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Photos of alleged abuse by unit given to New Yorker reporter. By JERRY LYNOTT jlynott@leader.net Already reeling from a U.S. Army report that concluded soldiers of the 320th Military Police Battalion abused Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, the Ashley-based Army reserve unit drew more notoriety in The New Yorker over photos the magazine says show 320th soldiers using dogs to terrorize a naked prisoner. In the magazine's online version of a story titled "Chain of Command" by investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh, the author says he was given new digital photos by a member of the 320th. "The...

"The authorities also executed numerous inmates at Abu Ghraib, al-Makasib, and other prisons, including long term untried political detainees and convicted prisoners. Some were apparently tortured first. Relatives reported that the body of 'Abd al-Wahed al-Rifa'i, hanged in March after two years in detention without trial, bore marks of torture when they collected it on March 26 from the General Security Directorate in Baghdad. Thirteen Abu Ghraib detainees, including students, were executed in August, and twenty-one prisoners convicted by special courts of killing several security agents were executed in October, including Falah Ahmad Hussain, Muhsin Yassin Kadhim, and Baqer Jassim...

WHEN President Bush told the world that abuses at Abu Ghraib prison do not reflect American values, he was right. The best American values, in spirit if not always in practice, respect human life, dignity and the rule of law. But some of what happened at Abu Ghraib, specifically the sexualized humiliations, may reflect American culture, especially in the instance of the naked human pyramid, which is nearly iconographic within the adolescent Zeitgeist that spawned our current generation of soldiers. The images from Abu Ghraib, now irreversibly tattooed on the Arab brain, were every frat-house cliche magnified. The human...

<p>May 11, 2004 -- THE events in Abu Ghraib prison shamed America and our military. The mistreatment of prisoners is utterly unacceptable. And we haven't accepted it. As a nation, we've taken responsibility for the tragic actions of a few. Our military has been investigating the misdeeds for months. The initial report was brutally frank. There's no hint of a whitewash. The guilty parties will be called to justice.</p>

Why Iraq Is Becoming Vietnam Liberals have long dreamed of turning our occupation of Iraq into another Vietnam, a scar on the face of America that they could revel in. I believe in many ways, they are succeeding. Their latest victory is their success in turning incidents of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison into an indictment of American foreign policy and the President. Our Defense Secretary was dragged before a motley group of Senatorial inquisitors, many of whom don’t have the moral standing to tie his shoe, much less interrogate him. The “scandal” is the Mai Lai massacre to...

Hack, The abuse and humiliation actually took place at 3 prisons in the Baghdad area. This was not done by accident, it was a planned, systematic way to break down the prisoners will to resist any interrogation, degrade them and then blackmail them into working for US Intelligence. The pictures were taken as a way to intimidate the prisoner and then keep them working as low level collectors (if they did not the pictures would have been released to their family and tribes) Videos were also made as a way to record the "success" to be used as a teaching...

Giving Aid & Comfort, Part 2. What can one say? When it rains, it pours. And this last week, it has been mana from heaven for those who hate America. If all the Jane Fonda’s, John Kerry’s, Osama Bin Laden’s and Saddam Hussein’s of the world had convened a meeting to devise a propaganda campaign to hurt America and her defenders, they could not, in their wildest dreams, have concocted anything as effective as Abu Ghraib Prison. In a fit of blinding stupidity a handful of morons did what legions of Saddam Fehdayen could never do. They stained the reputation...

Donald Rumsfeld likes to be in total control. He wants to know all the details, including the precise interrogation techniques used on enemy prisoners. Since 9/11 he has insisted on personally signing off on the harsher methods used to squeeze suspected terrorists held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The conservative hard-liners at the Department of Justice have given the secretary of Defense a lot of leeway. It does not violate the spirit of the Geneva Conventions, the lawyers have told Rumsfeld, to put prisoners in ever-more-painful "stress positions" or keep them standing for hours on end, to...

In his latest election-year stunt to undermine the Bush administration -- and our national resolve to finish the job in Iraq -- John Kerry has launched a petition calling for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Kerry claims that Secretary Rumsfeld should be held personally responsible for the actions of a few soldiers in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison who humiliated a group of the captive terrorists in their search for "actionable intelligence." This is the same John F. Kerry, by the way, who has alternately employed claims of his Vietnam wartime heroism and wartime criminality to catapult himself...

From Monday's White House press briefing: JEFF GANNON, TALON NEWS: In your denunciations of the Abu Ghraib photos, you've used words like "sickening," "disgusting" and "reprehensible." Will you have any adjectives left to adequately describe the pictures from Saddam's rape rooms and torture chambers? And will Americans ever see those images? MR. McCLELLAN: I'm glad you brought that up, Jeff, because the President talks about that often. We did remove a brutal regime from power that was responsible for mass graves and torture chambers and rape rooms. And this was a regime that encouraged and tolerated that kind of activity....

Nowadays the hate-America theme is rising to a crescendo on the isolated but abhorrent actions of a few renegade soldiers at an Iraqi POW camp. America's enemies both here and abroad desire that we fall on our knees in abject humility and shame over these isolated actions of abuse. No amount of penance will suffice. Of course, the sanctimonious accusations of shame by our enemies (and the Muslim world) readily come from those whose hands drip with blood and slaughter of countless innocents. It is a ludicrous scene to witness American politicians jumping on the blame-America bandwagon aside our enemies....

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US First Lady Laura Bush says she was deeply saddened by the scandal over US troops' abuse of Iraq prisoners. Saying the abuses made her "sad, really sad," the first lady told ABC television: "To be perfectly frank I can't bear to look at the ones that have been in the newspaper. "It is really, really sad, I mean, it is sad. I think we -- we agonize as each of those pictures come out and as we see them. It is a picture we don't want the rest of the world to have of us," she...

Soldiers' Warnings Ignored Failures: The blame for what happened at Abu Ghraib goes far beyond the military police, intelligence soldiers say. "May 9, 2004 WIESBADEN, Germany - The two military intelligence soldiers, assigned interrogation duties at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, were young, relatively new to the Army and had only one day of training on how to pry information from high-value prisoners. But almost immediately on their arrival in Iraq, say the two members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, they recognized that what was happening around them was wrong, morally and legally..."

Amidst all the apologies, I want to suggest we all (Hillary Clinton here) take a deep breath and consider something that no one in the administration or Congress has (publicly) considered: The POW photos are having an unintended effect on the Arab "Street" and the "resistance." By now, everyone pretty well knows that Arab societies base everything on power and perceptions of power. In part, that is why so many Freepers and conservatives got their panties in a bunch because it appeared in public like "apologizing" was a sign of weakness. Ah, my friends. You aren't thinking like an Arab....

<p>The shocking photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners that rocked the world were snapped by a former pizza-house manager who grew up exposed to gruesome pictures of dead people, according to a published report.</p> <p>Spc. Sabrina Harman, 26, an MP at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, has been accused by the Army of taking pictures of a nude human pyramid.</p>

Last Thursday, Pres. Bush publicly apologized to Jordan's King Abdullah II for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. I wasn't aware that Abdullah was the king of Iraq. Apparently, when America screws up, our leader must apologize to any and every Moslem in the world. I must have missed King Abdullah II's apology for the butchering of four American civilians in Fallujah. King Abdullah is a "moderate, pro-U.S." Arab, which means that his statements on behalf of genocidal terrorists are couched in restrained tones, and with an Oxbridge accent. And while being abused by Congress during his testimony...

A former POW in Iraq names an Ashley-based reservist in a complaint against the U.S. Army. And he compared the treatment at his camp to the abuse that's making international news. Hossam Shaltout said widespread mistreatment from soldiers in Camp Bucca, where he was imprisoned last year, was as inhumane as that depicted in recent photos from Camp Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Shaltout described Camp Bucca as a "torture camp" where soldiers beat and humiliated prisoners, had them lie naked atop each other or pose in sexual positions. "They wanted us to have sex with each other," Shaltout said. He...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The prisoner abuse scandal has so tarnished the Army's 800th Military Police Brigade that soldiers slated to receive an Army Bronze Star medal have been dropped from the list, the brigade's commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, said Sunday. "The vast majority of fine, outstanding soldiers in the brigade are paying dearly," Karpinski told The Associated Press in an e-mail. After the Army started its investigation into abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib penitentiary, "many, many" of the soldiers' recommendations for the Army medal were downgraded, said Karpinski, whose 2,800-member brigade operated 12 U.S. prisons and...

From Thucydides to Victor Hanson historians teach us that war is deeply rooted in human nature. All utopian efforts to banish it have failed, and trying to do so usually worsens its consequences. Similarly the noble effort to wage war carefully, sparing innocents, also has a downside: it may be perceived as weakness by adversaries. It can, thereby, deepen the horrors it was meant to limit. Harsh and sometimes brutal treatment of war prisoners is a timeless, universal phenomenon. Those who profess shock at what occurred at Abu Ghraib prison are either foolishly naïve or hypocritical. There is something suspect...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The head of U.S. detention centers in Iraq said Saturday the military has no plans to close the Abu Ghraib prison and blamed the abuse of detainees there on poor leadership and disregard for the rules. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller said the United States does intend to cut the number of prisoners to help improve conditions but added that ``we will continue to conduct interrogation missions at the Abu Ghraib facility.''Miller was named head of prisons in April after Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the commander of Abu Ghraib, was suspended amid allegations of abuse by U.S....