Volume 18, Number 19 May 5, 2004

Comment

Action Needed to Deal with Yankee Torturers

Some recent images from Iraq are gruesome as hell. Others are outrageous.

Last week, the U.S. television giants got their mitts on the pictures and began to make hay.

Photographs portraying crimes against POWs were taken by U.S. personnel, the Abu Ghraib prison custodians in Iraq. These people have clearly violated the Geneva Convention: Treatment of POWS. The real crime is the release of the photographs like this. Stupid grunts!

The photographed atrocities, which apparently occurred in late 2003 are said to have involved about 24 prisoners. There are allegations at least two inmates were murdered. Female inmates claim they were raped. If these accusations prove to be true, the jailor is a worse offender than the inmates; these so-called 'Americans' have degraded the honourable work of a couple hundred thousand heroic service personnel; and have disgraced their nation. 

U.S. reaction is disgusting. 

Some U.S. politicians are clearly as stupid as those grunts at Abu Ghraib who tortured and sexually humiliated prison inmates while photographing their actus rea. U.S. Democratic Party members and a few disgruntled axe-grinding  Republicans like Senator John McCain (Arizona) have irresponsibly exploited those images as fodder for the current Presidential electioneering and by demanding their concept of an immediate solution: another public inquiry and a public "Roast" of the Defense Secretary. The world needs to see action, not campaign-snake-oil hustling brain-dead politicians.

The pecking order (The social hierarchy in a flock of domestic fowl in which each bird pecks subordinate birds and submits to being pecked by dominant birds.) of the most righteously indignant is hard to figure but it is no less true that the competition for the top slot of "most outraged" is ferocious.

Lying to the world, U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein (California) said on CNN this morning, "Americans don't do these kinds of things!".

Al-Jazeera has been hungering for such a screw-up so desperately that the Arab TV network has been inventing 'American atrocities' for months. Now it believes it has a real one to make all the fakes seem true. Every indignant, lying U.S. Senator in Washington isn't going to change a thing.

Enough talk, Uncle Sam. The United States must get off its high horse and take remedial action:

1. The U.S. must appoint a team of prosecutors;
2. establish an easy access bureau for taking complaints throughout Iraq;
3. collect witnesses' statements;
4. dishonourably discharge, arrest and indict the perpetrators and their accomplices;
5. hand the Iraq prisons over to properly trained Provost Corps (MP) regulars;
6. open all the prisons in Iraq to the Red Cross;
7. tear down Saddam Hussein's Abu Ghraib hell hole jail;
8. immediately begin to set dates for the criminals trials; and
9. pay the air fare and lodgings for all victims' family members to attend relevant trials.

Micheal O'Brien, Editor

Publisher and Editor In Chief:
Micheal John O'Brien
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