Instead, the world is
(or pretends to be) horrified
by
the
abuse and humiliation of some 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.
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.
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.)
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.
For US to be 'insensitive' to certain cultures is not necessarily a bad thing, Mark Steyn, Irish Times, May 10, 2004.
"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."
Why I cannot share the outrage over Abu Ghraib, Mark Steyn, Irish Times, May 17, 2004.
"I cannot share the "outrage" over Abu Ghraib of some at this paper
...
And, as I endeavoured to explain last week, most Americans don't share the "outrage". ...
As Senator Zell Miller, a Democrat, put it: "Why is it that there's more indignation over a photo of a prisoner with underwear on his head than over the video of a young American with no head at all?"
...
The best rule of politics is this: Don't make the perfect the enemy of the good."
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."
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.
The shaming of America: George Bush's boast of shutting down Saddam Hussein's torture chambers in Iraq rings hollow now
by Conor O'Clery, Irish Times, Saturday, May 8, 2004
(also here).
A typical piece of Irish media hysteria that
shows the inability of so many westerners to make proper comparisons between their own (inevitably flawed) societies
and genuinely unfree totalitarian states.
To compare Abu Ghraib under the US to
Abu Ghraib under Saddam is simply absurd, and shows a real lack of imagination.
US soldiers urinate on dead Taliban, in a video that emerged in Jan 2012,
to much hysterical reaction from jihadis, the left, and enemies of America.
And yet, I am unappalled.
These brave men are true modern heroes,
killing Taliban scum
on behalf of all free people.
Given the disgusting nature of the way the enemy fights,
a little disrespect like this
is a perfectly understandable way of letting off steam when these sadistic child-killing monsters are finally caught.
Russian pro-Putin state propaganda
RT
titles this,
with no sense of irony:
"Abu Ghraib, Part II?"
In other words, no one gets killed, and yet the world goes hysterical.
Pissing on dead Taliban should probably not be policy,
but anyone who knows the first thing about the Taliban will feel a little bit like this:
You Pee for Us All, Marine, 16 Jan 2012.
Bill O'Reilly interviews Chris Kyle, January 5, 2012.
O'REILLY:
"What struck me in the book ... is that you considered the people you were killing, the Iraqis you were killing, quote, unquote, "savages.""
KYLE: "The people I was killing. Not just Iraqis."
O'REILLY: "Why did you consider the enemy savages?"
KYLE: "From their actions. The way they lived day-to-day, as far as the violence they commit on American troops, the beheadings, the rape of innocent villagers and townspeople that they go into just to intimidate them. They live by putting fear into other people's hearts, and civilized people just don't act that way."
O'REILLY: "You were so effective in Iraq that they put $20,000 on your head. If one of them had killed you, they would have been paid $20,000. Do you believe that they considered you a savage?"
KYLE: "I'm sure they did. Honestly, I don't know, and I really don't care."
I love his disinterest in the opinions of jihadists!
Terrible news:
Chris Kyle killed, Feb 2013. Very sad. RIP. Total western hero.
"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.