What is not being discussed about the prisoners.....

The most important fact about these horrendous acts is being totally marginalized in the media (Duh!) The Taguba report states clearly that more than 60 percent of the DETAINEES (not prisoners, not thugs, not bad guys, not terrorists, not criminals, not Saddam supporters) were in the prison as a result of stanards 'sweeps.' - taking ordinary civilans off the streets for interrogation. Yay, democracy in action!

These men were not prisoners of war - they were DETAINEES. Is stress that because that makes the photos even more horrendous. Of course, I'm not hearing this on the corporate media. Nah. This was an abberration... yeah, right.

The entire Taguba report can be linked here (second link down)

http://www.tvnewslies.org/html/news.html#MILITARY

except probably try to survive in Saddam's country and now don't know where their allegience lies.

The claim is that Contractors were the one's directing them on how to treat the prisoners. Who the heck were these Mercs and who put them in charge of interrogation? This stinks. There is something rotten in the center of this and we are not seeing it.

this is the "$500 hammer" taken to the extreme...

These were civilians. Civilians. Civilians. Say it over and over. If the majority of Iraqi's believe in democracy as this administration wants us to believe then we were torturing innocent civilians who believed in democracy. This administration has totally destroyed our intelligence gathering and proper use of intelligence. How in the hell are you going to get good intel. out of a tortured individual who will tell you what you want to hear? How many other innocent civilians did we "sweep" because of names that frightened Iraqi's gave to those interogaters?

What a God awful mess on mulitiple layers.

I picked up on that in one of yesterday's posts.

There doesn't appear to have been any effort at all to vet the detainees picked up in the "sweeps" and to release the innocent. Hence, all detainees were "tarred with the same brush" of "terrorist" even though nobody really had any idea of why the specific detainees were in the prison.

Iraqis are being held for bogus reasons.

This is the most salient feature of these reprehensible abuses, that the great majority of the people subject to this treatment were certainly innocens, with no information to give, no matter how they were questioned.

Not only were most simply swept up by unfortunate proximity to patrols and chek-points, but even most arrested as a result of "intelligence" have no connection to the resistance either. The intelligence received by U.S. forces in Iraq concerning the resistance is extraordinarily poor. U.S. forces are dependent on tips which they cannot examine independently before acting on them, as they lack sufficient language skills and knowledge of the milue in which they ar operating. In such a situation, people shop those they have quarrels with, or simply do not like, to the occupying forces, using these to settle old scores.

I heard Seymour Hersh on our CBC say that these prisoners were not "enemy combatants" or "insurgents", they were just civilians who were taken in for questioning.
He also said that there was no mechanism, no protocol for releasing prisoners. They were arrested, processed and thrown in with all the others.
They are truly being held 'at the King's pleasure', as they say.

This is what Hersh was saying in the O'Reilly interview that was posted yesterday. These men (and there are women and young boys too) were doing nothing wrong. They were taken into custody in sweeps and imprisoned and treated in this way.

This was standard procedure. Remember months ago there was a story about how the Iraqis would wait outside the prisons because they heard that a group was going to be released? They would hold pictures of their loved ones up for the reporters to see. Sometimes they would wait for days.

It is clear that we were sweeping up groups of locals indiscriminately and squeezing them for information that they may or may not have had about their families and neighbors. It is unconscionable.