Acts of cruelty that disgraced a nation


Unbelievable... the crimes of a military but they're only scratching at the surface. Men in uniform have been trained to act in this manner by their dehumanizing training. I hate the fucking military.
The pictures are even more unbearable to see but we must be witnesses to this cruel behavior to condemn it: http://dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story.jsp?sectionid=1258&storyid=2534076


By MICHAEL SEAMARK

January 20, 2005

A BRITISH soldier lashes out with his fist at an Iraqi civilian trussed up in a cargo net.

Another prisoner is hoisted off the ground on the prongs of a forklift truck operated by his grinning tormentor.

These shocking photos and many more like them are the images that have shamed a nation and form the basis of a court martial that has been dubbed Britain's Abu Ghraib.

The 22 images also show a soldier wielding a wooden pole, standing with both feet on an Iraqi lying bound and helpless on the floor. Others, too obscene to print, included Iraqi civilian captives being forced to simulate sex acts with one another.

Their crime: stealing food just days after the war in Iraq ended.

The sordid details of what happened at Breadbasket Camp in May 2003 emerged at the court martial in Osnabruck, Germany, where three members of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers face a series of charges relating to the incidents.

Prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Nick Clapham told a seven-man panel of senior officers: "'It can't be said that these photographs depict images that are anything other than shocking and appalling."

On trial are 33-year-old Corporal Daniel Kenyon, Lance Corporal Mark Cooley, 25, of Newcastle, and Lance Corporal Darren Larkin, 30, of Oldham.

All three, who fought in the war, face possible imprisonment and being dismissed from the army in disgrace if they are convicted.

Lt-Col Clapham said the alleged abuse happened two weeks after "the President of the United States famously disclosed an end to major combat operations".

The army, plagued by nightly thefts of food and humanitarian supplies from the camp, instigated Operation Ali Baba to capture and deter the Iraqi civilian looters.

Camp quartermaster Major Dan Taylor organised soldiers in groups of four and six, armed with SA80 assault rifles and long wooden poles used to support camouflage netting, to patrol the perimeter early in the morning.

If they captured looters, they were told they should "work them hard" on menial tasks, including returning the stolen property.

Lt-Col Clapham said apprehending the looters was legal, but he accepted that their temporary detention was illegal under the Geneva Convention.

Corp Kenyon's section "received three or four Iraqis" and took them to a warehouse complex inside the camp. It was there, said Lt-Col Clapham, that the physical and sexual abuse took place.

It came to light when another member of the regiment, Fusilier Gary Bartlam, 20, returned home to Tamworth, Staffordshire, and put a roll of film into a local photo shop.

Shop assistant Emma Blackie and colleague Kelly Adney alerted civilian police when they saw the contents.

The prosecutor accepted that the order by Major Taylor to work the prisoners hard was unlawful.

"But had these defendants done nothing more than what that order had envisaged they would not be facing the charges that they face today. We say that these charges are running way outside of that order," he said.

"In no way did that order envisage conduct of the type you have heard me describe."

He told the panel there was no doubt the incidents had taken place, "what you have to decide is what role, if any, these defendants played".

Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Spencer, one of the army's senior legal advisers, told the court martial he and a team of lawyers went to the Gulf specifically to brief soldiers on how to deal with prisoners of war and civilians.

There was "epidemic and psychotic looting" across Iraq at the end of the war but soldiers were told civilians were to be treated "with the utmost humanity and dignity".

He said: "Once a person has been temporarily detained he should either be released or handed over to the Royal Military Police or equivalent as soon as possible.'

The court martial continues.

The Daily Telegraph

This report was published at www.dailytelegraph.com.au

FINAL WORD ON IRAQ'S WMD SOUNDS VERY FAMILIAR

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ucgg/20050114/cm_ucgg/finalwordoniraqswmdsoundsveryfamiliar


Fri Jan 14, 6:23 PM ET

By Georgie Anne Geyer

WASHINGTON -- So now it's official and we can all breathe a little easier. This week, we finally know about the weapons of mass destruction. They weren't there, certainly not when we rushed to implausible war nearly two long years ago.

Geyer
Georgie Ann Geyer


When the Iraq (news - web sites) Survey Group announced this week that it was officially ending its search for WMD, it was a little like facing the announcement of the death of a person who had, in fact, died some years back. How can one mourn an event already gone so stale?

The White House seemed hardly to mourn at all, despite the fact that its little "mistake" has cost some 1,300 American lives, not to speak of those Iraqi lives (probably upward of 100,000) they simply don't acknowledge. President Bush (news - web sites) noted this new marker only by saying, isn't the world better without Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)?

Well, as a harsh and cold-bloodedly realistic judgment, one can argue that neither Iraq nor we are better without Saddam Hussein, despite the president's sleepwalking words.

On top of that, this week, the National Intelligence Council, which is the CIA (news - web sites) director's personal think tank, released a stunning report saying that Iraq has replaced Afghanistan (news - web sites) as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists. Not only has Iraq provided terrorists with a "training ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills and a recruitment ground," CIA officers said in a briefing, but there is the likelihood that the "jihadists" not killed there will in time "go home," thus "dispersing to other countries."

In the rampant violence and insecurity that followed the fall of Saddam, hundreds of foreign terrorists flocked to the open and uncontrolled Iraq, garnering and using unprotected weapons caches that the American invasion was supposed to have obliterated. This type of violence -- expanded -- will be at its height in 2020, the report said.

A personal note to those of my good readers who persist in believing that Iraq is not a mess: This report took a year to produce and is the result of the analysis of 1,000 U.S. and foreign experts.

What's more, pessimism about the war and what we have wrought is prevalent across virtually all sectors in Washington -- except, of course, the president and his cynical neocon fanatics who still dream of reconfiguring the Middle East by getting American troops on the ground alongside Israeli troops. The Financial Times reported this week from a leading diplomatic source that outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) last week told the president of the war, "We're losing."

But if the old WMD story that was the basis for this foolish and wasted war was not true of pre-war Iraq, what of it was true?

The man who headed the Iraq Survey Group and did much of the original research in Iraq, Charles Duelfer -- the CIA's special adviser and a man of unusual integrity -- already has given us some insight into the answers to that question in his initial report that was released in October.

After research that included interviews in Baghdad with many top Saddam aides and with access to the ongoing interrogations of Saddam himself, Duelfer wrote a brilliant initial report that rivals the best historical, political and psychiatric literature on leaders and their psychoses.

Saddam, he found, was as autocratic, cruel, grandiose, isolated and dominating as the world thought, but there was little mystery about his love affair with horrible weaponry. He kept it and used it in the Iran-Iraq war against the Iranians, in which a million people died on both sides.

After the '91 Gulf War (news - web sites), it appears that the Machiavellian Iraqi leader deliberately kept the appearance of having WMD in order to deter and strike fear in his neighbors while, on another power level, getting rid of them in order to convince the United Nations (news - web sites) weapons inspectors that he had none.

When one thinks about it, taking into consideration the fearful and hate-ridden psychologies of that part of the world, why would he NOT take these two related steps?

But there was at least one other crucial part of Duelfer's first analytical report. Saddam, he said, liked American movies and literature, his favorite being Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." Even more amazing, as late as the 1990s, he was sending emissaries to Washington to try to open a dialogue.

While Saddam "derived prestige from being an enemy of the United States," Duelfer wrote, he also recognized that "it would have been equally prestigious for him" to be a U.S. ally. In fact, Saddam's men approached Duelfer and other U.N. inspectors who were in Iraq in the mid-'90s, saying that "if Iraq had a security relationship with the United States, it might be inclined to dispense with WMD programs and/or ambitions."

You may say these acts were cynically self-interested -- surely, they were. But you can also say, with unfortunately even greater assurance, that the picture painted of Iraq and Saddam and WMD from the very beginning of this war by American leaders would be farcical, were it not so deadly serious.