So, as you may know, the Bush administration is now violating a court order to release the rest of its Abu Ghraib photos to the ACLU. Editor & Publisher has done a great job of helping suss out what those remaining photos are:
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, when the scandal was still front page news: "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.Now, this is probably my favorite part of the article. Regarding the government's excuse for NOT releasing the photos as the court has ordered:
A Republican Senator suggested the same day they contained scenes of “rape and murder.” No wonder Rumsfeld commented then, "If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse."
One Pentagon lawyer has argued that they should not be released because they would only add to the humiliation of the prisoners.Yeah. Please don't expose me as a torturer because that might add to the humiliation my victim has to face. Sure, exposing me as a torturer also means I'll probably have to stop torturing my victim, the victim I care so much about that I don't want to humiliate him by informing the world that I'm torturing him. Yeah, right.
So, here's what E&P was able to deduce might be in the photos and video - the photos and video that would pretty much expose our government to, what, war crimes tribunals?
A military report about that abuse describes detainees being threatened, sodomized with a chemical light and forced into sexually humiliating poses.The rape of little boys. Well God bless America. I'm so damned proud of my country right now, I could just, well, rape a little boy.
"’The American public needs to understand we're talking about rape and murder here. We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience,’ Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told reporters after Rumsfeld testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. ’We're talking about rape and murder -- and some very serious charges.’
“A report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba on the abuse at the prison outside Baghdad says videotapes and photographs show naked detainees, and that groups of men were forced to masturbate while being photographed and videotaped. Taguba also found evidence of a ‘male MP guard having sex with a female detainee.’
“Rumsfeld told Congress the unrevealed photos and videos contain acts 'that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman.’”
In the same period, reporter Seymour Hersh, who helped uncover the scandal, said in a speech before an ACLU convention: “Some of the worse that happened that you don't know about, ok? Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men….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 that your government has. They are in total terror it's going to come out.”
Yeah, I sure wouldn't want to know that my government was sanctioning, and then engaging in a cover-up, of those kind of actions. After all, the little boys who are being raped might be humiliated if we intervened and stopped them from being raped.
