Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: "We saw the pictures"

a project of the
Nation Institute  compiled and edited
by Tom Engelhardt 
 
 
  Postcards from the edge: "We saw the pictures"
To send this to a friend, or to read more dispatches, go to
tomdispatch.com
Postcards from the edge: "We saw the pictures"
"The next day [January 14, 2004], Gen. John Abizaid, commander of all
U.S. forces in the region, was on the phone to Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld. ‘General Abizaid informed the leadership within
hours of the incident,' said a senior Pentagon official. Brig. Gen.
Mark Kimmitt, the military's spokesman in Iraq, also called the
Pentagon, though with more alarming words. ‘He said, "We've got a
really bad situation," recalled one official, who like others
requested anonymity. ‘The evidence is damaging and horrific,' ‘We've
got a really bad situation…' 
"Abizaid talked daily with Rumsfeld about Iraq, and the prison
investigation likely came up often, officials said. Top Pentagon
leaders, such as Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs, as well as President Bush were kept
aware of the situation, said Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the CBS Early Show yesterday." (Tom Bowman,
the Baltimore Sun, Army tightly guarded pictures of prison abuse) 
The torture system 
It's worth starting with the basics, because they are what you're
likely to see the least of in the uproar at hand. 
The system of injustice that, since 9/11, we've sent offshore and
organized globally -- from Guantanamo, Cuba to Bagram Air Force Base
in Afghanistan -- is by its nature also a system of torture. It was
designed from the beginning to be a Bermuda Triangle of injustice,
existing in an extrajudicial darkness beyond "our" sight or oversight.
There, on military bases and in special military-controlled prisons,
the "war on terrorism" could be carried to its informational climax in
whatever ways and by whatever methods American intelligence officials
felt might "break" whatever prisoners we had. 
Whether in Guantanamo or at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, this developing
mini-gulag was never meant to be a system of imprisonment for crimes
-- hence the lack of charges, no less trials of any sort, anywhere in
the imperium. It was to be an eternal holding operation for the
purpose of information extraction (and possibly revenge). The men (and
woman) running the Bush administration's foreign policy in this period
didn't have to specify the actual use of torture, though some of them
seem to have done so. We know from the Sunday Washington Post that, in
April 2003, after "debates" on the subject, Pentagon officials at "the
highest levels" approved twenty "psychologically stressful" methods of
interrogation, most or all of which any sane person would classify as
torture, including the questioning of naked prisoners, and that these
methods were later approved at least for "high-value detainees" in!
Iraq. In the meantime, there was a good deal of post-9/11 torture
chatter in the media about how much of it we could, should, and would
use in a war to the death against a fanatic enemy. 
Both the President and his Pentagon chief claimed to be "shocked" or
"disgusted" by the forms a torture system took -- by its look. Yes,
they had been informed of what had happened at Abu Ghraib prison, but
those, after all, were just words, months of words. The difference was
the images on television and in the press. "We saw the pictures," said
the President. "It is the photographs that gives one the vivid
realization of what actually took place," said his secretary of
defense. "Words don't do it. The words that there were abuses, that it
was cruel, that it was inhumane, all of which is true, that it was
blatant, you read that and it's one thing. You see the photographs and
you get a sense of it, and you cannot help but be outraged." 
To read more of this dispatc
h.
http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1430
 photos emerged. Tom 
 
 

 the Baltimore Sun, Army tightly guarded pictures of prison abuse)
Peccato che non abbia modo di provarlo.
-Stefano

 you get a sense of it, and you cannot help but be outraged." 
Detta cosě, sembra la candida confessione che č un coglione inadeguato
al suo ruolo.
-- 
Luca Logi - Firenze - Italy        e-mail: 
ll...@dada.it

 al suo ruolo.
Non chiedergli troppo, potrebbe venirgli un ictus se me lo sforzi cosě.
-- 
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