By Alison@Creekside
When Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan complained about young boys being kidnapped and sodomized by Afghan soldiers and interpreters inside Canadian Forward Operating Base Wilson in Kandahar, they were informed by their superiors to look the other way because it was a “cultural difference.” One reported incident of “cultural difference” left a young boy with “his bowel and lower intestines falling out of his body,” but according to the Canadian Forces National Investigation Servies report this May, it was apparently none of our business.
When Obama rushed through confirmation of Rumsfeld’s black ops General to head up the new surge in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal’s involvement in the prisoner abuse scandal at Camp Nama, the detention centre he commanded in Baghdad, was questioned but it was apparently none of our business :
“Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will [the Red Cross] ever be allowed in here?’ And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in: they won’t have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators.”
It was eventually broken open from the inside by brave men like Captain Ian Fishback, Marc Garlasco, formerly of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and now with Human Rights Watch, and Maj. General Antonio M. Taguba :
“Yasser tearfully described that when he reached the top of the steps ‘the party began . . . . They started to put the [muzzle] of the rifle [and] the wood from the broom into [my anus]. They entered my privates from behind.’ . . . Yasser estimated that he was penetrated five or six times during this initial sodomy incident and saw blood ‘all over my feet’ through a small hole in the hood covering his eyes.” – by Physicians for Human Rights’ “Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” a report containing firsthand accounts of men who endured torture by U.S. personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.
In Sodomized to Protect Our Freedoms, Allan Uthman at Alternet questions the motive behind our new obsession with waterboarding:
Would we really need debate on the torture question if we discussed the numerous acts of sodomy instead of the nuances of waterboarding?
Just once, I’d like to hear one of these American Enterprise Institute psychos, the ones that always trot out to defend the neocons’ freakish obsessions, have to defend shoving a flashlight up a guy’s ass. I want to hear Frank Gaffney or Jonah Goldberg tell me why I shouldn’t be fucking mortified that raping prisoners was considered within tolerable interrogation practices by my country. I want Glenn Beck to justify butt-raping a suspect.
What’s so sick about it is that the sexual nature of the torture seems so unnecessary. I mean, even if we were going to torture them, we could have stuck to waterboarding, pulling some fingernails or just beating the shit out of them.
But menstrual blood smeared on their faces? Rape? What kind of people do that?The upshot is this: America is the country that rapes its prisoners. We’re sex criminals. That’s our thing now. And Obama’s refusal to “look back,” i.e. prosecute these incredibly serious crimes, ensures that it’s our permanent legacy. No national reputation can survive this simply by shrugging it off.
And when we talk about torture, we stick to waterboarding, because nobody, not even the “liberals,” are willing to face what we’ve done.
NYT :
“NATO approved a reorganization of its command structure in Afghanistan on Tuesday to better coordinate the war. The Obama administration wanted the change to improve command efficiency over the NATO forces there, known as the International Security Assistance Force.
“NATO agreed to establish a new Intermediate Joint Headquarters in Kabul under an American Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, to manage the day-to-day war. General Rodriguez will continue to report to the top American military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.”
Ass-raping and the torture of children for freedom and prosperity. Is it our business yet?
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