US Prison Abuse Painted on Wall

[seemslikeadream]

A prisoner dressed and hooded in black with his hands wired to electric cables is seen painted on a wall in a Baghdad suburb. To his right is a white-hooded Statue of Liberty, one of its hands wired up to the detainee. Photo by Middle East Online.

For the Record: 2 June 2004, Wednesday.
Middle East Online
By Virginie Locussol

Amid the squalor of an impoverished Baghdad suburb, an artist has been driven to paint a mural reflecting the betrayal felt by many Iraqis towards US-style democracy in the wake of a prison abuse scandal.

A prisoner dressed and hooded in black with his hands wired to electric cables has been painted on a wall in the capital's teeming Shiite Muslim area of Sadr City.

To his right is a white-hooded Statue of Liberty, one of its hands wired up to the detainee.

"This is freedom for (US President George W.) Bush," has been written alongside the painting, the handiwork of 31-year-old artist Salaheddin Sallat.

A US soldier has been sentenced to one year in jail for his part in the abuse and another six court martial trials are expected to take place next month in the case that has drawn international condemnation and suspicion that blame lies higher up.

http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=35348

[Just Me]

1. That image is sure getting around!!!

It's all over the globe!!!

[saigon68]

2. And About Time Too

This was planned by more than Graner and Lynndie.

[seemslikeadream]

6. I believe there's the makings of a great coffee table book

I'll start a collection!



Spazito, this one is amazing thanks

[Kid_A]

3. There's one heart and mind we didn't do a very good job of winning over...

Why does he hate America so much? Oh right... the invasion. Yeah, I'd probably hate the president of a country who invaded my country and then tortured my soldiers, too. I mean it's not like Americans have ever had to fight off a hostile imperial presence...

[Spazito]

4. Here is another set of murals on the main highway in Iran..

People walk past mural paintings in Tehran depicting scenes from the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at the Abu Ghraib. The number of cases of misconduct by US soldiers against detainees and civilians in Iraq (news - web sites) and Afghanistan (news - web sites) now numbers at least 91, and is likely higher, an army official said.(AFP/Behrouz Mehri)

[Kid_A]

5. Can someone translate the Arabic

on the picture on the right?

[On the Road]

12. In the Picture on the Right,

the bottom word looks like "Iraq." The top word seems to have an "m" and an "r", and might be "America."

[Barkley]

11. Great Posting!

:kick:

[seemslikeadream]

7. What have we done?

Monday May 24, 2004
The Guardian


To have the American effort in Iraq summed up by these images must seem, to those who saw some justification in a war that did overthrow one of the monster tyrants of modern times, "unfair". A war, an occupation, is inevitably a huge tapestry of actions. What makes some actions representative and others not? The issue is not whether they are done by individuals (ie, not by "everybody"). All acts are done by individuals. The question is not whether the torture was the work of a few individuals but whether it was systematic. Authorised. Condoned. Covered up. It was - all of the above. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely.

Considered in this light, the photographs are us. That is, they are representative of distinctive policies and of the fundamental corruptions of colonial rule. The Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, committed identical atrocities and practised torture and sexual humiliation on despised, recalcitrant natives. Add to this corruption, the mystifying, near-total unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq to deal with the complex realities of an Iraq after its "liberation" - that is, conquest. And add to that the overarching, distinctive doctrines of the Bush administration, namely that the United States has embarked on an endless war (against a protean enemy called "terrorism"), and that those detained in this war are "unlawful combatants" - a policy enunciated by Rumsfeld as early as January 2002 - and therefore "do not have any rights" under the Geneva convention, and you have a perfect recipe for the cruelties and crimes committed against the thousands incarcerated without charges and access to lawyers in American-run prisons that have been set up as part of the response to the attack of September 11 2001. Endless war produces the option of endless detention, which is subject to no judicial review.

So, then, the real issue is not the photographs but what the photographs reveal to have happened to "suspects" in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs were taken - with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless captives. German soldiers in the second world war took photographs of the atrocities they were committing in Poland and Russia, but snapshots in which the executioners placed themselves among their victims are exceedingly rare. (See a book just published, Photographing the Holocaust by Janina Struk.) If there is something comparable to what these pictures show it would be some of the photographs - collected in a book entitled Without Sanctuary - of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880s and 1930s, which show smalltown Americans, no doubt most of them church-going, respectable citizens, grinning, beneath the naked mutilated body of a black man or woman hanging behind them from a tree. The lynching photographs were souvenirs of a collective action whose participants felt perfectly justified in what they had done. So are the pictures from Abu Ghraib.

more
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1223344,00.html

[seemslikeadream]

8. "Up to then, there had been only words, which are easier to cover up..."

Words matter to me. They can stand for Truth. And some are True.

From the article:

EXCERPT...

The pictures will not go away. That is the nature of the digital world in which we live. Indeed, it seems they were necessary to get our leaders to acknowledge that they had a problem on their hands. After all, the conclusions of reports compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other reports by journalists and protests by humanitarian organizations about the atrocious punishments inflicted on ''detainees'' and ''suspected terrorists'' in prisons run by the American military, first in Afghanistan and later in Iraq, have been circulating for more than a year. It seems doubtful that such reports were read by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice or Rumsfeld. Apparently it took the photographs to get their attention, when it became clear they could not be suppressed; it was the photographs that made all this ''real'' to Bush and his associates. Up to then, there had been only words, which are easier to cover up in our age of infinite digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination, and so much easier to forget.

So now the pictures will continue to ''assault'' us -- as many Americans are bound to feel. Will people get used to them? Some Americans are already saying they have seen enough. Not, however, the rest of the world. Endless war: endless stream of photographs. Will editors now debate whether showing more of them, or showing them uncropped (which, with some of the best-known images, like that of a hooded man on a box, gives a different and in some instances more appalling view), would be in ''bad taste'' or too implicitly political? By ''political,'' read: critical of the Bush administration's imperial project. For there can be no doubt that the photographs damage, as Rumsfeld testified, ''the reputation of the honorable men and women of the armed forces who are courageously and responsibly and professionally defending our freedom across the globe.'' This damage -- to our reputation, our image, our success as the lone superpower -- is what the Bush administration principally deplores. How the protection of ''our freedom'' -- the freedom of 5 percent of humanity -- came to require having American soldiers ''across the globe'' is hardly debated by our elected officials.

CONTINUED...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/23PRISONS.html?pagewanted=1

[Spazito]

9. What is it that makes those who perpetrate horrors on other...

human beings continue to record their actions? This goes back in history to murals, wall paintings, etc. It is not new by any means. Why the need to "glorify" inhumane acts, exhibit them in all their graphic horror? What does it say about us?

[seemslikeadream]

10. Kinda like that gun georgie is keeping in his office

Every time he looks at it, holds it, he experiences that warm cozy feeling all over again.

[saigon68]

13. HE NEEDS TO CARESS A FIREARM TO OBTAIN AROUSAL

He also needs violence.

Its all in the DSM

[saigon68]

14. more pics

HOODED PROTEST



A protester demonstrates in London against the Iraq (news - web sites) war. Britain was shaken
by a report that its soldiers systematically beat and tortured a group of prisoners in Iraq in the
presence of an officer, contradicting claims that any British abuses were caused by rogue
soldiers(AFP/Alessandro Abbonizio

Muslim women call for the release of Iraqi women held in jail in Iraq news - web sites), during a
demonstration outside the U.S. Embassy in central London, May 22, 2004. REUTERS/David
Bebber

A hooded Iraqi detainee appears to be cuffed at both wrists and collapsed over a rail inside the
Abu Ghraib Prison, west of Baghdad in this undated photo. Hundreds of unreleased photographs
and short digital videos depict U.S. soldiers using a wide variety of abusive techniques at Iraq
news - web sites)'s Abu Ghraib prison and appearing to enjoy the mistreatment, The Washington
Post reported on May 21, 2004. (Washington Post via Reuters)


Iraqi artist Salah Edine Sallat puts the final touches to a wall painting based on the US Statue of
Liberty and a widely published photograph of an abused detainee at the Abu Ghraib prison in
Baghdad's Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City.(AFP/Ramzi Haidar)

More

[seemslikeadream]

15. Well you were up early this morning

and I almost missed this!

Thanks saigon68 for always being there