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![]() Just Above Sunset
July 31, 2005 - News of What Didn't Happen, and of What Won't Happen
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Item One: INFORMATION
NOT RELEASED AND LEGISLATION THAT WILL BE STOPPED So what is shown on the 87 photographs and four videos from Abu Ghraib prison that the Pentagon,
in an eleventh hour move, blocked from release this weekend? One clue: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Congress last
year, after viewing a large cache of unreleased images: "I mean, I looked at them last night, and they're hard to believe."
They show acts "that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhumane," he added. You've already got your
detainees being threatened, sodomized with a chemical light and forced into sexually humiliating poses, of course. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has seen what more is there: "... we're talking about rape and murder
here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience. We're talking about rape and murder - and some
very serious charges." The unreleased images show American soldiers beating one prisoner almost to death, apparently
raping a female prisoner, acting inappropriately with a dead body, and taping Iraqi guards raping young boys, according to
NBC News. From the investigative
reporter Seymour Hersh, this: The women were passing messages saying "Please come and kill me, because of what's happened".
Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The
boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. You get the idea. Or he might not. As you also recall, Karl Rove successfully painted McCain as mentally unbalanced because of that, and also
suggested McCain had fathered a black "love child" with a crack addict - and that won Bush the South Carolina primary back
in the run-up to the 2000 election. Bush later apologized and told McCain it
was "just politics." What does Dick Cheney think of McCain? WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Thursday threatened to veto a massive Senate bill for
$442 billion in next year's defense programs if it moves to regulate the Pentagon's treatment of detainees or sets up a commission
to investigate operations at Guantánamo Bay prison and elsewhere. According to this in the Washington Post last week the Bush administration was lobbying to block legislation supported by Republican
senators that would bar our military from engaging in "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of detainees, and from hiding
prisoners from the Red Cross, and from using interrogation methods not authorized by a new Army field manual. The Post also reports that Cheney met that Thursday night with three senior Republican members of
the Senate Armed Services Committee "to press the administration's case," and this was the second time that Cheney had met
with Senate members to "tamp down" this incipient Republican rebellion. The Republican effort is intended partly to cut off an effort by Senate Democrats to attach more
stringent demands to the defense bill regarding detainees. One group, led by
Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), has proposed an amendment calling for an independent commission - similar to the Sept. 11 commission
- to look into administration policies on interrogation and detainee abuse. So the rebels were just
trying to be good Republicans, and get the jump on the Democrats who might call for even more - like a commission!
So on one hand, the Bush administration is frantically blocking the release of the photographic
proof of the most horrific war crimes committed in U.S. military-run prisons. Overheated? Perhaps, but some of it all has been surfacing all along, like this from Scotland's Sunday Herald way back in August last year. It was early last October that Kasim Mehaddi Hilas says he witnessed the rape of a boy prisoner
aged about 15 in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. "The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with
sheets," he said in a statement given to investigators probing prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib. "Then, when I heard the screaming
I climbed the door ? and I saw [the soldier's name is deleted] who was wearing a military uniform." Well, we'd never let such
things be reported in our press. Where do they get such stuff? From our own government, in the The Taguba Report (PDF) from last year. A few weeks ago, I predicted on the Chris Matthews Show that more photographs of the Abu Ghraib
abuses and torture would be released by the end of last month. After all, a judge had ruled in favor of the ACLU's request
for the materials. The government obeys the law of the land, doesn't it? Not in this administration, which has, by presidential
memo, declared the president above the law in fighting the war on terror. Yeah, dream on. ... set uniform standards for interrogating anyone detained by the Defense Department and would
limit interrogation techniques to those listed in the Army field manual on interrogation, now being revised. Any changes to
procedures would require the defense secretary to appear before Congress. Yeah, another McCain amendment
prohibits the "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of anyone in the custody of the U.S. government. And this provision is modeled after wording in the UN Convention Against Torture -
which the United States has already ratified. But that would overturn an administration
position that the convention does not apply to foreigners outside the United States. Why would the Bush administration want to retain the option to use "cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment or punishment" of detainees? They don't support torture, do they? The amendment would simply bring order and law
to what has been a free-wheeling and disastrously inept detention policy, made up by Bush officials as they went along. It
beggars belief that, after Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Gitmo and the dozens of deaths in interrogation that the administration wouldn't
want some way out of its own impasse. Well, calling McCain leftist
or unpatriotic may come soon, or they'll trot out the "mentally unbalanced" thing again, or go back to the illicit interracial
sex thing. As White House counsel, [Alberto Gonzales] was the one first notified that the Justice Department,
at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That notification came
at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must "preserve
all materials" relevant to the investigation. Ah, think Rosemary Wood
and the missing eighteen and a half minutes of Nixon talk that mysteriously got erased way back when. On CBS's Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer noted that this time gap would have "give[n] people
time to shred documents and do any number of things." Gonzales argued that he asked for and received permission from the Justice
Department to wait until the next morning to order White House staff to preserve all documents regarding their contacts with
journalists about Valerie Plame. But he did tell one person the night before? What that means? When the president decided not to replace Sandra Day O'Connor with a woman, why did he pick a
white guy and not nominate the first Hispanic justice, his friend Alberto Gonzales? Mr. Bush was surely not scared off by
Gonzales critics on the right (who find him soft on abortion) or left (who find him soft on the Geneva Conventions). It's
Mr. Gonzales's proximity to this scandal that inspires real fear. Yeah, it would have been
messy. |
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This issue updated and published on...
Paris readers add nine hours....
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