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Undertoad · 05-08-2004, 08:26 AM

Oh come on. Please. The truth is that war crimes happen - they just do, as terrible as they are - because people are people, they're morons, they're imperfect and they're put into this bizarre situation. And the real question is whether you have to establish policies that would prevent these kinds of problems under any, any circumstance or whether you allow a cheaper, less thorough approach to managing prisoners.

And everybody understands that. It turns out they had a military lawyer on hand for a March 25 press conference when they announced they had problems at the prison. They expected to have to lay the whole thing out for reporters. But the reporters considered it a non-story. Not interesting enough to follow up on. Hey, shit happens, and in Iraq there's a lot of shit happening and this particular shit doesn't even register. Some people were morons, there was humiliation, nobody died, not enough story to register on the most sensitive scale.

Until the pictures showed up. When the pictures showed up it totally changed the dynamic of the story. Now it's important mostly because it's a cultural problem; the Arabs don't like humiliation, while we treasure it and celebrate it by engaging in it constantly from age 10-17. (They had panties on their heads, man! Worst thing in the fucking world! I kinda wish I had some panties on my head though, don't you?)

(Y'see Arabs are allowed to cut off tongues and hands and heads and beat themselves bloody with chains and cut themselves open and stone each other to death and be as warlike as possible to each other, but they can't possibly have another culture come in and put panties on their heads... it's just horrible for them.)

But until the pictures came out, nobody could have anticipated that this sort of cultural problem could be elevated to become the Worst Problem in the Entire Fucking War for a few days. NOBODY!

And so when it turns out that the Secretary of Defense was a little more concerned with problems larger than people putting panties on prisoners' heads, something thoroughly addressed months ago (including giving the press all the information they had), I say: good! There were about 100 more important things for him to worry about, such as whether he should have had 20,000 more troops covering the borders.

05-08-2004, 08:26 AM	#61
Undertoad Radical Centrist Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Cottage of Prussia Posts: 31,423	Oh come on. Please. The truth is that war crimes happen - they just do, as terrible as they are - because people are people, they're morons, they're imperfect and they're put into this bizarre situation. And the real question is whether you have to establish policies that would prevent these kinds of problems under any, any circumstance or whether you allow a cheaper, less thorough approach to managing prisoners. And everybody understands that. It turns out they had a military lawyer on hand for a March 25 press conference when they announced they had problems at the prison. They expected to have to lay the whole thing out for reporters. But the reporters considered it a non-story. Not interesting enough to follow up on. Hey, shit happens, and in Iraq there's a lot of shit happening and this particular shit doesn't even register. Some people were morons, there was humiliation, nobody died, not enough story to register on the most sensitive scale. Until the pictures showed up. When the pictures showed up it totally changed the dynamic of the story. Now it's important mostly because it's a cultural problem; the Arabs don't like humiliation, while we treasure it and celebrate it by engaging in it constantly from age 10-17. (They had panties on their heads, man! Worst thing in the fucking world! I kinda wish I had some panties on my head though, don't you?) (Y'see Arabs are allowed to cut off tongues and hands and heads and beat themselves bloody with chains and cut themselves open and stone each other to death and be as warlike as possible to each other, but they can't possibly have another culture come in and put panties on their heads... it's just horrible for them.) But until the pictures came out, nobody could have anticipated that this sort of cultural problem could be elevated to become the Worst Problem in the Entire Fucking War for a few days. NOBODY! And so when it turns out that the Secretary of Defense was a little more concerned with problems larger than people putting panties on prisoners' heads, something thoroughly addressed months ago (including giving the press all the information they had), I say: good! There were about 100 more important things for him to worry about, such as whether he should have had 20,000 more troops covering the borders.