- If you have any sense of justice, do not allow the United
States government to make scapegoats out of a few enlisted people at the
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. That, of course, is exactly what Washington
has in mind, and it has already begun the process.
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- When this story first broke, I said it smelled of intelligence
and the CIA, and so it does. The purpose of the humiliation and the photographs
was to break down resistance to interrogation " to, as the Pentagon
so euphemistically puts it, "soften them up."
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- Now, there is one certainty you can count on when you
deal with the military: Enlisted people do not originate anything. They
follow orders. They follow orders of lieutenants, who obey captains, who
obey majors, who obey lieutenant colonels, who obey colonels (full birds,
they are called), who obey generals, who obey other generals, who obey
civilians in the Defense Department. If ever there was a trickledown organization,
it is the U.S. military.
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- As part of my duty, I endured the two sessions of bull
at which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared. Leave it to a bunch
of bloviating senators to make Rumsfeld appear almost heroic. Almost, but
not quite.
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- The strategy was clear. The young Americans at Abu Ghraib
were being disowned. Everyone took great care to say they were not typical,
just bad apples, not representative of America's true values.
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- Oh? Which country has an $8 billion pornography industry?
You can see stuff as raunchy as those pictures on cable television, on
a zillion Internet porn sites and sometimes in gay pride parades. Whose
commercial entertainment industry thinks the only things that sell are
sex and violence? Which country has the largest prison population in the
world? Which country, in 1999, had more than 15,000 murders and 89,000
forcible rapes?
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- The answer to all of the above is the United States.
Those kids in the military police unit are products of American culture.
And for God's sake, folks, why would anyone believe that if we are willing
to shoot, bomb, burn and dismember Iraqis and destroy their country, we
would hesitate to employ torture? The United States is without a doubt
the most self-deluded nation on Earth, and that nest of liars who occupy
Washington work full time to maintain the delusions.
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- We are like the lady in the Bobby Burns poem who sat
in puffy pride in her fine silks in church while lice crawled out of her
hair. We need to go to rehab and recover from the dope of Washington lies
and look at ourselves realistically. We are and always have been one of
the world's most warlike nations. And when we go to war, we turn savage.
War crimes are as old as America itself.
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- In the first Gulf War, some pundits ridiculed the Iraqis
trying to escape from Kuwait with their vehicles loaded down with loot.
They didn't escape. They were cremated on what was called the "Highway
of Death." But what I thought of was Gen. William Sherman. When his
army left the smoking ruins of Columbia, S.C., the wagons loaded with stolen
personal property " stolen from homes, churches and businesses "
stretched out for five miles. War crimes were committed all over the South
by the invading Northern armies, and virtually all went unpunished. Even
so, the South fared better than the Native Americans.
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- I'm not one of the "hate America" crowd. I
love this country. But I love it for what it really is, warts and all,
and not some kindergarten fantasy created by lying politicians to cover
up their own immoral actions.
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- We are not God's chosen people. We are a nation of human
beings, and like every other nation, we have a mix of virtues and vices.
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- Do not allow the guilty parties in Washington to sacrifice
the young men and women at Abu Ghraib on an altar of hypocrisy.
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- http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20040519/index.php
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