US town sees GI's as real victims in Iraq abuse

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040507/us_nm/iraq_abuse_town_dc&cid=1896&ncid=1480

CUMBERLAND, Md. (Reuters) - For many in the sleepy town of Cumberland, home of the military company at the heart of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, the U.S. soldiers are the real victims and the Iraqis had it coming.

....
For some, shock mingled with embarrassment over their hometown's sudden and unwelcome notoriety. For many others, sympathy for the soldiers far outweighed their concerns.

"Excuse me, if I see somebody dragging my people through the streets and hung up on a bridge -- I mean, the bible even says an eye for an eye," said retired Vietnam War veteran Robert Zalewski, 56, drinking a beer at Pete's Parkview Tavern and Grill.

....
"What they did was wrong. Maybe they kind of regret it. But maybe they just kind of lost it," said Glenn Rice, 55, another Vietnam War veteran who is a bartender in a local club. "Maybe somebody got hurt they knew."
....
"Don't you think it has something to do with the fact they've been told three different times they're coming home and three different times it's been pushed back?" she said.

Zalewski said he was worried the soldiers in the photos would be prosecuted, taking the fall as scapegoats while their superiors washed their hands of the affair.

....
Jessica Buzzard, a 24-year-old college student and mother of two, said she was among the few in her town who were appalled by the abuse.


"I don't care what background they're from and what culture, but to treat them like animals, that's not right," she said.

"She shouldn't have been wearing that outfit."

You sheep! Are you devoid of reason?!

My god, I grew up that way, but I outgrew it. It took a long time to recover from 20+ years of life with the Bible as my guide. It was the absolute truth on every single issue one could ever encounter, and to question it was to question God! It wasn't done.

I outgrew it. Dear God, why can't other people?

This "eye for an eye" mentality is going to be the death of this country if we don't pull out of it. But how?

Christ rejected that outright and explicitly as part of the old covenant (that he replaced). Never fails to piss me off when a Christian trots out that garbage knowing full well that Christ's instruction was to turn the other cheek and to treat others as you'd wish to be treated.

They can find passages in the Bible that don't exist, and ignore ones which do. 'An eye for an eye' they swear by, even though it's from the Old Testament, but they don't think twice about eating pork, which is explicitly banned.

Maybe we should start teaching the Bible in public schools. If kids actually read it and understood it, they'd probably all be liberals.

Even if you take the Old Testament as a guide for modern living, which I don't, there is a lot in there about sharing the wealth with those less fortunate and being your "brother's keeper." It doesn't say anything about "supply-side" tax cuts.

And if children studied and took to heart what Jesus Christ said in the Gospels (which is what "Christians" are supposed to do, BTW), the Republican Party would completely die out within two generations.

The former Southern Democrats took over the sane GOP starting with the Nixon era and destroyed it as a moral force. Now it is full of fire-breathing fanatics who are often an embarrassment to their fellow party members outside the South, but without whom the GOP would never have even come close to controlling Congress.

The death of this nation can be traced to the time period when the fundies began convincing the lukewarm and even irreligious masses to vote on hot-button social issues susceptible to the worst forms of bigotry (to paraphrase Lincoln, "the worst demons of our nature") which should never have entered the political realm.

The government established by the framers of the Constitution was fastidiously neutral toward matters of religion, as that is what they were escaping from in Europe--theocratic wars which went on dozens of years with nothing but a lot of dead people on all sides.

it's not the knuckle-dragging fundies that bother me, or the die-hard arch conservatives, former Southern Democrat types. It's the moderate-liberal sorts who morphed into fire-breathing conservatives because they were too dumb to realize the party had changed.

I was a pretty moderate sort for most of my 45 years. I voted for Ford in 76 against Carter. I voted in the Republican primary in 1980 for GHWB, then a moderate, pro-choice candidate who thought Reagan's idiot economic plans were 'voodoo economics'. When Reagan won, I was dumbfounded anyone could think what he wanted to do was even remotely sane. I voted for Carter in the general and have voted Democratic ever since.

I liked your post quite a bit.

One quibble. We have not been free of theocratic public policy for long. Recall that it wasn't until the early 1960s that prayer and Bible reading were finally driven from US public schools.

Indeed, that wise elaboration of the Jeffersonian wall is a significant force behind our present problems: the radicalization of the fundies and the exodus of the southern Dems are in some measure attempts to roll back this aspect of modernity (while extending religious control over private the private sphere, too).

I don't think the Republic has enough secularists to withstand the tide. Nor do I think our institutions--so battered by twenty-five years of Reaganism--have it left in them, either. Do you?

The theocrats are winning, but you'll notice it's theocrats of one religion who are doing this. That's not to denigrate the religion as a whole, you understand- only the theocrats who wish to forcibly impose, by arms if necessary, their view of the laws of their religion upon all, even nonbelievers.

Once that starts to happen in earnest, the theocrats will find that while they may control the use of the big guns, neither the men who fire them nor the public at large will stand for the vast majority being told what to believe by an extreme minority.

Then again, the antichrist supposedly deceives many into following him, yes?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

nt

It says "an eye for an eye", but what this mouth-breathing Deliverance bastard fails to realize is that JESUS CHRIST, the supposed "Philosopher" that The Great Leader depends on to help him decide what nation to destroy next, DID away with those archaic and outdated notions in the NEW TESTAMENT when he introduced the concept of "Turn The Other Cheek", and "Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto To You."

Didn't they teach this fundie piece of waste about THE GOLDEN RULE in Sunday School?

You know, I don't hate my country, but I sure am beginning to harbor unbridled hate for some of the people in it.

WE are becoming the Nazis NOW.

We closed Saadam's "Rape Rooms" only to priviatize them for THIS barbarism.

WHAT HAVE WE BECOME?

it shames our military, it shames America, it shames us AS HUMAN BEINGS. I'm disgusted.

The "eye for an eye" argument is turned on its head. The killings and burnings of the bodies of the contractors (or mercenaries) were the retribution for the prisoner abuse (or torture), not the other way around. Not that I agree with "eye for an eye", necessarily, but these people are so brain-washed they assume the Iraqis don't know what is going on in their own country if they don't see it on Fox news.

On edit - I mean the killings could have been the retribution for prisoner abuse, not that they necessarily were - I don't know the facts about the motivation any better than anyone else.

that the Fallujah killings occured first. It's been driving me nuts, everyone seems to ignore that little fact.

was really a plea for compassion, a new way instead of the old way of taking someone's life for a minor infraction. Of course the RWingers always use it as an excuse for harsh vengeance. The bible also said a lot of other things like "do unto to others" and "turning the other cheek" but that doesn't fit with their theme. :-(

that they should be like us.

I know --=--I knew a lot of them.

They used to "GREASE" Gooks with great abandon.

They are bums and bullies with a gun who will waste you in a New York Minute.


REMEMBER "SUPPORT THE TROOPS"

...we can only hope that we as individuals are not like them. Can we know for certain that we would not be like them?

they have lost their sense of humanity. It's very sad and more than a little disturbing.

The repukes on the panel asking the questions are nothing but a bunch of stinking old gas wind bags, and they are going to help bring down the *. They keep calling the soldiers that are "guilty" miscreants" and giving the higher ups a pass. Even if the soldiers were wrong and they were, the fact that the rank and file are going to shoulder the blame just might unite the rank and file soldier. They know to that it is wide spread, they will not like being made the scapegoat. They might pay the administration back at the ballot box. Oooohh that guy asking questions right now, good looking man of color. Where is he from? Very articulate, mentioned that Rumsfield met with Saddam, basically asked Rumsfield about resigning.

It's hard to "retaliate" for something that didn't happen until two months later, folks.

And, if the soldiers were upset because their rotation date home came and went three times, why would they take their frustrations out on the detainees, when it was the corrupt Bush administration that failed them?

It seems we sent our soldier out ignorant not only of the Geneva Conventions, but of the inconvenient fact that they or their buddies might get killed or wounded.

I'll agree, however, with Jessica Buzzard's assessment: It's not right.

"Excuse me, if I see somebody dragging my people through the streets and hung up on a bridge -- I mean, the bible even says an eye for an eye," said retired Vietnam War veteran Robert Zalewski, 56, drinking a beer at Pete's Parkview Tavern and Grill.

Next time you sober up, Bobby Boy, perhaps you would ponder the fact that all this torture happened *BEFORE* the four mercenaries were dragged through the street. Did it ever occur to your beer-besotted brain that the Iraqis might just be responding to the stories of torture and abuse that were making the rounds in Iraq *MONTHS* before they were mentioned in the US press?


David Allen
www.thoughtcrimes.org
Distrusting the Government Since 1984

:sad: folks are so uninformed.

quote
"People are trying to kill you. You got to protect yourself," he said, adding the abuse by the soldiers was "half what they (Iraqis) have done to us."
/ quote

We've killed at least 10,000 Iraqis who were doing nothing but going on about their lives.

If I could ask this idiot a Q, it would be: "What exactly have the Iraqis done to us?"

The answer would probably be "9/11".

If the answer is "roadside bombs", etc., it opens up a perfect place to say
There Were No Roadside Bombs Before the Idiot Invaded Their Country!

(and let's leave aside the fact that abusing prisoners does not protect our people - it endangers them)

They're a bunch of fucking nazis.

SS troops and officers search the Jewish department heads of the Brauer armaments factory during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.






Surrounded by heavily armed SS and SD guards, SS Major General Jürgen Stroop (center), watches housing blocks burn during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The original German caption reads: "The leader of the grand operation."

till they turn over the prison guards...


oops sorry, thought this was Falluja for a second

in Cumberland. I can just see how proud they are of their new heros.
I suppose the community leaders will have a tough time deciding between a bronze statue of Lynndie and her victim on the leash, or the guard raping a 16 year old with his flashlight.

with his lovely BLUE GLOVES.

People will grasp any rationalization to keep from viewing the
ugly truth. Seems that most believe that the torture of Iraqis happened last week. Many still believe that Saddam was involved with 911 Attacks and in cahoots with Al Q. The profound ignorance of so many Americans is astounding and explains why W is still high in the approval ratings game.

That's the message we've been given over and over by the Bushies. I remember Bush saying to reporters, "Isn't freedom wonderful".

turn the other cheek, love they neighbor, and all that stuff...

As someone posted here:

What Would Jesus Do With A Leash and A Naked Iraqi?

This shit was going on long before the animalistic attacks on the mercenaries.

Or, was it the crusades?

No one knows right from wrong.

In any case, wake me up when it's over, please!

I see the GIs as common "thugs" and murders using "rape rooms" for torture.