Miss Cam is very, very angry

[misscam]

What kind of shit is this?!

Seriously, what the hell is this Abu Ghraib thing?

So I've been following this lovely little tale of Abu Ghraib, Saddam's notorious prison which has now gained yet more notority. And this time it can certainly not be blamed on Saddam.

American soldiers humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners. Now there is a lovely image. And apparently this was investigated and a report on it was finished in *March* (and apparently Mr. Rumsfeld had not yet read this report by May 4th). The more I hear about this, the more disgusted I get. And if this turns out to be part of some wider practice (which some do suggest, but proof will have to be put forward to show if it is true or not), woe betide the US government.

Links, in case you've missed the story:
The Pentagon reaction.
Bush to speak to Arab TV on the scandal.
BBC on the report into prison abuse.
Aftermath in Falluja.

You know, this is getting worse than any of my very gloomy pre-war Iraq predictions. I feel like I'm watching a trainwreck. Whatever good the US has done in Iraq gets eaten up by scandals like this. How the hell did this happen? And it's especially bad now that the US government is trying to sell that this war was for humanitarian reasons (given that those pesky WMDs turned out to be rather ghostly) and you get images like that. An image is worth a thousand words and right not all those thousand words are all slamming the US. The Pentagon can talk about rotten apples all they like (and even be right about it) and that image of smiling Americans next to humiliated and abused Iraqis will still be as clear as ever in people's mind.

This is just so not good. There's even been pictures of British soldiers involved in abuse as well, though their authenticity has been questioned, so I guess it remains to be seen on that account. If it's true, woe betide the British government as well.

And of course, the sovereignty the US talked about giving on June 30th turns out to at best be a kind of half sovereignty, if that. It'll still be the US army that is the real power in Iraq. And from sneering at the UN and lob not-too-inventive insults at it, the US is now busily trying to draw it back to Iraq. Troop numbers that were to be reduced turned out not to be reduced at all, an ex-Saddam military commander sent to fix the problem of Falluja... All this just screams 'making it up as we go along' to me. Maybe I'm wrong and there was some great plan here, but I'm certainly not seeing it. I see rising deaths and rising anger and neither is filling me with confidence about where this is going.

I mean, Abu Ghraib, for crying out loud. Saddam's own little torture prison, one of the very symbols of his badness. Now with American soldiers abusing Iraqis. I mean, the link there is just appaling. And that aside, it's just appalingly stupid too. Abusing prisoners where Saddam used to do so. Yeah, that's real smart.

So I say again: What kind of shit is this?!

And don't even get me started on the US-Israeli thing. I've run out of energy to hiss at Bush now (there's a first).

Good grief. Abu Ghraib, of all places!

Comments

[talestra.livejournal.com]

No, I think, the comparison was exactly between liberating Iraq from from tyranny of Saddam and liberating Palestinians from Israeli occupation.

Oh, I wasn't joking about extraction of information with torture.