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[Undertoad]

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.

[DanaC]

Originally posted by Undertoad

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.

From the BBC News Site ; Wednesday 5th May

The US military says there have been investigations into 25 deaths in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In two cases the dead men were found to have been murdered by Americans, according to a US army official.

People did die. People have had their human rights violated in what is looking increasingly like an intitutionalised culture of widespread abuse. Is anybody terribly surpised that soldiers ( and reservists and paid up civilians) abuse and humiliate their prisoners? Well no.....if we all expected that sort of thing not to happen nobody would have felt the need to enshrine it in n internationally accepted convention.

(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?)

If you had been raised a muslim with muslim sensibilities you would find it thoroughly humiliating and deeply wounding. ...In fact I think if you as the person you are now were placed in a situation where you feared for your life and were under no illusions of being covered by the geneva conventions....where you were in fact entirely at the mercy of the invading occupying soldiers in whose custody you found yourself.....I suspect being made to wear womens underwear over your face might seem somewhat worse than it sounds to someone sitting comfortably at home.

(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.)

I see. So because many arab nations live under regimes which promote that kind of state violence against their populace or in whose lands civil war and division has led to savagery and extreme responses we shouldnt feel bad about being the ones to abuse them ? So...perhaps we shouldnt feel bad about the way the Americans who were burned out of their vehicle and then even when dead dragged about the streets because hey....you guys are quite happy to kill someone with agonising surges of electric current burning them up from the inside out and hey....your gangs in LA are too busy shooting each other up to notice they ran out of crack.....Why should you be bothered if a non american treats one of you badlly? Its not even as if they were alive when they got hung fromthe bridge why should anyone care?

Your attitude towards the Iraqis is deplorable. These people are in the care of occupying forces. We keep saying we shouldnt be srprised at the horros being committed but we really should....This isnt war this is an occupation, these people have rights and we should be respecting that.

[jaguar]

Sorry UT you just lost my respect.

How you can possibly claim that routine humiliation and torture of prisoners under the protection of a country that is trying to claim it's the bringer of justice and peace AND justified the war with propaganda about saddams torture chambers as nothing is beyond the pale. No wonder Iraqis are actively resisting American occupying forces, they must see them as worse than Saddam - at least there was peace, security and electricity then.

These pictures will be the same as that little girl running from the burning village was for the Vietnam war - Iconic reminders that America's intrusions into other soverign nations bring only destruction, chaos and hate.

[richlevy]

Originally posted by Undertoad
(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.)

Actually, we Americans have our little quirks as well. While we find violence socially acceptable, sexuality is still more shocking. This is why it is easier to show a gunshot to the chest on TV than a bare nipple.

Americans might have accepted the electrodes, or the sleep deprivation, and said "Hey, that's the cost of doing business". The forced lewd acts however, cut across all lines. The liberals who weren't uptight about sex were still disturbed by abuse and the conservatives who might have accepted non-sexual abuse were shocked at the forced lewd acts.

In short, it was 'the perfect storm' (note overused phrase) in terms of unnacceptable behavior.

The deaths of individuals in custody is also an issue.

A senior army official said there had been investigations into 25 cases of death and 10 of abuse in US custody in Iraq or Afghanistan since December 2002.

The BBC's Pentagon correspondent Nick Childs says of the 25 deaths, 12 were found to be either of natural or "undetermined" causes, one was a "justifiable homicide", and two were murders. Ten inquiries are ongoing, he says.

Not jailed

An Army official said a soldier had been convicted of using excessive force when he shot dead a prisoner who was throwing stones at him.

He was thrown out of the army but did not go to jail.

The other murder was committed by a private contractor who worked for the CIA, the official said.

Killing someone who throws rocks at you is a judgment call. After all it happened at Kent State and noone was ever tried for murder. Killing individuals in custody should be a big deal. Unfortunately, the US has a poor history of punishing homicides on or near battlefields.

As a result of the My Lai massacre, Lt. Calley, who I believe was the only person to serve any time at all, served 3 years under house arrest before being pardoned.

After deliberating for 79 hours and 57 minutes, the jury returned a verdict. They had found Calley guilty of premeditated murder of 22 of the villagers of My Lai. One juror claimed that they “had labored long and hard to find some way, some evidence, or some flaw in the testimony so we could find Lt. Calley innocent.” Before the jury reconvened to decide his punishment, Calley was allowed to address the jury and said, “Yesterday you stripped me of all my honor, please by your actions that you take here today, don’t strip future soldiers of their honor-I beg you.” The prosecution responded that Calley had stripped himself of his honor by murdering women and children. After seven hours the jury sentenced Calley to life of hard labor. In the end, he only served only days in Fort Leavenworth, before being transferred back to Fort Benning, where he was placed under house arrest. His sentence was repeatedly reduced. Finally, he was pardoned by President Nixon. He was paroled in November, 1974.

It has always been believed that it is harder to punish someone for killing ten thousand people than 1. When killings, even of acknowleged innocents such as the children in the Philadelphia MOVE bombing, occur as a result of otherwise justifiable operations, there always seems to be a concern for the morale and future effectiveness of the police or military. It might be that authorities consider any severe punitive judgement would cause more social harm than the goodwill and rule of law associated with such a judgement justify.

A few months ago, everyone in the United States had what we thought was a purely intellectual excercise in the validity of using torture in the war on terror. In August 2002, the public had a short discussion about the issue when the US abstained from a vote to beef up the Geneva conventions on torture ABC News .

Personally, I am glad that we as a nation saw the pictures. I am tired of the public handing off responsibility to authorities and being insulated from the results. Doing so leads to real abuse, as was discovered during the Holocaust. If we as a culture really wish to justify torture to ourselves, than we need to see the results of such a decision so that we can take off the imaginary white hat we see ourselves wearing and realise that we are stepping closer and closer to becoming 'evildoers' ourselves.

It's one thing to choose not to be a vegetarian. It's another thing completely to pretend that the hamburger you are eating was grown on a hamburger tree.

Show us what war costs in men, money, and souls. Let us shed the hubris, fold up the 'Mission Accomplished', and never, ever, utter the phrase "bring it on" again. Maybe our next presidents, even if they have never been in combat, may more fully appreciate the true cost of war.

[xoxoxoBruce]

By that logic we should only ever have plays which are set in fantasy worlds for fear of accidentally giving someone the wrong impression.

Bullshit, I didn't say anything of the sort.

Generally people who go to a play know that it's the playwrite's own interpretation of events

Generally speaking the people watching and the people producing those plays know this.

You seem to know a hell of a lot about what other people "generally" think.

I do however think he may have had a reasonable insight into the events given the several years of research and the interviews with some ofthe people concerned.

What you're getting is his take on it, which is not necessarily the truth. If it were, then 5 people that spend several years of research and interviews on a subject, then write a book about it, would all write the same thing. Doesn't happen.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Killing someone who throws rocks at you is a judgment call.

No it's not. Throw rocks at me and I'll blow your fucking head off. No question about it.:p

[jaguar]

While UT would like to pretend it was all fun and games putting panties on someone's head, this is far more serious than that and he should know that. I quote the Ney Yorker, which itself is quoting a military report.

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

At the very same prison Saddam's henchmen committed some of the worst torture in Iraq.

SFC Snider grabbed my prisoner and threw him into a pile. . . . I do not think it was right to put them in a pile. I saw SSG Frederic, SGT Davis and CPL Graner walking around the pile hitting the prisoners. I remember SSG Frederick hitting one prisoner in the side of its [sic] ribcage. The prisoner was no danger to SSG Frederick. . . . I left after that.

I questioned some of the things that I saw . . . such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell—and the answer I got was, “This is how military intelligence (MI) wants it done.” . . . . MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days.

See:

Certainly a unique way of winning hearts and minds. Here

[DanaC]

Originally posted by xoxoxoBruce

quote:quote:
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By that logic we should only ever have plays which are set in fantasy worlds for fear of accidentally giving someone the wrong impression.
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Bullshit, I didn't say anything of the sort.
quote:
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Generally people who go to a play know that it's the playwrite's own interpretation of events
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quote:
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Generally speaking the people watching and the people producing those plays know this.
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You seem to know a hell of a lot about what other people "generally" think.

I didnt say you said that, I merely followed what you did say through to what I considered to be it's logical conclusion.
As to what I do or do not know about what other people think....No I dont know what other people think, however I can make an informed guess given my own experience of the theatre going public through my involvement in the UK theatre scene. I merely express what I have found to be the case amongst those I have spent time with. The theatre scene is not like the Cinema scene ( certainly not in the uk) The kind of theatre which produces Les Smith's plays and the kind of audience he attracts is as idiosynchratic as the audience you might find at a Michael Moore film.....more so because Michael Moore is very well known by the mainstream too unlike Les who isnt....More generally the types of audience attracted to Town theatres ( not including te musicals and am dram productions) and Rep theatrical productions tend to be dominated by a particular demographic ....Forgive me if I am arrogant enough to suggest I may have an insight into them as I am one of them.

And yes, what Les researched gave him a particular view of the events. It seems that hisview of events is eerily similar to the views held by the survivors, the whistleblowers, the international media and most honest historians.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally posted by Undertoad
(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.)

Give those soldiers the "Not as bad as Saddam" medal!

[xoxoxoBruce]

I didnt say you said that, I merely followed what you did say through to what I considered to be it's logical conclusion.

I don't consider that at all logical. To the contrary, it's ridiculous, but I think you know that.

Not being part of the British theater scene and not knowing Les Smith, I'll take your word for his fans being idiosynchratic.
Michael Moore's fans are just idiots.

[Undertoad]

My point, and I'd hoped it would be plain, is that you can't possibly put over a hundred thousand troops into a war/warlike situation and give them enough autonomy to get the job done efficiently without finding that some number of them have gone wrong for whatever reason and committed war crimes. On the scope of war crimes this is a one on a scale of ten. If the expanded New Yorker bits are true it's a two on a scale of ten. If they had taken the prisoners out back and summarily executed them it would be a six on a scale of ten. Comprende? In war, people do some really fucked up shit.

Meanwhile Belmont Club points out,

My first thoughts at the news of the Abu Ghraib abuses, the Taguba Report and the Presidential mea culpa which followed was whether posterity would recall the incident in the same way the Christmas Truce in the first year of the Great War is remembered today. The last grasp at enforcing civilized standards of conduct before the brutality of the trenches coarsened men completely. The fraternization of that first December so alarmed the generals that "special precautions were taken during the Christmases of 1915, 1916 and 1917, even to the extent of actually stepping up artillery bombardments" to prevent its recurrence.

The brass didn't have to worry: it was never to be repeated. After the Somme in the following year, infantrymen on both sides filed saw-teeth into their bayonets to make the thrusts more painful. The history which remembers the Second World War as 'the Good War' forgets how four years of fighting transformed Allies that refused to bomb German cities in 1940 into those that planned thousand plane raids on Hamburg and Dresden in 1945 to rain incendiaries on tens of thousands of Western Europeans as policy. There were no reprimands, only medals, for the B-29 crews that incinerated 100,000 civilians in Tokyo in the raid of March 9, 1945. And the sad balance of probability is that Abu Ghraib will be displaced from the front pages by the next terrorist outrage, the next Bali, the next Madrid, the next 9/11 until we find ourselves wondering why it upset us at all.

While it is important to punish everyone responsible for the outrages at Abu Ghraib, the only effective way to stop the corrupting influences of war is to achieve victory.

We are at war, and the men in those hoods are the enemy. If we are at the end of this war, these events will seem like a long-run outrage. If we are at the beginning of this war, these events will seem like a drop in the bucket. I really have no way to know where we are in history but it doesn't exactly seem like victory is close at hand, does it?

[DanaC]

I don't consider that at all logical. To the contrary, it's ridiculous, but I think you know that.

I know nothing of the kind.

What you said in your post was this
"quote:
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The problem with plays is the gritty little details are often not true, which leads the play goers to think they know the true story, when in fact they don't."

If gritty little details are a problem because they lead the audience to believe they know the story when they dont, what would you suggest as a solution? Fewer gritty details? Or a change of subject matter to be quite sure they dont get the wrong impression? Maybe a disclaimer at the start of the play? I was pointing out a stylistic feature of the play and the playwrite, you suggested that it may be problematic. Personally I disagree with you. I dont think that is a common problem with theatre production. More of a problem with the Hollywood productions of historically inaccurate and underesearched films I'd have thought.

Besides, since this play was primarily about one of the survivors and her story as told by her ....I think it can be taken as having some accuracy. It wont tell you the whole story of My Lai, but it will tell one of the stories of My Lai fairly well.

I am not even remotely surprised at your disdain for Michael Moore fans ( of which I am one) I'll take that idiot label and wear it with pride ;P ....and when all the smoke clears and the House of Bush and all it's acolytes are shown for the scoundrels they are and Moore's work is vindicated I'll polish my label up nice and shiny and make sure I wear it every place I go

[xoxoxoBruce]

I was pointing out a stylistic feature of the play and the playwrite, you suggested that it may be problematic.

Wrong, "The problem with PLAYS is the gritty little details are often not true, which leads the play goers to think they know the true story, when in fact they don't." The same goes for any theatrical production, i.e., movies, tv programs, vingnettes, historical dramas and reenactments. They are ALL, somebodys take on history and the more OPINIONS on the gritty details the more misleading they are. Anything written for entertainment, based on true incidents, except for putting fictional characters in a historical setting, in a way that the setting is background and the characters do not affect the background story, is misleading.

Moore can not be vindicated because he's already proved himself to be a charlatan. It has nothing to do with Bush, as Moore has been around a long time and been tilting since before the first Bush. Sometimes they were dragons but usually windmills. He's an opportunist of the first order. Even opportunists get it right occasionally. Moore less than most. So you can wear your "idiot label" proudly, for as a Moore fan, you've earned it.

[elSicomoro]

As a liberal, I find Michael Moore to be a fucking idiot. He's like the Ann Coulter of liberals. Fucking rabble-rousing turd.

[Troubleshooter]

Something I ran across in my sociology studies.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Welcome to the Stanford Prison Experiment web site, which features an extensive slide show and information about this classic psychology experiment. What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions we posed in this dramatic simulation of prison life conducted in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University.

How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress. Please join me on a slide tour of describing this experiment and uncovering what it tells us about the nature of Human Nature.

http://www.prisonexp.org/