Politics - Iraq - Abu Ghraib

Abu Ghraib prison

The world has little interest in the decades of torture, rape, mutilation, beheading and mass killing of innocents at Abu Ghraib prison under Saddam.

Instead, the world is (or pretends to be) horrified by the abuse and humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib by some undisciplined US troops after liberation (who were severely punished).

Abu Ghraib is a clear example of the world focusing on minor crimes by democracies rather than major crimes by tyrannies. Psychologically, it seems easier for people to do this. This is the law of human nature that The most criticised societies are the best ones.

Summary

	Number killed:	Fits into popular global narrative?	Percentage of coverage (looking at Google Images):	Films about it:	Guards disciplined by the authorities for abusing prisoners:	Reaction by Islamic world:
Abu Ghraib under Saddam	30,000	No.	Under 1 percent.	None.	None. Guards can torture and kill prisoners freely.	No detectable anger.
Abu Ghraib scandal under US	0	Yes. Very much so.	More than 99 percent.	One. Two. Three. Four. And more.	11 convictions. Up to 10 years prison. Expulsion from army. Demotion of superiors.	Crazed fury. Beheadings. Torture. Burning people alive. Rape. Suicide bombings of innocents. Bombings of mosques, churches, weddings, funerals, markets, public transport. Killing of thousands of men, women and children. The bombing by jihadis of Abu Ghraib itself, killing large numbers of prisoners.

Abu Ghraib under Saddam

Video of torture at Abu Ghraib prison.
Thousands of innocents were raped, tortured and executed here by the Baathist regime.

Abu Ghraib Prison (now Baghdad Central Prison), site of thousands of tortures, rapes and mass executions under Saddam.
Video of the torturers of Abu Ghraib Prison:
- Depicts: breaking arms, cutting off fingers, cutting off hands, cutting off tongues.
- Description of video: Seeing, and Believing: The torture tapes the media are ignoring by Nick Schulz, June 17, 2004
- Screen shot
American Enterprise Institute
- AEI meeting on the above video, June 8, 2004.
- Transcript of AEI meeting: "Much of the recent controversy surrounding Abu Ghraib has made only vague reference to the prison's nightmarish past. Under Saddam Hussein, some 30,000 people were executed there"
- AEI copy of the video:
- Video of AEI meeting itself: (Needs codec from here.)
Foundation for Defense of Democracies (or via here) hosts the above torture video.
- Saddam-era torture videos
- Beating prisoners, throwing prisoners off roof:
- Blowing prisoners up, shooting them, beheading:
- Chemical weapons attack on civilians:
- Screen shots

Video of torture at Abu Ghraib prison.

Abu Ghraib under the US (after the liberation of Iraq in 2003)

US soldiers' abuse of some prisoners came to light in 2004.
Discussion:
- Abu Ghraib quiz
- New video reveals real torture scandal: Saddam's daily horrors make America's Abu Ghraib abuses seem almost trivial by David Kupelian, June 21, 2004
- It's America's War by David Gelernter, 24 May 2004
- Reporting For The Enemy by Deborah Orin, 15 June 2004 - On how the media aren't interested in the tortures and killings of Abu Ghraib.
- Left Eye's View - John O'Sullivan, May 18, 2004, on the media coverage of Abu Ghraib.
Torturous apology by Mark Steyn, May 11, 2004 (also here): "to be coerced into apologizing more generally is very foolish. What happened at Abu Ghraib is terrible because it's an offense to American values, not Arab ones. It's ridiculous to insist that America has to apologize to Arab thugocracies in which what's merely simulated in those photographs is done for real every day of the week."
Christopher Hitchens, September 5, 2005, nails it: "Let me begin with a simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad." I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day."
Photos of the torture and killing of prisoners by the Iraqi "resistance"
Tortured screams ring out as Iraqis take over Abu Ghraib, Sept 2006 - A glimpse of reality. Iraqis take over Abu Ghraib and immediately conditions get far worse, and immediately left-wing complaints about those conditions will get less in number, not more.
- "Some of the small number of prisoners who remained in the jail after the Americans left said they had pleaded to go with their departing captors, rather than be left in the hands of Iraqi guards. 'The Americans were better than the Iraqis. They treated us better.' ... 'Please help us, we want the human rights officers, we want the Americans to come back' ... Haleem Aleulami .. said the Americans had treated him better when they ran the jail. ... 'We preferred the Americans. We asked to move with them to Baghdad airport because we knew the treatment would be changed because we know what the Iraqis are. When the Americans left everything changed.'"
- As I say, a glimpse of reality.

The Abu Ghraib courts-martial

The undisciplined US troops at Abu Ghraib received long prison sentences, longer than one gets for actual genocide under international law.

Charles Graner got 10 years for prisoner abuse. He did not kill anyone.
Ivan Frederick got 8 years for prisoner abuse. He did not kill anyone.

I'm not opposed to jailing them. What I'm opposed to is the incredible anti-American hysteria about this rather minor incident, which killed nobody. This hysteria only fed the grievances of the Iraqi jihad resistance, which killed tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children in 2004-08.

"Shamefully we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management."
- Useful idiot Ted Kennedy demonstrates the simple-minded moral equivalence of the left, May 2004. Search for quote.

"The inability to distinguish between categories of evil is evidence of the inability to distinguish between evil and good. That Ted Kennedy lacks such capacity does not surprise. What does surprise is that Kennedy's colleagues have not condemned his slander of the American military. He is equating the suffering of millions and the deaths of hundreds of thousands under Saddam, with the actions of a handful of rogue soldiers."
- Hugh Hewitt replies.