Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse (from Wikipedia-contains morbid pictures)

This is directly related to the operations in Fallujah and elsewhere.
Stories of atrocities, murder, torture and sexual assualts of children in front of their parents were being reported by the Iraq media before these reports came to the attention of the US media.

PMC/mercenaries employed by the administration of George W. Bush aka The War President shut down the Fallujah press to quash the stories. There were demonstrations by mostly women and students to restore the press.

The response to some of these demonstrations was mercenaries shooting people in the face. Blackwater Security employees were killed and their bodies mutilated as a result.

The USMC was ordered to take reprisals for the deaths and mutilations.
This has only spiraled since then.

Here is the Wikipedia report on Abu Ghraib, which should be getting a lot of press here, but doesn't due to the "perception management" programs about our actions in Iraq.

Abu Ghraib was not a series of isolated incidents by any means imo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prisoner_abuse

This is horrible and won't be forgotten regardless of the administration's "perceptual management" about Iraq.

"That's 'Fair Play for Cuba Committee'."

;-)

As Sy Hersh has said at every opportunity to hawk his latest, the Israelis would never dare treat the Arabs in such a manner.

As any human being who knows the facts would say, these are the acts of evil people.

Perceptual or perception, you are absolutely correct, bobthedrummer. What the Bush Organized Crime Family has done will never be forgotten or forgiven.

Regarding perceptions, have you read the latest from Bob Parry?

Bush's 'Perception Management' Plan

By Robert Parry
November 18, 2004

George W. Bush has been criticized for disdaining fact in favor of faith in his own instincts. But he is savvy about the dangers that information can present to his authority over the government and the American people.

That is why the first priority of his second term has been the elimination of the few government sources of information that could challenge the images he wants to project to the public. Bush doesn’t want the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency portraying his Iraq and other foreign policies as abject failures or reckless adventures.

So, by attacking these remaining pockets of analytical resistance, Bush is moving to ensure that his administration can keep much of the U.S. population seeing a near-empty cup as almost entirely full, a concept known in the intelligence world as “perception management.”

On a personal level, Bush appears to have found in his electoral victory a validation of his public-relations strategy of casting his foreign policy as a black-and-white war between good and evil. In this tough-talking approach, Bush has been helped immeasurably by the powerful conservative news media, ranging from AM talk radio to Fox News, from right-wing newspaper columnists to Internet bloggers.

Indeed, it is impossible to understand why Americans have grown so detached from reality without appreciating the combined impact of this conservative media – built over the past quarter century – and Bush’s personal insistence on loyalty over almost all other values. These two factors have made the United States a kind of ultimate test for the Orwellian intelligence theories of “perception management.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/111804.html

At least one aspect of the occupation of Iraq was well planned by Washington. The USA needed help conducting mass interrogations of Arabic-speaking detainees. Foreign Report can now reveal that, to make up for this shortfall, the USA employed Israeli security service (Shin Bet) experts to help their US counterparts 'break' their captives.

The USA could have approached other friendly regimes in the Middle East, such as Egypt or Jordan, which have vast experience interrogating Muslim fundamentalists. The Israelis may be brilliant linguists, but they cannot match Arabs speaking their own language. But there is a significant difference between the Egyptian and Jordanian interrogation techniques and those of the Israelis. For the Egyptian and Jordanian secret services, physical torture is an essential part of interrogation and a key element in breaking the prisoner's will and making them co-operative.

In the past, Shin Bet would use torture when it interrogated prisoners. But 20 years ago, an Israeli government committee investigated the security service's practices and the use of torture was subsequently banned, forcing Shin Bet to adopt a variety of techniques that did not cause physical damage. These new methods are much more palatable to US sensibilities. They also brought faster and more convincing results.

Foreign Report has learnt that top Shin Bet interrogation experts were sent to Iraq to help with the most difficult interrogations, such as the captured heads of the Iraqi intelligence - and perhaps with former president Saddam Hussein. US sources say that in spite of the incidences of abuse in Abu Ghraib prison, such events are not representative of the sophisticated methods that Shin Bet used in Iraq.


more
http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/fr/fr040707_1_n.shtml

Head bags are a dead give-away, so I've been told.

These are crimes against humanity committed by an occupying power while waging a war of aggression. The war crime trials should include those commentators who sell waging wars of aggression and crimes against humanity as a good and just thing for us to do.

War President's administration.

I keep hoping that Seymour Hersh will publish more on Abu Ghraib, as he's indicated in the past 90 days or so.

:dem::kick:

for God's sake!
:grr::puke::argh:

look soooooo happy, then you compare them to the ones were they are on trial and they look soooooooo miserable.