Your Government At War

It's been reported elswhere in the blogosphere, but I can't ignore it here. Evidently, we haven't heard the worst of the abuses of Abu Ghraib.

Young male prisoners were filmed being sodomised by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, according to the journalist who first revealed the abuses there.

Seymour Hersh, who reported on the torture of the prisoners in New Yorker magazine in May, told an audience in San Francisco that "it's worse". But he added that he would reveal the extent of the abuses: "I'm not done reporting on all this," he told a meeting of the American Civil Liberties Union.

He said: "The boys were sodomised with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking. And this is your government at war."

One wonders if this footage will be released, and just how it will be handled if it is. One also wonders just when the footage will be release. For my part, I think it should be relased somehow. I think, come what may, Americans need to see and hear just what was done in our name and on our dime. Otherwise, we continue to live in denial about some of what we are responsible for.

Comments

[Tom Armstrong]

Ya, Terrance. But I do worry about how the Careless Bush Administration's follies play on the Arab Street.

Of course -- if it all could be isolated -- it would be good to have 'all the poisons in the mud hatch out.' But while the mostly-noble American soldiers are in harms way, I would not mind too terribly if the information stream was delayed.

Freedom, justice, democracy -- and all that jazz -- are very very foreign to the average non-trusting Iraqi public. [Come to think of it, it is all pretty foreign to us -- but we at least have a better sense of the ideal.]