Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

So why is he making speeches? He should be screaming this from the rooftops, and hammering in every media door in the country. Am I missing something? No offense -- I love the blogs -- but this has to be broken out.

Some time ago we were told by Congresspersons who had seen the whole thing that the Abu Gjraib pictures then out in public were nothing compared to the ones which had not been released.

This may be it. We've got a basket of useless smoking guns. **But now we have the semen-stained dress!**

The kink element always drove the Abu Ghraib
story, even though there was a dead body in the first batch of pictures. Now it's kiddy porn too.

The meaningful indicator here is that even Christopher Hitchens knows how awful what hasn't yet been revealed is, based on his only-readable-article-in-months piece in Slate several weeks ago....

It is frightening how similar the Abu Ghraib situation is to Professor Zimbardo's Prison Experiment.
http://www.prisonexp.org/

Indeed. If it's true, why isn't this a front-page article on the NYT, and why isn't it the lead story on the nightly news? If it's true, why hasn't anyone else stepped forward?

If it's not true, then why is Sy Hersh telling these stories?

I hope what he's saying isn't true, because it's horrible beyond belief. I fear that it's true, because I have no faith in the decency, honesty, or competence of the Bush administration. But assertions of this kind demand incontrovertible facts. Where are they?

It's possible that it's true and it's so horrible that a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't be are complicit in convering it up because, they think, the alternative would be worse. They're wrong, but it's a not uncommon way to think in this sort of situation.

From May 22, 2004, www.independent.co.uk:

ABU GHRAIB: INMATES RAPED, RIDDEN LIKE ANIMALS, AND FORCED TO EAT PORK

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington, Justin Huggler in Baghdad and Leonard Doyle

The abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison continued yesterday with the publication of fresh pictures and sworn statements that detailed a teenage boy being raped, prisoners being ridden like animals and other Iraqis being forced to eat pork and drink alcohol in contravention of their religion. For the first time video footage of some of the abuse was also broadcast, a development likely to increase the political impact of the scandal.

The new details caused fresh outrage around the Arab world and further rocked the Bush administration--already floundering after a week in which US forces killed dozens of guests at a wedding party in Iraq after mistaking them for insurgents. The latest pictures and allegations--chronicling more calculated attempts to humiliate Muslim prisoners--have only added to the suspicion that they were part of a policy formulated at a high level of authority.

Even though the existence of the images was known--indeed, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have seen many of the images already--their publication put further pressure on Washington as it prepares to hand over sovereignty to an Iraqi administration at the end of June.

In one statement, a prisoner tells how he witnessed a US army translator raping an Iraqi boy, aged somewhere between 15 and 18.

Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, prisoner number 151108, says a female soldier took photographs of the rape. Sheets had been hung to block the prisoners' view, but Mr Hilas says he heard the boy's screams and climbed a door to see what was going on. "The kid was hurting very bad," his statement reads...

Hey, I thought Posner above told us it would only ever be Osama and a ticking bomb! I think Posner needs to devote his intellectual integrity, moral clarity, and legal reputation to defending the rape of an adolescent boy. A "bad apple" here and there, I suppose. 9/11 did indeed change everything.

Hersch is irreplacable, and I fear will not be replaced. My world is bearable because he lives in it.

The question of whether the video should be shown while we have soldiers in Iraq is a serious one. I do believe their safety might be put in jeopardy.

Given the juxtaposition of these horrors with the anti-gay-marriage amendment voted on today, I gather we're supposed to conclude that forcibly sodomizing young boys is fine with Republicans, but loving, consensual gay marriage isn't. That is all.

Yes Rebecca, that is because forcibly sodomizing young boys is a patriotic act performed by freedom fighters who are engaged in the war on terrorism.

Blog with clip of video from a German TV report about alleged abuse and detention of children in Iraqi prisons and links to news articles about children's prison:

http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/000732.html

As far as the Pentagon in crisis, disaffection, and "neoconservative cultists," it's useful to rememember that Rummy started this almost immediately upon taking office--well before 9-11--in his conduct of the Quadrennial Defense Review, in which he ignored the advice of most of the professionals who had been working long-term defense planning. Rummy, Wolfowitz, Cambone, and Feith--what a crew. The republic will survive even this, though.

it used to be that the middle-class was the most sexually conservative, now it's a huge consumer of tremendous amounts of porn.

and it's interesting to me [i'm a linguist] how much violent sexual metaphor has entered ordinary discourse. "ripping someone a new one" for example. what's wrong with us?

Annie, have you ever visited Hip-Hop or Rap world on MTV where our teenagers are getting an education? Young women are routinely referred to as bitches and whores and move their bodies in sexually explicit pelvic grinding motions in skimpy outfits in the videos for the amusement of young men, or they "get low" by squatting down and spreading their legs stripper style. The men brag about being "pimps" which in today's street lingo means they are having sex with as many "bitches" as they can while making it clear that there is no personal attachment whatsoever. Uncensored rap lyrics are blatantly misogynistic and sexually explicit. This is a long way from Leave It To Beaver and American Bandstand. In this context it is little wonder that the military has had willing participants for what we have seen coming out of Abu Ghraib.

The entire rest of the world has largely already concluded, I think, the worst --as detailed in the Taquba report-- is true. We in America are the only folks who aren't that far up yet. And the rest of the world is drawing conclusions about how much they can trust America based on the degree of concern our press, our Congress, and our leadership have for rooting out the perpetrators and causes. Which is to say, unfortunately, not much and not much.

The Chimp and all around him need to be flogged until their backbones show. I am not kidding. Job One of the Kerry Administration should be to throw all of these bastards, from the top down, in prison.

Why is Rumsfeld still at the pentagon? I'm sorry, but "I don't know what's going on," even if it's true (which I doubt in this case, but supposing it is) just doesn't cut it in this case. If he isn't obliged to resign because of malfeasance, I say he's still obliged to resign out of nonfeasance. If our standard for the police is, "I didn't rob the bank! I just wasn't paying attention while those other people did!" then we have lost any sense of standards for what our government should be. If, on the other hand, our standard for the police is "I DID rob the bank, but I wrote a memo saying it's okay," then we still have standards, but they're awful standards, and we're awful people for holding them.

You will not read this report much on American news agency sites, I read a small report on CNN, and also found it on Switzerland.co (news reports)

****Swiss-run International Committee of The Red Cross (ICRC)fears United States is hiding terror suspects.

The report claims suspects reported to be rounded up have never turned up in detention centers

Does this mean we are in the "disappearing" business.
If a prisoner is reported to be rounded up and on a list; and the red cross has lists of all detainees at either Guantanamo, Iraq, or Afghanistan....

Then what happened to these prisoners. Will history judge us same as Nazi Germany?

www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=105&sid=5083723

Besides torture and unreleased photo's and videos kept intact to ensure less reprisals verse American or contractors that could be captured,
how long can we keep a lid on this aspect of missing prisoners.
Seemingly, we are now the evil empire!
not the other 3 at this point. So, since when do 2 wrongs make a "right". (also, how many prisoners are missing and what is the pattern)

I have heard that there are videos of children tortured in front of parents. Only rumor, but...

The defenders or at least minimizers of the torture situation use the argument that what we have done is not as bad as what Arabs do to each other. In other words, they hide behind the moral relativism they generally abhor. However, I am, to some degree, a moral relativist, so I will take the argument at face value. The problem with what we have done is not that the practices were more cruel than Mideast norms, which is probably not the case, but that they were more sexual. Now, the conservative cultures of the world see us not just as cruel, but as sexually degenerate. That's worse: you may fear the cruel, but for the degenerate, you will have only contempt. There are arguments for being loved and arguments for being feared, but none for being held in contempt. It is ironic that it is the stridently religious conservatism of the Bush Administration that has brought us here.

German TV broadcast a report about children in US custody in Iraq about 2 weeks ago.

http://www.swr.de/report/archiv/sendungen/040705/02/frames.html

What seems to be indisputable is that children are/were indeed interned in variuos places which are controlled by US troops. Neither the Red Cross nor UNICEF have had an access to those children.

Furthermore, a guy who says he was working for military intelligence at Abu Grahib and an Iraqi TV reporter jailed there for two months, tell of instances of abuse.

The Pentagon has so far not replied to the allegations.

America, America, please stand up for yourself! What's happened to you? Oh my... '-(

yes, dubbleblind, i have seen that stuff on mtv and i've listened to the music. i watched an amateur version of that sort of thing at my kid's middle school variety show. wow, was that ever wince inducing!

so ok. young people are in a monkey see monkey do situation. what about older adults? i don't see a lot of adult contrition over abu greib. however, i do see that the threshhold of acceptable violent/sexually charged languange and imagery has increased dramatically. if other cultures are aghast at this "american" phenomenon, hey, i am too.

finally, i said "ordinary discourse" when i should have further qualified it as all but formal, scholarly discourse. "ripping someone a new one" is one of my pet peeves on forums like this one, atrios, dkos, etc

Jean-Phillippe Stijns> [...] What's happened to you? Oh my... '-(

We're still trying to convince ourselves that the noisy minority of people among us who tell us lurid tales about our government are not really telling the truth, that they might hopefully turn out, if we are blessed by good fortune, to be completely insane or self-interested and amoral liars.

And the rest of the world continues to buy our dollars and lend us their capital rather than face the same reality.

Oh, go Cheney yourself, you puling LIE-berals. We're God's Chosen Administration, and we can lie, cheat, steal, torture, rape, and cuss all we want to 'cause, like, God told us so.

Yours in Christ,
The Attorney General of the Untied States of America

"In this context it is little wonder that the military has had willing participants for what we have seen coming out of Abu Ghraib."

You're not linking raping by US soldiers to Rap music, are you? Is this another piece of irony I am missing? I am conservative enough to be concerned about Rap lyrics. Not because I care about the decency of music (I am actually happy to see that nowadays at least Rap-artists fell free to shock mainstream America and ignore its Puritan ethics). But because I find them degrading for Afro-Americans (along the lines of the latest outcry by Bill Cosby as reported in The Economist this week). In any case, change must obviously come from within the Rap audience, and cannot be regaluted. But to say that Rap laid the ground for the raping of children at Abru Ghraib is... social conservatism taking care of its own parody.

Shorter Dubblblind: "It's all the fault of that damn negro music."

Please.

If it is criminal to do those acts in Iraq, why is it not criminal to do those acts in US prisons? Why isn't that issue a cover up issue. Is there no play in the US press about that. Is there no political fodder in the US about that. Let's clean up what we have at home. Basically, its cruel and unusual punishement to subject any human being to that behavior.

When Emerson said it it came out thusly " We eventually become that which we most despise."
When the Clash said it, the result was thus "I believe in this and it's been tested by research, He who fucks nuns will later join the church."
The right wing has defined their "bottom," as it were, and in this case their avatars are diving for coins.

I don't disbelieve Sy Hersh. I think he's an honest man and a heroic figure in journalism. But was anyone else bothered by his demeanor in the ACLU video? I thought he was all over the road, frankly. And some of his answers to questions were actually incoherent.

And it wouldn't be good for anybody to hype it up because it would put our troops as well as civilians abroad and at home at risk from outraged individuals and groups who may identify with the conflict and want some payback.
Child rape is nearly universally reviled. Vote Kerry if you are opposed to child rape.

To Jean Philippe and Dr Memory I say you have over simplified my message. The modern rap music culture focuses on sex and treats women as sex toys and nothing more while making a point of not placing any value on human relationships and caring. This is not the cause of the events of Abu Ghraib to be sure but this dehumanizing culture (which arises in the very areas where the military actively recruits) fits rather nicely with the real sickos of the Bush administration who crafted the policies whereby the atrocities of Abu Ghraib were made possible and provides them with the people to execute those policies. People who do not require much in the way of reconditioning.

Just to be inclusive, Limbaugh thinks the occurences at Abu Ghraib were no worse than frat initiations. Given his age, color, and politics, it seems unlikely that the behavior he reports was inculcated by rap music. (Note that I do not mean to defend misogynistic rap, simply to point out that the phenomenon isn't unique to that segment of the black underclass).

Let me make one point perfectly clear: rap music is not the cause of anything, listening to music lyrics does not cause behaviour. Rap music *reflects* a culture, a culture which devalues human life.

If your experience with hip-hop extends no further than modern-day MTV you really have no room to comment....

And if you don't know the difference between hip hop and rap you don't even have a seat at the table.

I've transcribed Hersh's remarks in full and posted them at http://www.pastpeak.com/archives/2004/07/post_1.htm

No, I wasn't disturbed by Sy Hersche's demeanor. He appeared to be strongly questioning himself as to exactly how much information he wanted to tell. Remember, much of this is going into future articles that he's writing about the Abu Ghraib situation. You don't want to give away your scoop if you're a journalist, and you don't want to tell the opposition what you're going after next. It appears that Sy is going after the videos, i.e., going around behind the scenes asking inside sources to see if they can find a copy of the videos and sneak them to him. My guess is he may even have a copy of the videos by now, else he would not have mentioned them. But he hasn't published yet, and thus he had to stop himself often to keep himself from giving away his scoop to the competition. (The videos are no scoop -- their existence has been known for over a month now -- the question is what else does Sy have that's in the pipeline getting prepared for publishing?).

"Either Sy Hersh has gone completely insane ..."

Since he's long been kinda whacked, he wouldn't have to travel all that far to get to completely insane.

America, America, please stand up for yourself! What's happened to you? Oh my... '-(

I know Jean-Phillipe, we are trying to stand up for ourselves, but I don't think people of other countries realize what we are up against or facing here.
We are doing the best we can. I just wish other people from other countries would help us out and start speaking out about WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH AMERICA. Where's our Canadian friends, our French and British friends? Average citizens could start writing editorials in their newspapers and ask what in God's name is going on in the US.
You got tons of people in your country that aren't under the thumb of American media. You could organize because I have to tell you that the people who are sane in this country and know what's going on: WE HAVE OUR HANDS A LITTLE FULL RIGHT NOW!

America, America, please stand up for yourself! What's happened to you? Oh my... '-(

I know Jean-Phillipe, we are trying to stand up for ourselves, but I don't think people of other countries realize what we are up against or facing here.
We are doing the best we can. I just wish other people from other countries would help us out and start speaking out about WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH AMERICA. Where's our Canadian friends, our French and British friends? Average citizens could start writing editorials in their newspapers and ask what in God's name is going on in the US.
You got tons of people in your country that aren't under the thumb of American media. You could organize because I have to tell you that the people who are sane in this country and know what's going on: WE HAVE OUR HANDS A LITTLE FULL RIGHT NOW!