It really is a coalition effort!
It's not just American military personnel who have abused Iraqi prisoners. These pictures and captions are from today's Daily Mirror of Britain:
 
 
Top left: "URINATED ON: A British soldier urinates on an Iraqi prisoner in a vile display of abuse. The captive was beaten and hurled from a moving truck. Army chiefs are investigating." Top right: "GUN TO HEAD: The terrified suspect cowers as a gun is placed at his head -- then the rifle barrel was forced into his mouth." Bottom left: "BLEEDING: Blood seeps through the mask of [the] battered suspect." Bottom right: "BUTT IN GROIN: A rifle is cruelly jabbed in the young man's groin as his eight-hour nightmare goes on."
The Mirror reports of the young Iraqi man pictured above:
A hooded Iraqi captive is beaten by British soldiers before being thrown from a moving truck and left to die.
The prisoner, aged 18-20, begged for mercy as he was battered with rifle butts and batons in the head and groin, was kicked, stamped and urinated on, and had a gun barrel forced into his mouth.
After an eight-hour ordeal, he was left barely conscious and close to death. Bleeding and vomiting and with a broken jaw and missing teeth, he was driven from a Basra camp and hurled off the truck. No one knows if he lived or died.
The shocking pictures on this page were handed to us by one of the attackers and a colleague. We have agreed to protect their identities as they fear reprisals.
Last night, their damning testimony was in the hands of appalled ministers and Army chiefs who pledged an urgent investigation.
Chief of the General Staff General Sir Michael Jackson said: "If this is proven, the perpetrators are not fit to wear the Queen's uniform. They have besmirched the good name of the Army and its honour."
...The outrage, which emerged the day after U.S. troops were pictured torturing Iraqi prisoners of war, makes a mockery of the Army's attempts to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people....
Very apparently, the Iraqi people have traded the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein for the brutal regime of the United States and Great Britain and the few other smaller nations that the Bush regime could strong-arm into its "coalition of the willing."
I don't buy for one second that these cases of U.S. and British military personnel abusing Iraqis are "isolated cases," "just a few bad apples," as the Bush and Blair regimes no doubt will claim in order to save their political asses -- and as many "patriotic" Americans and Brits psychologically need to believe in order to maintain their incorrect belief that Americans and Brits are morally superior to the rest of the world.
These cases of abuse of Iraqis by coalition military personnel are just the ones that we know about; think of how many other cases that we don't know about and will never know about.
This is what needs to happen:
- American and British and other Bush-regime coalition military personnel need to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible and the United Nations needs to assume the safety of the Iraqi people until they can fully govern themselves.
- Full, independent investigations need to be made of the abuse of Iraqis by Bush-regime coalition military personnel and the coalition military personnel found guilty of abusing Iraqis need to be expelled from the military and criminally tried and punished as appropriate. Those military personnel who did not personally participate in the abuse of Iraqis but who had personal knowledge of it and remained silent or who covered it up should be expelled from the military and also should be criminally tried and punished.
- George W. Bush and his lapdog, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, need to be booted out of office. They and their war planners should be tried as the war criminals that they are, but we all know that because they sit atop the world's largest white-male power structures, we will never see such justice done.
- John Kerry needs to be elected U.S. president on Nov. 2, 2004 by such a significant margin that the Republicans cannot steal yet another presidential election from the American people.
- The long, hard work of cleaning up George W. Bush's many messes needs to begin -- and we'd damn better not blame President Kerry for King George II's messes. Kerry deserves another medal just for being willing to follow George W. Bush, the spoiled rich drunken white frat boy who never grew up and who thinks that the world is his and his buds' to trash.
Update (Sunday, May 2, 2004): God, liars are so fucking predictable. I wrote yesterday: "I don't buy for one second that these cases of U.S. and British military personnel abusing Iraqis are 'isolated cases,' 'just a few bad apples,' as the Bush and Blair regimes no doubt will claim in order to save their political asses..."
The Associated Press reports today:
WASHINGTON -- Top U.S. military officer Gen. Richard Myers said [today] there is no widespread pattern of abuse of Iraqi prisoners and that the actions of "just a handful" of U.S. troops at a Baghdad prison have unfairly tainted all American forces.
Memo to the Bush regime: You have no credibility, assholes! You stole the White House by perpetrating election fraud in Florida with the help of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida Secretary of State (and Florida chairwoman of George W. Bush's presidential campaign) Katherine Harris. Then, you fabricated a "reason" for invading Iraq in March 2003 -- you told the world that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that made it a threat to the United States and its allies. You're fucking liars! We can't believe anything you say!
There's only one thing that the United States can do to get itself out of this mess, and it's to rid itself of the people who got us into this mess in the first place, the members of BushCheneyCorp.
To think that the people who got you into your deep shit in the first place are the ones to get you out of it is insane.
If we don't elect John Kerry on Nov. 2 -- and if we don't ensure that the Republicans don't steal two presidential elections in a row -- then we will deserve whatever we will get.
Update (Thursday, May 13, 2004): There are media reports, such as this one, that the British government claims that the photos published in the Daily Mirror are fake. However, to my knowledge, the photos have yet to be definitively proven fake or genuine.
Update (Friday, May 14, 2004): OK, now it's generally accepted, even by the Daily Mirror, that the pictures are fake. The Mirror's editor was fired today over the scandal, Reuters reports today.
It's odd, because when the pictures first surfaced they looked genuine enough to me, but now that they have been labeled as fake, they look fake!
This makes the Brits look better -- although I still oppose Tony Blair's blind cooperation with the Bush regime regarding the Second Bush War in Iraq and I hope that his political career suffers for it, because that's what he deserves -- and makes the Bush regime and us ugly Americans look even uglier, because, apparently, of the "coalition" members we appear to be the lone abusers. (All of the other pictures of the abuse of Iraqis I've posted -- not fake.)
Update (Saturday, May 15, 2004): Here is the front page of today's Daily Mirror. Story here.
2:12:32 PM 
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