__________________________________________________________________

Within the confines of good taste and a respect for concealing the faces and identities of Iraqi victims of American rapists, the photos referenced in the article reproduced below should be published and shown to the world.

I learned recently while seeking to participate in a forum of nominally intelligent people in my Georgia hometown that Middle America remains in denial about Bush administration excesses and abuses.

Persons I would have thought knew better complained that I was too "negative" in referring to those abuses and in calling for prosecution of Bush, Cheney, and their lieutenants on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

A challenged member of the group averred that torture, when done correctly, is not a bad thing at all--that if a single American life could be saved by subjecting men to waterboarding and worse tortures, such was justified.

A fresh-faced precocious kid on the forum protested that whatever mistakes Bush and Cheney may have made, they had had the best interests of his nation in mind at the time.  And his most emotional response to me was to post a MIDI music file of Kate Smith singing "God Bless America"!  Bless his little heart.  He thinks a rousing rendition of "God Bless America" will heal any "boo-boo" and make the "bad" go away for his nation!

None on the forum that would identify themselves wished to hear more about or discuss further the shame Bush brought to our nation and the horrors he visited on the world from 2000 through 2008.
 
They apparently wish it all swept under the rug and forgotten as an embarrassing skeleton in the closet of the American psyche.

They are ready to move on and forget, as best they can, the Bush years.

I realized during this encounter that Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are preaching to the choir each night--that Middle America's opinions are not shaped by my heroes and heroines, but by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.  I realized that we who watch Olbermann and Maddow each night represent, sadly, a thoughtful minority in this nation of shallow hedonistic American Idol junkies.

They STILL don't get it and they STILL don't want to deal with it.

Healing will not occur in America and our reputation in the family of man will not be restored until the crimes committed in our collective name during the Bush years--all of them--are exposed, discussed, accepted and digested, while the perpetrators of those horrendous crimes are tried and punished, as prescribed by the law.

Americans need to see every damned one of those rape photos.  They need to know what their sons and husbands in uniform from this alleged "Christian" nation did to helpless Iraqis at the height of the darkness that was George W. Bush's criminal administration.

Americans need to be forced to the realization torture and abuse of Iraqis did not represent the work of a "few bad apples", but that it was endemic in the American military at the time--that a green light for unimaginable abuses was given by the Bush White House.  It's all documented now, but simpletons that watch Fox News won't hear much about it.

Yes, I say publish the rape photos. Let's see the rapists' faces, the tattoos on their asses, and their names.  These animals that are walking among us even now need to be caged.

D. Grant Haynes

__________________________________________________

Abu Ghraib Abuse Photos 'Show Rape'

Thursday 28 May 2009

By Duncan Gardham and Paul Cruickshank

The Telegraph UK
  
Photographs of alleged prisoner abuse which Barack Obama is attempting to censor include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, it has emerged.

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.
 
Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.
 
Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.
 
Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

The graphic nature of some of the images may explain the US President's attempts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published...
 
In April, Mr Obama's administration said the photographs would be released and it would be "pointless to appeal" against a court judgment in favour of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

But after lobbying from senior military figures, Mr Obama changed his mind saying they could put the safety of troops at risk.
 
Earlier this month, he said: "The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to inflame anti-American public opinion and to put our troops in greater danger."
 
It was thought the images were similar to those leaked five years ago, which showed naked and bloody prisoners being intimidated by dogs, dragged around on a leash, piled into a human pyramid and hooded and attached to wires.
 
Mr Obama seemed to reinforce that view by adding: "I want to emphasise that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib."
 
The latest photographs relate to 400 cases of alleged abuse between 2001 and 2005 in Abu Ghraib and six other prisons. Mr Obama said the individuals involved had been "identified, and appropriate actions" taken.
 
Maj Gen Taguba's internal inquiry into the abuse at Abu Ghraib, included sworn statements by 13 detainees, which, he said in the report, he found "credible based on the clarity of their statements and supporting evidence provided by other witnesses."

Among the graphic statements, which were later released under US freedom of information laws, is that of Kasim Mehaddi Hilas in which he says: "I saw [name of a translator] ******* a kid, his age would be about 15 to 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw [name] who was wearing the military uniform, putting his **** in the little kid's ***.... and the female soldier was taking pictures."

The translator was an American Egyptian who is now the subject of a civil court case in the US.

Three detainees, including the alleged victim, refer to the use of a phosphorescent tube in the sexual abuse and another to the use of wire, while the victim also refers to part of a policeman's "stick" all of which were apparently photographed 

Is there no fathoming depth of depravity of Bush's kick ass warriors?

When you think you have plumbed the depths of the cesspool that was George W. Bush's Iraq policy, something even more revolting bubbles to the surface.

No, CG forum apologists, we don't need to sweep this one under the rug and talk about vegetable gardening and music videos.

http://www.truthout.org/052909R

A high priority of the Obama administration is an overhaul of the health care system in the United States.

In this writer's opinion, timid approaches that can be most easily sold to Congress--approaches that reflect an attempt to placate the American Medical Association by fine tuning the present system--will amount to no meaningful improvement.

The American health care system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up.

The problem with U.S. health care is that it is predicated and built primarily on a foundation of privatized for-profit capitalistic greed rather than on a Hippocratic oath to serve mankind.

Private physicians, physicians' groups, hospitals, medical labs, radiologists, medical insurance companies, and pharmaceutical firms all skim off their share of profits for the pleasure and edification of stockholders before an ailing man's typically astronomical bill is tallied. That, in a word, is why the bill is typically so astronomical.

This greedy, profit-maximizing approach to alleviation of human suffering is morally reprehensible.

The solution to U.S. health care problems is to dismantle entirely the present unworkable, top heavy, profit intensive absurdity of a private health care system-one that lends itself to medical malpractice suits because so much is being done shoddily in the quest for money-and adopt a universal health care program similar to that of every Western nation on earth except the United States.

Let the doctors and specialists now amassing millions in the private medical system become well-paid civil servants of the people in a nationalized system in which their careers and compensations are performance based.

Yes, Americans would probably have to pay for an equitable health care system with higher taxes. But many Americans are now paying hundreds or thousands monthly for co-pays, supplemental coverages, catastrophic coverages, prescribed drugs not on lists provided by medical insurance companies of approved drugs, and in a hundred other small and invidious schemes that line the pockets of various middle men in the medical and pharmaceutical industries of our hodgepodge system. Eliminate those unfair burdens on the American family and most would be happy to apply some of the savings to a fair and equitable universal system in which the only criteria for admission and treatment is need.

The receptionist's first question would then be, "what's your medical or dental problem today?", rather than, "do you have an insurance card and could I make a copy of it?".

National health insurance programs assure the health of the public in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and virtually every European nation from Great Britain, to Germany, to Liechtenstein. And life expectancy is greater in these nations and 38 others than in the United States, according to the CIA World Factbook. Our nation ranks an unenviable 45th on the list.

Even South Africa, a very poor nation by Western standards and only decades removed from apartheid and bantustans, is attempting to provide universal health care for its masses.

In Asia, Japan has free universal health care, and China and India, with their incomprehensible (to an American) problems of poverty, overcrowding, and squalor, are committed to the morality of the concept that a man, woman, or child is entitled to basic health care-not because he or she has a Blue Cross card, but because he or she, as a citizen of the nation, has an unalienable right to be free from sickness, debilitation, and pain.

Not so here, but one can hope that will soon change.

The United States, the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation on earth, ranks 45th in life expectancy, partly because privatized health care is unavailable to millions.
 
We should adopt a single payer nationalized system and seek to eliminate the immoral disparity between medical services available to the poor on the one hand, and those available to the prosperous or wealthy on the other.

Label the single payer universal health care system that must come "socialized medicine", if you wish.

Socialized medicine--a pejorative term only among brainwashed Americans---would be a good thing.  

And if the Third Circuit should once again rule in favor of CBS, the case could make its way back to the Supreme Court, assuming that the F.C.C. refuses to give up the fight... .