to look at your dictionary for a defnition of "democracy," nows the time. As for the "democracy" we have at home, you probably don't understand the discrimination that still exists for minorities in this country. The violence against Arab-Americans in the US has been increasing. Take that and smoke it.
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Sat 8 May, 2004 04:56 pm
Walter Hinteler wrote:
ican711nm wrote:
CURIOUS

The time (assuming its standard time) stamped on all posts to this forum implies .....

.... what "Timezone" and "Date format" you have set in your 'Profile'.
(Mine e.g. is CET-summertime.)


This post of yours is timed in my copy:

Quote:
Walter Hinteler Posted: Sat May 08, 2004 10:17 am Post subject:



Walter Hinteler wrote:
.... what "Timezone" and "Date format" you have set in your 'Profile'.
(Mine e.g. is CET-summertime.)


The following was edited after my dinner:
Quote:
Please standby: I'll answer this after dinner. Time now is Sat 5:57 pm CDT (i.e. 1 hour later than CST = Central Standard Time)



This was added after my dinner, Saturday 6:35 pm CDT:
Quote:
The time now is Sun May 09, 2004 4:29 am :: All times are GMT + 5 Hours (GMT = Greenwich Mean Time)


So I now ask: Why are all times in able2know GMT + 5 hours?
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Sat 8 May, 2004 06:35 pm
cicerone imposter wrote:
ican, We don't need you to post a definition of "democracy" from the dictionary.


Oh, but you certainly do need me to post definitions of the word democracy from the dictionary. When you say we don't have democracy at home you obviously mean something other than any of the dictionary definitions of democracy. So please give me your definition of democracy so I can determine what you mean. Or shall I assume that you are merely blowing smoke?

cicerone imposter wrote:
To make an attempt to compare American-style democracy and what we're trying to "enforce" on the Iraqi people is laughable.
Why?

The government we have "enforced" on the Iraqi people is merely a preliminary government. The members of this preliminary government were selected by the Coalition. They have completed a draft of a Constitution for an interim government. The interim government is going to ask the Iraqi people, after June 30, to either adopt or reject it. One fundamental part of that draft Constitution is that it can be amended by those representatives of the Iraqi people that can be elected by the Iraqi people once an interim Constitution is adopted and those elections are held (just as it was done in the US more than 200 years ago).

In the case of the US, the first Constitution specified a confederation of independent states form of government. However, that interim government was replaced within a relatively short time by the federation of dependent states form of government we have today, after it was generally perceived that the confederation wasn't going to work satisfactorily.

cicerone imposter wrote:
As for the "democracy" we have at home, you probably don't understand the discrimination that still exists for minorities in this country. The violence against Arab-Americans in the US has been increasing.


I assume discrimination in the US by government (federal or state or local levels) against various minorities in the US still exists even though I am unaware of it. Our government democratically ended a great deal of discrimination by government against dark complected people back in 1865 with the adoption of the 13th Amendment.

Another big step was taken democratically in 1954 by the US Supreme Court when that "separate but equal" BS was ended. Still another big step was taken democratically with President Lyndon Johnson's sponsored Civil Rights Law.

However, discrimination by non-government groups of people against non-government groups of people living under a democratic form of government does not make that government not democratic. It makes that democratic form of government have still more democratically determined improvements to make.
0 Replies
 
Walter Hinteler
 
  1  
Reply Sun 9 May, 2004 12:29 am
ican711nm wrote:

So I now ask: Why are all times in able2know GMT + 5 hours?


Still, here, with me, all time in Able2Know is GMT [UTC] + 2 hours ... and I know, why Laughing

(Why don't you change the clock to your correct time zone [in the 'profile', to name this again] or do you live in - or do you live in a country with Eastern European Summer Time?)
0 Replies
 
Tarantulas
 
  1  
Reply Sun 9 May, 2004 04:48 am
Quote:
In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation.

This is a lie. It calls into question the truthfulness of the rest of the article.

Quote:
The Story Behind the Sheriff's Pink Shorts

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was having trouble with inmates stealing pairs of regular white boxer shorts from the county jails - it was affecting operating expenses. It was costing the county about $40,000 a year to keep jail prisoners in clean, comfortable shorts.

In an effort to reduce theft, he devised a clever plan to dye all inmates' shorts pink. Then, as the inmates are discharged from jail or goes out on work furlough leave, they are searched for any pink boxer shorts. Since the boxer shorts are easy to identify, theft has dropped drastically, thereby reducing taxpayer cost for replenishing inmates' shorts.

This program was so effective that Sheriff Arpaio was getting requests from other inmates asking for a souvenir pair of shorts for friends and neighbors. With this in mind, the Sheriff wondered if there was a market for these pink shorts. He had 3000 pairs especially made with the Maricopa County Sheriff's badge embossed on them along with his signature.

These shorts are all brand new, and are the same make and style furnished to inmates at the county jails. Because of the unique color, these shorts have become a real fashion statement. The initial 3000 shorts sold out in a day and a half, so an additional 25,000 were ordered and are being sold in Phoenix area malls.

Why someone would twist the truth into a lie that could be so easily discovered is beyond me. I wonder whether any statement in that article is actually true.
0 Replies
 
Joe Nation
 
  1  
Reply Sun 9 May, 2004 05:16 am
Let's see: the reporter in the first article said it was humiliation.
The reporter in the second story said it was cost savings.

Maybe the second reporter talked to the sheriff

and the first reporter talked to the inmates. Question Question

So maybe, it was both, it just depends on whether you were being made to wear them or putting them out for sale.

BTW: T, We have a reporter's name and publishing newspaper for the first article, could we please, please, please have sources for what you post. Please.

Joe
0 Replies
 
Kara
 
  1  
Reply Sun 9 May, 2004 06:56 am
Tarantula, if the object was easy identification and not humiliation, why weren't the shorts dyed red or some other "masculine" color? ( I am keeping in mind that the officials might have tried to dye them red and the result turned out pink Smile )

I do agree with you that one must read different sources ALWAYS and not rely on one article or opinion. Recent news stories about fabricatrion in the media are only the most obvious reason for this. But the piece from the NYTimes had the ring of truth.
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Sun 9 May, 2004 07:53 am
Walter Hinteler wrote:

(Why don't you change the clock to your correct time zone [in the 'profile', to name this again]
Smile

You're right. When I first joined able2know I mistakenly adopted what was aparently a default time setting. With your help thank you, I now know how to change it. The time in my profile was left at GMT + 5 by my mistake. It is now changed to the correct time for me GMT - 5 for US Central Daylight Time (CDT). Thanks again.
0 Replies
 
yilmaz101
 
  1  
Reply Sun 9 May, 2004 07:58 am
Ican.... follow this link

http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/ni/ni-c10-s03.html

there you will find quoted from:

US Army Operational Concept for Terrorism Counteraction (TRADOC Pamphlet No. 525-37, 1984); Robert Kupperman Associates, Low Intensity Conflict, July 30, 1983. Both cited in Michael Klare and Peter Kornbluh, eds., Low Intensity Warfare (Pantheon, 1988, 69, 147).

the official definition of terrorism which is:

"the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear."

And tell me what difference is there between this definition and the US foreign polic agendas.
0 Replies
 
ican711nm
 
  1  
Reply Sun 9 May, 2004 08:47 am
yilmaz101 wrote:


the official definition of terrorism which is:

"the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear."

And tell me what difference is there between this definition and the US foreign polic agendas.


No Difference Shocked

My definition of terrorism (not the dictionary's definition): The intentional, threatened or actual, killing or maiming, of innocent people to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature.

My definition of self-defense (not the dictionary's definition) against terrorists is: The killing, maiming, or incarcerating of terrorists (my definition of terrorists) before or after they actually kill or maim innocent people.

My definition of innocent people (not the dictionary's definition) is: People who have not maimed or killed, or threatened to maim or kill other people, except to defend themselves against being maimed or killed by other people.
0 Replies
 
Tarantulas
 
  1  
Reply Sun 9 May, 2004 10:39 am
Joe Nation wrote:
Let's see: the reporter in the first article said it was humiliation.
The reporter in the second story said it was cost savings.

Maybe the second reporter talked to the sheriff

and the first reporter talked to the inmates. Question Question

So maybe, it was both, it just depends on whether you were being made to wear them or putting them out for sale.

BTW: T, We have a reporter's name and publishing newspaper for the first article, could we please, please, please have sources for what you post. Please.

Joe

The first reporter said it was humiliation, and also said that men were made to wear women's underwear. As you can see by the pictures (links below), they are men's boxer shorts, dyed pink. That's where the lie occurs. I don't believe the color is meant to be humiliating, I think they picked pink because men commonly wouldn't come to jail wearing pink shorts. Another reason I don't think it's humiliating is that everyone is wearing them, so no one would stand out from the rest.

The text I posted wasn't a news article. It's part of a poster we made to sell pink shorts in the malls. It's on our Sheriff's Posse website, so I can't post a link to it due to the A2K Terms of Use. Incidentally, I was gratified to see that ours is the #3 website shown in a Google search for "Pink Shorts." Makes me think I'm doing something right.

Kara wrote:
Tarantula, if the object was easy identification and not humiliation, why weren't the shorts dyed red or some other "masculine" color? ( I am keeping in mind that the officials might have tried to dye them red and the result turned out pink Smile )

I do agree with you that one must read different sources ALWAYS and not rely on one article or opinion. Recent news stories about fabricatrion in the media are only the most obvious reason for this. But the piece from the NYTimes had the ring of truth.

As far as I know they were intended to be pink from the very start, for the reason explained above. And yes, the article does sound plausible. I wonder where the reporter got his information.

I would post pictures of the pink shorts but the website where I found them is a Tripod site, and they don't allow remote linking. It's funny because this is an anti-Sheriff Joe site and he apparently got most of his pictures from my Sheriff's Posse website. The first page has a couple of pictures of pink shorts. Both of them come from my website. I know that because I recognize the carpet where I laid the shorts down to take the picture. The second page is my scan of a poster autographed by Sheriff Joe for my wife. The Deputy Sheriff in the background is wearing a pair of pink shorts. The pink shorts shown on the first page were made up especially as a money-making device for the Sheriff's Posse. People all over the world have heard of our Sheriff and his pink shorts, and they want some as a souvenir. The shorts in the poster are the real ones worn by jail inmates.

http://sheriff_joe_a_jerk.tripod.com/pinkshorts.html

http://sheriff_joe_a_jerk.tripod.com/tentphoto.html

The jail inmates also wear white shirts and pants with horizontal black stripes like the old-time prison inmates used to wear. That's because one of them escaped from jail a few years ago and he wasn't easily picked out of a crowd, because at that time the jail clothing looked like what a hospital orderly would wear. Those are also hard for inmates to steal when they get out. And all the jail towels are dyed pink too. Very Happy
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Sun 9 May, 2004 10:43 am
"The only people who have been pushed aside in this
administration are the truth tellers . . ."
World of Hurt

May 9, 2004
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Good golly, you knew Rummy wasn't going to pretend to stay
contrite for long. Not with lawmakers bugging him about the
Pearl Harbor of PR, as Republican Tom Cole called it.

The flinty 71-year-old kept it together as John McCain
pounced and Hillary prodded. But soon he was once more
giving snippy one-word answers to his inquisitors, foisting
them on his brass menagerie or biting their heads off
himself.

By Friday evening, when the delegate from Guam, Madeleine
Bordallo, pressed him on whether "quality of life" was an
issue in the Abu Ghraib torture cases, you could see
Donald-Duck steam coming out of his ears.

"Whether they have a PX or a good restaurant is not the
issue," he said with a veiled sneer.

Rummy was having a dickens of a time figuring out how a
control-freak administration could operate in this
newfangled age when G.I.'s have dadburn digital cameras.

In the information age, he complained to senators, "people
are running around with digital cameras and taking these
unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against
the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not
even arrived in the Pentagon."

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, mourned that America
was in a "world of hurt." If Gen. Richard Myers knew enough
to try to suppress the CBS show, Mr. Graham asked, why
didn't he know enough to warn the president and Congress?

Donald Rumsfeld, a black belt at Washington infighting,
knew the aggrieved lawmakers were most interested in an
apology for not keeping them in the loop. He no doubt was
sorry - sorry the pictures got out.

The man who promised last July that "I don't do quagmires"
didn't seem to be in trouble on Friday, despite the
government's blowing off repeated Red Cross warnings.

But who knows what the effect will be of the additional
"blatantly sadistic and inhuman" photos that Mr. Rumsfeld
warned of? Or the videos he said he still had not screened?


Dick Cheney will not cut loose his old mentor from the
Nixon and Ford years unless things get more dire.

After all, George Tenet is still running the C.I.A. after
the biggest intelligence failures since some Trojan ignored
Cassandra's chatter and said, "Roll the horse in." Colin
Powell is still around after trash-talking to Bob Woodward
about his catfights with the Bushworld "Mean Girls" -
Rummy, Cheney, Wolfie and Doug Feith. The vice president
still rules after promoting a smashmouth foreign policy
that is more Jack Palance than Shane. And the president
still edges out John Kerry in polls, even though Mr. Bush
observed with no irony to Al Arabiya TV: "Iraqis are sick
of foreign people coming in their country and trying to
destabilize their country, and we will help them rid Iraq
of these killers."

The only people who have been pushed aside in this
administration are the truth tellers who warned about
policies on taxes (Paul O'Neill); war costs (Larry
Lindsey); occupation troop levels (Gen. Eric Shinseki); and
how Iraq would divert from catching the ubiquitous Osama
(Richard Clarke).

Even if the secretary survives, the Rummy Doctrine - using
underwhelming force to achieve overwhelming goals - is
discredited. Jack Murtha, a Democratic hawk and Vietnam
vet, says "the direction's got to be changed or it's
unwinnable," and Lt. Gen. William Odom, retired, told Ted
Koppel that Iraq was headed toward becoming an Al Qaeda
haven and Iranian ally.

By the end, Rummy was channeling Jack Nicholson's Col.
Jessup, who lashed out at the snotty weenies questioning
him while they sleep "under the blanket of the very freedom
I provide, then question the manner in which I provide it."

Asked how we can get back credibility, Rummy bridled.
"America is not what's wrong with the world," he said,
adding: "I read all this stuff - people hate us, people
don't like us. The fact of the matter is, people line up to
come into this country every year because it's better here
than other places, and because they respect the fact that
we respect human beings. And we'll get by this."

Maybe. But for now, the hawks who wanted to employ American
might to scatter American values like flower petals all
across the world are reduced to keeping them from being
trampled by Americans. As Rummy would say, not a pretty
picture.

E-mail: [email protected]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/09/opinion/09DOWD.html?ex=1085103155&ei=1&en=0835036cefc68755

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
0 Replies
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Sun 9 May, 2004 10:49 am
Top Stories - Reuters


Pentagon OK'd Harsh Prison Techniques at Guantanamo

Sat May 8, 8:47 PM ET Add Top Stories - Reuters to My Yahoo!



WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Defense Department last year approved interrogation techniques for use at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba that include forcing inmates to strip naked and subjecting them to loud music, bright lights and sleep deprivation, the Washington Post reported on Saturday.



The techniques were approved in April 2003 and require approval from senior Pentagon (news - web sites) officials and in some cases Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the paper reported on its Web site, citing unnamed defense officials.


It cited a document outlining 20 procedures that require interrogators to justify the harshest questioning techniques as a "military necessity," quoting an official said to possess the document. Some techniques require "appropriate medical monitoring," the report said.


Similar methods have been approved for use on detainees in Iraq (news - web sites) with links to terror or insurgent groups, though it was not clear whether they were approved for use at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, the Post said.


A Pentagon spokeswoman declined to comment on the report, referring questions to U.S. Southern Command in Miami.


Army Col. David McWilliams, a spokesman for Southern Command, confirmed that the U.S. military approved a sliding scale of interrogation techniques in the spring 2003, but denied that the list includes forcing detainees to strip.


"Not only is there no protocol that calls for disrobing a detainee, it was never considered," McWilliams told Reuters. "We do not do it."


He said approved standards are for "making sure that we could work with more difficult detainees, but do it in accordance with the standards of accepted international law and international techniques for interrogation."


McWilliams declined to comment on other interrogation techniques.


The Post story said prisoners could be made to stand for hours and questioning a prisoner without clothes was permitted if he was alone in his cell.


Pictures of grinning American soldiers abusing naked Iraqis at Abu Ghraib -- the largest prison in Iraq and notorious for torture under President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) -- have caused an international outcry.


The United States holds about 600 foreign nationals at the Guantanamo Bay prison, captured in what President Bush (news - web sites) calls the global war on terrorism.


This week the U.S. military punished two Army Reserve soldiers who assaulted prisoners while working as guards at Guantanamo, defense officials said.


The United States began detaining terrorism suspects -- most caught in Afghanistan (news - web sites) -- at the remote Guantanamo base in January 2002. About 150 prisoners have been transferred to their home countries either for outright release or for continued detention by those governments, the Pentagon has said.
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