Abu Gharib

[AZZERAE]

According to many credible sources, under the Bush era, a couple years after the September 11th attack on the World Trade Centre, the US Army and the CIA detained criminals of various severity, and supposed leaders of an insurrection against said American occupational forces in Iraq.

What followed were leaked photographs of torture both of a sexual and non-sexual nature. The violence enacted on the prisoners was proven to have violated the human rights of the detainees, and resulted in war crimes explicitly flying in the face of Geneva Conventions.

While I'm certain that a key few individuals subjected to the sodomy, execution and torment were indeed not boy scouts, in my view, the acts perpetrated against these people exceeded what was necessary - and having been done in order to attain information that would damn the islamic and non-islamic extremists - was a poor, poor excuse for what came to light.

Many aspects of this piece of recent history turn my stomach. And have gotten me thinking - how were these abuses excused, and almost none of the military officials charged for engaging in this behaviour?

How is any of this that far removed from what Nazi Germany did?

I'm sure everyone has come across the photographs some time in the past of the smiling, seemingly elated guards giving a "thumbs up" next to dead bodies, perched atop human pyramids, and documenting prisoners with human faeces smeared over their faces, having urine-soaked underwear pulled over their mouth and nose, being chained to bars in incredibly uncomfortable positions for days, taunted by vicious dogs, or even being electrocuted by makeshift shocking devices, with bags on their heads.

I don't even wanna link the photos here, but I will make one exception, and share with you a picture of a woman with a sadistic grin on her face next to a dead, seemingly frozen cadaver:



The pic above is not even the worst of it, and we all know that.

Can anybody explain to me how such a freedom-loving country can get away with such things? Please, help me understand if I'm missing something.

No other country in the world could get away with this (well, maybe North Korea - and Trump's buddy-buddy relationship with Kim Jong-Un still confuses me), so, who THE FUCK thought it'd be a good idea to take snapshots of this barbarity?

While I can't begin to imagine how angry flying planes into a prominent building made the American public - along with all the innocent life lost - can there really be any credible excuse for the behaviour at Abu Gharib?

And who got charged?

[Laser]

Canadians are generally consumed with their own moral guilt.



https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Somalia_Affair

[WOTR]

*Wall of text ahead.

The long and the short of it is that western democracies have extreme rot. It must have started before 9/11- but that was when the decay became blatant. War has always required the dehumanization of your enemy. That was nothing new. But to have the "great" democracies sanction torture, extrajudicial killings, fighting a one sided war with drones, and then imprisoning anybody who would tell the truth (hello Assange) was disgusting.

I remember arguing with somebody about this years ago. They asked "if you could torture the person responsible for the killing of your mother would you not do it?" (also the variation of torturing the person holding your family hostage...) My response was "of course I would. But that is why the state and the law is there- to stop me from extracting my own version of justice or revenge."

But too many people wanted that kind of revenge. And somehow we became what we always declared that we hated. And most of us don't see the monster in the mirror and are happy to instead turn to the carnival distorting mirror where we are still innocent and "the bad people" are just getting what they deserve (if we even acknowledge it at all.) Certainly our government would not be complicit in torture?

How it is different from Nazi Germany? We are still writing the history books. We are still in charge of the narrative, and we still want to see our actions as justified. Therefore, it is not at all the same. We only torture "bad" people. Similar reasons for why nobody is charged. We are good people. To lay charges might expose what we have allowed ourselves to become and how high up the rot goes.

Finally- how does this continue? Because even for somebody like myself who has always found our "enhanced interrogations techniques" as well as our declaring any resistance to us to be the actions of "unlawful combatants" to be one of the darkest events in recent memory- it does not matter enough. And even if it did- there are two parties to chose from. Don't like What Bush did? Vote in Obama? Don't think he is doing a good job and wish he would quit torturing people? Vote in Trump. Oh, he didn't end it? Well then vote in the war monger Biden. In short, unless somebody runs on this one issue, they will continue on our present course. And people will allow it to slip because there is only so much "outrage' that we can each have. And while I am outraged over this- there are other issues that I vote for / against more than it.

A freedom loving country gets away with it because for many that love of freedom either does not extend to the freedom of our enemies, or because they don't even value true freedom for their fellow countrymen. So many examples. Ignore Covid- there are something like 20% of the population right now who at least claim that they think that you should be fired from your job (read homeless and starving) if you hold the opposite political view. How do you convince people to give a fuck about a few dozen people that somebody somewhere declared were bad (no judge, no evidence. Just trust that they have the right people in custody.) The answer is that you don't. They are not humans anyhow (sarcasm.)


*Note that I am not somebody who says that there was any justification for the terrorist acts. Nor do I believe that there should not be a military response. I'm just somebody who does not want anybody tortured in my name, nor do I wish to see us lose our humanity. I hate that when I watched the beheading of western individuals, I could only think "at least it was fast- better than the years of torture we offer our captives." And that is disgusting to me that I should even have such thoughts.

So it continues.

[pate]

......

To my knowledge I don't know either individual in that picture.  That said;  the living one I wood:  as to the dead won, probably naught.



Call me cynical.

[Colonel Pate Manly]

[Brother OJ]

To the victor go the spoiled corpses

[Asuka Langley]

Can anybody explain to me how such a freedom-loving country can get away with such things? Please, help me understand if I'm missing something.

America was never freedom loving.

[Asuka Langley]

[AZZERAE]

America was never freedom loving.