Monday, May 18, 2009

Suppressed Abu Ghraib Photos Published Down Under

http://www.laprogressive.com/2009/05/16/suppressed-abu-ghraib-photos-of-children-screaming-while-being-sodomized/

Suppressed Abu Ghraib Photos Published Down Under;
"What Doesn't Obama Want Us to See?"

Pentagon Has Videos of Children Screaming While Being Sodomized

by Charley James
posted on Saturday, 16 May 20096 Comments

15 of 60 Photos obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald
were published Saturday, 16 May..

Attached Photo: SBS/Dateline

Somehow, the Sydney Morning Herald obtained some of the additional Abu
Ghraib photos that the Obama administration is in US court trying to keep
hidden as it fights an ACLU Freedom of Information lawsuit. Fifteen of the
60 are published on-line Saturday (Sydney time) by the newspaper.

Is it because we've become inured to photos of Americans torturing prisoners
of war that I don't have the same violent, angry reaction to this latest
batch as I did when the first Abu Ghraib pictures were leaked? Have I
watched that same video loop of a jump-suited Army volunteer being
waterboarded too many times to feel the same intense nausea at images of
what George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the
Inquisition priests authorized in my name? Did seven years of a constant
drip-drip-drip on my head as each new piece of information leaked out of yet
another crime against humanity desensitize me to the horror of what we
became?

America finally jumped the shark, dooming us and our time to be remembered
in history as the moment when we joined a long list of nations whose
self-betrayal led to our own collapse. And why do I not feel an Arctic chill
blain down my back when I think of this horrific possibility, or how and why
it happened? Why we let it happen?

I am revolted by my own lack of revulsion.

Mourning In America

Meanwhile, Daily Kos is reporting Seymour Hersh saying the US government has
videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an
ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of
criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there,
and higher."

This may be the reason behind President Obama's decision this week to fight
releasing the images and video tapes.

Hersh was speaking to the ACLU's 2004 America At A Crossroad membership
conference last week. According to Kos, Hersh also said,

Some of the worse that happened that you don't know about, ok. Videos,
there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters,
communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib which is 30 miles
from Baghdad [...]

"The women were passing messages saying "Please come and kill me, because
of what's happened". Basically what happened is that those women who were
arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys
were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the
soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total
terror it's going to come out.

It's impossible to say to yourself how do we get there? Who are we? Who
are these people that sent us there?

As Dick Price wrote to me, whatever moral high ground we once held is gone.
Maybe forever. We should all be in mourning for America.

Charley James
The Progressive Curmudgeon

LA Progressive

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