The following quote is something I just read in the wonderful post-war noir, Prelude to a Certain Midnight by Gerald Kersh:
I don’t really see what all the kafuffle is about. What is there so extraordinary in a kid being killed? One of these days I dare say there will be a war, and then we’ll knock over millions of ’em, and congratulate ourselves.
This week Matt Bivins in The Nation wrote the following (via Cursor.org):
There’s another element to this. We’re all talking in horror about a photo of a man in a hood standing on a box. But there’s a context to this crime: While some agents of our government were making grown Iraqi men perform mock fellatio on each other, others were dropping 500-pound bombs on a small one-story town and in the process killing, among others, hundreds of women and children.
Of course, there was much more than mock fellatio going on:
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.
This last quote from Ishbaddidle, who also links to quotes from the Guardian showing that sexual torture was a systematic policy, not something that a few out of control guards did:
The sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors who do not know what they are doing, according to British military sources.
A lot of information about Abu Ghraib has been collected on wikipedia .
