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Subject: How many of the torture pictures are fake?
Blackwood    4/30/2004 9:27:14 PM
There's questions about the alleged torture pictures being passed around on the internet. The BOTTOM set of photos on the arab site link that are not from link are obviously from a porn film and not legit Their uniform is nothing at all like the Iraqi issue. They're wearing jungle fatigues in a desert. The tire props are cheap and look like from a Honda, not a Hummer They have no indentifying insiginia of any army at all. Some clothing is too large and ill fitting. (One guy's shirt reaches down to his knees in the third from the bottom photo, which was laughed at by a veteran looking over my soldier here.) Their shoes are cheap and not military issue. The women gang raped appear to be hispanic and russian, not iraqi. But the photos on: link are harder to dismiss. The guy in a hospital gown standing on a box does NOT have wires connected to his testicles, despite the earlier verbal reports. The man "beaten to death" leaves the question, "beaten by whom"? He's certainly not in a US Army body bag, but appears to be wrapped in saran wrap from some arab deli. He may be a shopkeeper beaten to death by a gang. It definately is out of sequence with the rest of the series. The series with the woman and hooded naked men appears to be legit, the uniform fatigues correct. But is it a training exercise with American GIs playign Iraqis that later fell into goofing off for the camera? One man has "Rapeist" written across his buttock. He later appears stacked in a naked pyramid with this same word displayed. He may or may not also be the one miming forced oral sex to another man with a bag also still on his head. While the guy with glasses has rubber gloves for body excavation, the girl who this exercise seems to be about does not. Her role mostly seems to be not laugh outloud at her crew appearing in the buff. The men pose for the camera and strut their stuff while keeping hooded anonymnousness. Most importantly, all the men are in a jail cell, outnumbering the army staff 8-2, hooded, but with unobstructed hand usage. You can even see one taking off his hood in boredom in the lower right picture, carefully obscurred by a body in the front. Wouldn't prisoners undergoing a body cavity search usually be in handcuffs, at least until any concealled weapons were cleared? There unfortunately are no tattoos visible in the pictures released. which would be a sure sign of GIs, not Iraqis. There do appear to be bikini tan lines, but that may be a trick of the pixillation. The prisoners do seem to be much more well fed and exercised than you'd expect of someone who's been in prison for a long time. And they're into American frat boy stunts like stacking in a pyramid for the camera. Arab culture also has a severe taboo about exposing the soles of one's feet that seems to be disregarded here. Currently, I can't conclusively rule out the link photos as a training exercise, but I can say it's possible.
 
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FJV    Deaths in custody not unheard of.   5/5/2004 3:18:49 PM
""Wel New guy, the US military has admitted to 25 deaths in US custody."" Made me remember a radio documentary about the Dutch prison system. The point was made there that new prisoners are watched very closely as they are more likely to commit suicide. Propably the same with prison systems all over the world (very often do you see films where a prisoner has to give up his shoe laces and belt to prevent suicide.) I guess the sudden loss of freedom is more traumatic than most suspect. So even in a very humane prison system suicides occur. Even though it would not be a bad idea for US forces to take a look into the ways other countries have been dealing with this problem.
 
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chemist    RE:A few idiots.   5/5/2004 3:32:12 PM
I think there needs to be another lithmus test applied here then(intellectual honesty). Do you fire the CEO of a company because an employee rapes a woman? If your answer is no because the two are rather unrelated or would be an extremem case of micromanagement/'getting into someone's bedroom' then how can you call for Rumsfelds head and claim it to be a test of integrity? How about a few others? Did you call for Bergers resignation when Marines raped an Okinawan teen?(Rather analogous don't you think?) Now, if you asked for the head of the direct superiors there isn't a person on this board who'd argue with you. But, I find it rather odious that you imply that anyone who says that Rumsfeld shouldn't be sacked for this is drinking the 'coolaide'.
 
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SC29112    RE:A few idiots.   5/5/2004 3:33:36 PM
I asked, you answered. Simple.
 
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chemist    RE:A few idiots.   5/5/2004 3:37:11 PM
Okay, Sarge used the same example I did, and so in the name of integrity, how about calling for Berger's nads when American pilots flew into the wires of a gondola in Italy resulting in multiple deaths? How about calling for Berger's head when the US bombed a Chinese facility in Kosovo? Hmm? Well, did you? It's rather ridiculous to fire the Sec Def over this. It'd be like firing the dock foreman for one of the truckers not making a delivery on time(since the trucker didn't acquit his duty properly). There's a word for this: partisanship.
 
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SGTObvious    So about that Litmus test, SC...   5/5/2004 3:51:42 PM
Litmus tests are obsolete. This may be more chemist's department than mine, but when we need to find the pH of a material (important when cleaning stone) we use a pH meter. Tests that have only "red" and "blue" as answers are not that useful these days, wouldn't you agree?
 
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leoinnyc    RE:Perception, Reality and Wingedhorse.   5/5/2004 7:40:13 PM
My concern with public perception in Iraq does not flow from some wishy-washy desire to that everybody like us. It stems from a simple, pragmatic desire to get our troop the HELL out of Iraq with devastating American foreign policy any more than Team Bush has already managed to do. I do not compare things to Vietnam lightly, and I have tryed mightily to avoid doing so with Iraq, but there are some terrifying similarities emerging and at the core of these similarities is the question of exit strategy. If we leave an Iraq that is unstable and hates America we will have managed to single-handedly created a brand-new breeding ground for terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism. And our foreign policy will be discredited for years, just when we need help from the rest of the world to prosecute the war on terror. And frankly, this is a political impossibility -- whoever is President next year (and especially Bush) will more or less HAVE to keep troops there until the situtation is stable. Which is actually a real problem, because the people who want to see us fail -- and there are a lot of them inside and around Iraq -- will do everything they can to prevent us from achieving a peaceful Iraq. The Baathists, nationalists and fundamentalists inside Iraq will do everything they can to get the Iraqis to hate us, and there are a lot of actors in the region who, like the Soviets and the Chinese 40 years ago, would like nothing better than to see America bogged down in an ugly, bloody, resource-draining war. Which means that we have to either run with our tail between our legs or get the Iraqis to calm down and like us at least enough for us to get out without completely losing face. Does this situation remind you of anything? Does the phrase "peace with honor" ring a bell? Another analogy might be the Israeli-Palestininan situation. Bush, like Ariel Sharon, has made the mistake (well, in Sharon's case this might be intentional, but that's another discussion) of creating a very simple objective for his enemies to acheive. Sharon refuses to engage in the peace process as long as terrorism continues. Which means that all the Palestinian opponents of the peace process have to do to derail it is blow up a bomb every now and again, thus crippling the middle east with nothing more than a couple of sticks of dynamite, and in depressingly impressionable teenager (neither are hard to find). Likewise, all of the people who want to see the US fail in Iraq know that all they have to do blow up a car bomb or take a shot at a visiting dignatary -- anything to prove that Iraq isn't really "stable" -- and the US will have to stay a little bit longer. And a few more of our guys will die, and we'll have to respond to prove that you can't kill US troops and get away with it, and some more Iraqi civllians will die, and on and on. How long do you think we can stay there, with our tanks rumbling down the streets, and our soldiers manning checkpoints, etc. before the population REALLY starts to turn against us? I mean, this is nothing compared to how it COULD be in a year if they decide they don't like us (if they haven't already). And that's why I think it matters what they think of us. We've still got a long way to go in Iraq, let's not start burning our bridges just yet.
 
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NewGuy    RE:Perception, Reality and Wingedhorse.   5/6/2004 12:29:57 AM
"Which means that all the Palestinian opponents of the peace process have to do to derail it is blow up a bomb every now and again, thus crippling the middle east with nothing more than a couple of sticks of dynamite, " This is way off topic, so to not induce off-topicism I wont answer to any reply, so take this as a counterpoint-only question: Where exactly ARE the Palestinian PRO-pponents for peace??? NewGuy
 
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leoinnyc    RE:Perception, Reality and Wingedhorse.   5/6/2004 8:03:40 AM
well, yes, that's a whole other off-topic discussion. There was a time, very recently when there were lots of pro-peace Palestinians. But now they are all so angry Isreal that it's hard to find anyone who will criticize Hamas or Fatah. But at the same time, I think many if nt most Palestinians want normalcy back in their lives, and want economic stability as well -- they just want the occupation to end even more, and don't regard Sharon as a "partner."
 
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Blackwood    Wash Post: Some of them were staged   5/6/2004 9:15:42 AM
In the newest Wash Post article, they now admit: "The new pictures appear to show American soldiers abusing prisoners, many of whom wear ID bands, but The Post could not eliminate the possibility that some of them were staged."
 
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Blackwood    Tatoos now visible, making more likely GIs, not Iraqis   5/6/2004 10:38:41 AM
With more cleaned up versions of the photos, we can see tatoos up and down the right-most of the pyramid guy's arms. This makes it even more likely that the photo is not of Iraqis than it is of American GIs. link
 
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