Heaven only knows what McG is saying...ever.
dlowan wrote:Lol - AI only discusses the worst side of ANY country. The US, Australia, Great Britain, Saudi Arabia, North Korea......ALL countries.
That is its mission - to uncover the human rights injustices.
I guess McG is saying it should pack up and go home, cos the US won't tolerate criticism?
So tell me dlowen. Can you tell me of a human rights violation that any group like AI has discovered about the US that was not already under investigation by the US? We do not need AI to point out what we do wrong. We do a fine job of that for ourselves.
AI needs to investigate countries like Iraq before our invasion. Perhaps their actions may have helped keep some of the people in those mass graves alive.
That link did not lead to the story, Nimh...is there more?
Edit: Hre's more:
Former Powell aide links Cheney's office to abuse directives
By Agence France-Presse
11/03/05 "IHT" -- -- WASHINGTON Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for directives that led to U.S. soldiers' abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top State Department official said Thursday.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, told National Public Radio he had traced a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to Cheney's staff.
"The secretary of defense under cover of the vice president's office," Wilkerson said, "regardless of the president having put out this memo" - "they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we've seen."
He said the directives contradicted a 2002 order by President George W. Bush for the U.S. military to abide by the Geneva conventions against torture.
"There was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense, down to the commanders in the field," authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said.
The directives were "in carefully couched terms," Wilkerson conceded, but said they had the effect of loosening the reins on U.S. troops, leading to many cases of prisoner abuse, including at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, that were contrary to the Geneva Conventions.
"If you are a military man, you know that you just don't do these sorts of things," Wilkerson said, because troops will take advantage, or feel so pressured to obtain information that "they have to do what they have to do to get it."
He said that Powell had assigned him to investigate the matter after reports emerged in the media about U.S. troops abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both men had formerly served in the U.S. military.
Wilkerson also called David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, "a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions."
On Monday, Cheney promoted Addington to his chief of staff to replace I. Lewis Libby, who has been indicted over the unmasking of a CIA agent.
Wilkerson also told National Public Radio that Cheney's office ran an "alternate national security staff" that spied on and undermined the president's formal National Security Council.
He said National Security Council staff stopped sending e-mails when they found out Cheney's staff members were reading their messages.
He said he believed that Cheney's staff prevented Bush from seeing a National Security Council memo arguing strongly that the United States needed many more troops for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Wilkerson also said that the former CIA chief George Tenet did not inform Cheney's office of key weaknesses in the government's argument that Saddam Hussein had or was seeking weapons of mass destruction.
That argument was central to the Bush administration's justifications for the Iraq war.
Wilkerson has also said recently that Cheney and Rumsfeld operated a "cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign and military policy.
WASHINGTON Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for directives that led to U.S. soldiers' abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top State Department official said Thursday.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, told National Public Radio he had traced a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to Cheney's staff.
"The secretary of defense under cover of the vice president's office," Wilkerson said, "regardless of the president having put out this memo" - "they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we've seen."
He said the directives contradicted a 2002 order by President George W. Bush for the U.S. military to abide by the Geneva conventions against torture.
"There was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense, down to the commanders in the field," authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said.
The directives were "in carefully couched terms," Wilkerson conceded, but said they had the effect of loosening the reins on U.S. troops, leading to many cases of prisoner abuse, including at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, that were contrary to the Geneva Conventions.
"If you are a military man, you know that you just don't do these sorts of things," Wilkerson said, because troops will take advantage, or feel so pressured to obtain information that "they have to do what they have to do to get it."
He said that Powell had assigned him to investigate the matter after reports emerged in the media about U.S. troops abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both men had formerly served in the U.S. military.
Wilkerson also called David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, "a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions."
On Monday, Cheney promoted Addington to his chief of staff to replace I. Lewis Libby, who has been indicted over the unmasking of a CIA agent.
Wilkerson also told National Public Radio that Cheney's office ran an "alternate national security staff" that spied on and undermined the president's formal National Security Council.
He said National Security Council staff stopped sending e-mails when they found out Cheney's staff members were reading their messages.
He said he believed that Cheney's staff prevented Bush from seeing a National Security Council memo arguing strongly that the United States needed many more troops for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Wilkerson also said that the former CIA chief George Tenet did not inform Cheney's office of key weaknesses in the government's argument that Saddam Hussein had or was seeking weapons of mass destruction.
That argument was central to the Bush administration's justifications for the Iraq war.
Wilkerson has also said recently that Cheney and Rumsfeld operated a "cabal" that hijacked U.S. foreign and military policy.
WASHINGTON Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for directives that led to U.S. soldiers' abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top State Department official said Thursday.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, told National Public Radio he had traced a trail of memos and directives authorizing questionable detention practices up through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office directly to Cheney's staff.
"The secretary of defense under cover of the vice president's office," Wilkerson said, "regardless of the president having put out this memo" - "they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we've seen."
He said the directives contradicted a 2002 order by President George W. Bush for the U.S. military to abide by the Geneva conventions against torture.
"There was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense, down to the commanders in the field," authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said.
Copyright © 2005 the International Herald Tribune
And this is odd, you know, because the vice pres really only has two functions. One is president of the senate, and the other is to replace the president if needed.
Not, it seems, Cheney.
In my reading, he is being viewed as an extremely active and powerful VP.
Do YOU think he is sticking to those functions, Roger?
Dunno, Deb. It seems like he disappeared 4 1/2 years ago, barring a brief appearance at Auschweitz last year.
Oh, all right. No it doesn't seem so, but outside of hearsay, I have no idea what he is doing.
nimh wrote:This made me as furious as I haven't been at the American government since ... sometime in the 80s. I'm close to declaring the US the enemy now.
Mind you, these are not some Afghan interrogaters hired by the Americans to torture by proxy; these were Americans who did this, thinking they were following instructions.
So pathetically typical. Sensational journalism riles the blood of foreigner, who automatically accepts the foreign paper's bias, then posts bluster intending to find other foreigners (and homegrown escapees from reality) to join him in his tirade. Get off of your soap box, remember than just like people say "don't believe everything you see on TV", the same can be said of newspapers. Unless you truly believe that the Guardian and the NY Times are indeed the modern Oracles of Delphi.
And your comments on declaring the US the enemy - typical symptom of liberals idealogically joining murderers, terrorists, and jihadists, in their skewered prism of "global" morality. Pacifism is a plague that infects those that ultimately are destroyed by the very thing they attempt to pacify. Kind of glad I'm now so close to being your "enemy". With "friends" like that, who would need enemies.
Lusatian wrote:nimh wrote:This made me as furious as I haven't been at the American government since ... sometime in the 80s. I'm close to declaring the US the enemy now.
Mind you, these are not some Afghan interrogaters hired by the Americans to torture by proxy; these were Americans who did this, thinking they were following instructions.
So pathetically typical. Sensational journalism riles the blood of foreigner, who automatically accepts the foreign paper's bias, then posts bluster intending to find other foreigners (and homegrown escapees from reality) to join him in his tirade. Get off of your soap box, remember than just like people say "don't believe everything you see on TV", the same can be said of newspapers. Unless you truly believe that the Guardian and the NY Times are indeed the modern Oracles of Delphi.
And your comments on declaring the US the enemy - typical symptom of liberals idealogically joining murderers, terrorists, and jihadists, in their skewered prism of "global" morality. Pacifism is a plague that infects those that ultimately are destroyed by the very thing they attempt to pacify. Kind of glad I'm now so close to being your "enemy". With "friends" like that, who would need enemies.
Yeah, except that this "foreign paper's bias" is based on an interview with NPR,
US Public Radio. This "foreign" news sources simply picked up on a domestic (US) news story. Your jingoism is showing, Lusatian.
heehee...LUSATIAN calling Nimh bad names for "blustering".....heeheehhhheeee.....laugh, I nearly shat, I have not laughed so much since Uncle Percy caught his left testicle in the mangle....
(Prize for anyone who remembers where I bastardized THAT drom...)
Merry Andrew wrote: Your jingoism is showing, Lusatian.
"... again." I'd like to add.
Looks like I missed the fun and games...
The newly published photos from the Abu Ghraib file...
How many conservative posters here asserted that all that was going on was "more like a kind of hazing" than anything else?
Story:
Abuse photos reignite scandal of Abu Ghraib
Quote:The images, aired by the Australian public television broadcaster SBS, showed injured Iraqi prisoners, an apparently dead man and sexual abuse.
Quote:Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya aired footage, including video of a man repeatedly banging his head against a wall, photos of a hooded man in his underwear and of a naked figure lying on the floor next to what appeared to be a pool of blood.
Other pictures shown on the SBS current affairs programme Dateline included those of a man whose throat had apparently been slit, a group of men being forced to masturbate in front of guards, photographs of bloodied Iraqis who had been shot and prisoners with burns and weeping wounds.
Quote:A spokesman for Dateline declined to say how the programme had obtained the images but said that SBS was "confident in the credibility of the source". A Pentagon official confirmed last night that the images were authentic.
Quote:in Baghdad there was little surprise. "Nothing is new to us," Muhammad Shati, 34, a Baghdad telecom engineer, told The Times. "Those are the Americans we know already. They should stop giving speeches on fighting for freedom: an army of terror cannot defeat terror."
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,268720,00.jpg
An American soldier sits while an Iraqi prisoner slumps against the bars of a cell. An Australian news programme, Dateline, has broadcast dozens of what it claims are undisclosed photographs of abuse in Abu Ghraib prison (SBS/Dateline)
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,268714,00.jpg
An Iraqi holds up a severely burned arm. Dateline says it has obtained hundreds of images which the US Department of Defence has tried to suppress. Some 87 images are currently the subject of a legal battle between the Pentagon and American Civil Liberties Union (SBS/Dateline)
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,268713,00.jpg
American soldiers are visible next to naked prisoner behind a heap of Iraqi detainees. It is unclear whether the prisoners are dead or alive. Seven American soldiers, all members of the 372nd Military Police Company, have been convicted of crimes committed in Abu Ghraib (SBS/Dateline)
http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,268716,00.jpg
Of the dozens of images broadcast today, nearly all show prisoners injured, naked or forced to stand in humiliating positions. Abu Ghraib, 20 miles outside Baghdad, first became notorious for torture under the regime of Saddam Hussein, when it housed as many as 50,000 prisoners (SBS/Dateline)
"Why do they hate us?"
God. You just want to weep. Or pull your hair out.
Here is a link to UNCENSORED Abu Ghraib photos that Salon has gotten ahold of.
WARNING, Not for the faint of heart!
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/02/16/abu_ghraib/portfolio.html
I feel sick after looking at them
Cycloptichorn
The whole Abu Ghraib scandal is something I still hold against the United States.
And when I say "United States" I'm talking about the media who are not reporting about this kind of thing, the people who excuse this kind of thing (e.g. saying, "Could you tell me, please, how do the insurgents treat their prisoners?"), and, above all, the administration who willingly let it happen.
And if somebody here would like to counter this with the usual "bad apples" argument, then I'd be glad to see if he could come up with an instance, one single instance, where this kind of behaviour (i.e. torturing prisoners to death, allegedly without being ordered to do so) resulted in a prison sentence of more than a couple of months. A life sentence. Or something.
It is hard to imagine anything which is more counter-productive to stated administration goals than what they have gotten up to. Which sure begs the question as to what their goals might actually be.
Osama would likely never have evolved his philosophy were it not for the influence of another man who mentored Osama and who had been severely tortured in Egyptian jails.
nimh wrote:The newly published photos from the Abu Ghraib file...
How many conservative posters here asserted that all that was going on was "more like a kind of hazing" than anything else?
Nah...now they'll just go back to "the few bad apples".
