Best of the Web Today - May 5, 2004
By JAMES TARANTO
Abu Ghraib and the American Way
President Bush went on Al Arabiya television this morning and strongly denounced the abuse of Iraqi prisoners:
First, I want to tell the people of the Middle East that the practices that took place in that prison are abhorrent and they don't represent America. They represent the actions of a few people. Secondly, it's important for people to understand that in a democracy that there will be a full investigation. In other words, we want to know the truth.
In our country, when there's an allegation of abuse--more than an allegation in this case, actual abuse, we saw the pictures--there will be a full investigation and justice will be delivered. We have a presumption of innocent until you're guilty in our system, but the system will be transparent, it will be open and people will see the results.
This is a serious matter. It's a matter that reflects badly on my country. Our citizens in America are appalled by what they saw, just like people in the Middle East are appalled. We share the same deep concerns. And we will find the truth, we will fully investigate. The world will see the investigation and justice will be served.
NBC News has obtained a copy of the Army's investigation into the abuses, conducted by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. Excerpts:
6. I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts:
a. Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
b. Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
c. Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
d. Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
e. Forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear;
f. Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
g. Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
h. Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
i. Writing "I am a Rapest" (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;
j. Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee's neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture;
k. A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee;
l. Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;
m. Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees.
Reuters reports that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who is in charge of reforming the U.S. military detention system in Iraq, offered both an apology and a promise: "I would like to personally apologize to the people of Iraq for the actions of a small number of leaders and soldiers who have violated our policies," he said. And: "I will personally guarantee that this will not happen again in any of the operations we have for detention and intelligence gathering."
All in all, we'd have to say the American system is working rather well. The abuses have led to a thorough investigation, an apology, a vow from the president himself that justice will be done, and a promise that reforms are in the works so this won't happen again. The New York Times has an interview with Hayder Sabbar Abd, who says he spent six months in U.S.-run prisons. Most soldiers "treated him well and with respect," he says, until November, "when punishment for a prisoner fight at Abu Ghraib degenerated into torture":
That night, he said, he and six other inmates were beaten, stripped naked (a particularly deep humiliation in the Arab world), forced to pile on top of one another, to straddle one another's backs naked, to simulate oral sex. American guards wrote words like "rapist" on their skin with Magic Marker, he said.
The Times says Abd plans to travel home to Nasiriya, but he won't stay there:
He said he would be too ashamed. He wants the American government to pay compensation. He said he felt he needed to move out of Iraq, and despite it all, he said he would not refuse an offer to move to America.
He wants to move to America. That says it all, doesn't it?
This Sounds Pretty Abusive
"Abu Ghraib Prison Population to Be Cut in Half"--headline, Associated Press, May 4
Hand to Hand
"One of his friends was dead, 12 others lay wounded and the four soldiers still left standing were surrounded and out of ammunition," the Associated Press reports from Najaf, Iraq:
So Salvadoran Cpl. Samuel Toloza said a prayer, whipped out his knife and charged the Iraqi gunmen.
In one of the only known instances of hand-to-hand combat in the Iraq conflict, Cpl. Toloza stabbed several attackers swarming around a comrade. The stunned assailants backed away momentarily, just as a relief column came to the unit's rescue.
"We never considered surrender. I was trained to fight until the end," said the 25-year-old corporal, one of 380 soldiers from El Salvador whose heroism is being cited just as other members of the multinational force in Iraq are facing criticism.
El Salvador is part of what John Kerry calls the "fraudulent coalition."
But Tree in Kentucky Criticizes It
"Bush in Ohio Defends War"--headline, CNN.com, May 5
Potemkin Protest
The Brown and White, Lehigh University's student newspaper, reports on a hilarious "protest" some students staged at the Bethlehem, Pa., campus:
When his students refused to take his midterm exam last Friday, professor Ted Morgan was not completely surprised; this had happened before in this class.
The students of Movements and Legacies of the 1960s, a political science class, refused to take an exam because they felt it was hypocritical in light of what they had learned all semester.
"It was not so much protesting that specific exam or that class," Clare Burchi, '06, said. "It was more protesting the whole idea of exams and writing down all that we had learned into a little blue book."
The paper notes that "Morgan will offer the students two alternative assignments in place of the exam. Students can write individual assessments of why they protested in light of what they learned about the 1960s movements. The students are also asked to give a full report of the actions they took to put what they learned into action." Such a protest would be more impressive if the students boycotted an exam in an actual academic class where they would pay a price for doing so.
Kerry's Latest Vietnam Troubles
"A group of former officers who commanded John F. Kerry in Vietnam more than three decades ago declared yesterday that they oppose his candidacy for president, challenged him to release more of his military and medical records, and said Kerry should be denied the White House because of his 1971 allegations that some superiors had committed 'war crimes,' " the Boston Globe reports from Washington:
''I do not believe John Kerry is fit to be commander in chief," said retired Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, who helped organize the news conference and oversaw all of the swift boats in Vietnam at the time Kerry commanded one of those crafts. ''This is not a political issue; it is a matter of his judgment, truthfulness, reliability, loyalty, and trust--all absolute tenets of command." . . .
The senator's campaign has long weathered criticism from some Vietnam veterans over Kerry's actions in Vietnam and as an antiwar leader, but yesterday's event was unprecedented because it included nearly all of his commanding officers.
The group calls itself Swift Veterans for Truth. Meanwhile, National Review's Byron York has tracked down Louis Letson, the physician who treated Kerry for the wound that led to his first, disputed Purple Heart. Letson, in writing, describes the examination:
I have a very clear memory of an incident which occurred while I was the Medical Officer at Naval Support Facility, Cam Ranh Bay.
John Kerry was a (jg), the OinC [officer in charge] or skipper of a Swift boat, newly arrived in Vietnam. On the night of December 2 [1968], he was on patrol north of Cam Ranh, up near Nha Trang area. The next day he came to sick bay, the medical facility, for treatment of a wound that had occurred that night.
The story he told was different from what his crewmen had to say about that night. According to Kerry, they had been engaged in a fire fight, receiving small arms fire from on shore. He said that his injury resulted from this enemy action.
Some of his crew confided that they did not receive any fire from shore, but that Kerry had fired a mortar round at close range to some rocks on shore. The crewman thought that the injury was caused by a fragment ricocheting from that mortar round when it struck the rocks.
That seemed to fit the injury which I treated.
What I saw was a small piece of metal sticking very superficially in the skin of Kerry's arm. The metal fragment measured about 1 cm. in length and was about 2 or 3 mm in diameter. It certainly did not look like a round from a rifle.
I simply removed the piece of metal by lifting it out of the skin with forceps. I doubt that it penetrated more than 3 or 4 mm. It did not require probing to find it, did not require any anesthesia to remove it, and did not require any sutures to close the wound.
The wound was covered with a bandaid.
Not [sic] other injuries were reported and I do not recall that there was any reported damage to the boat.
In itself this story is only mildly damning, but given the degree to which Kerry is running on his Vietnam service, further scrutiny of it is both inevitable and legitimate.
Was Frist First?
Yesterday we noted that John Kerry had described himself visiting the Sea of Galilee and regaling fellow Holy Land tourists with his reading of the Sermon on the Mount. It turns out Kerry isn't the first senator to tell such a story. In a January 2003 profile of Sen. Bill Frist, who'd just been named Senate majority leader, David Brooks, then of The Weekly Standard, wrote: "On one memorable day during a tour of Israel, Senator Frist stood on the spot where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount and read the sermon to the tour group. He electrified them with his simple faith and devotion."
The Daily Howler, a left-leaning Web site that fancies itself the scourge of spinmeisters, had some fun at Brooks's and Frist's expense:
Would any pol except Bill Frist traffic in tales like that last jaw-dropper--a tale in which the humble Frist is compared to Jesus himself? (On the Mount!) You'd really have to be a kook to spread a story like that around--but it fits right into the standard Frist bio. (By the way, what other solon would even dream of reciting the Sermon to tourists?) But then, weirdo tales pop up with Frist all the time.
We couldn't find anything at the Howler's site on Kerry's reciting the Sermon on the Mount.
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Not Too Brite--CXLI
"A Texas man is suspected of using a bubble bath by candlelight and soothing music as bait to set a date with death for his wife," Reuters reports from Dallas. "Police said on Monday that William Joseph Wolfe, an emergency room nurse, has been arrested for attempted murder after he tried to electrocute his wife in the bathtub by dropping a radio into her bathwater--a method of execution he researched on the Internet."
Oddly Enough!
(For an explanation of the "Not Too Brite" series, click here.)
Smearing Karen Hughes
A little over a year ago, it was revealed that John Kerry is French-looking, and this has been a political liability for him ever since. But Robert Furs, "a university student and columnist/editor for Counterbias.com," writes on the Angry Left DemocraticUnderground.com that Kerry is fighting back--by smearing an erstwhile aide to President Bush:
Karen Hughes, one of George W. Bush's chief propagandists, was herself born in France.
"I understand that Karen Hughes was born in Paris," Kerry stated, on the March 27, 2004, broadcast of MSNBC's Hardball. The host, Chris Matthews, a Democrat with Republican leanings (or is it the other way around?), found the comment funny--as most likely did every non-Bushist watching.
That's right! One of Bush's fiercest attack dogs, sent out with her new book to pounce on Kerry while consistently flattering her friend George to extremes, is a cheese-eating surrender monkey.
Indeed it turns out Hughes was born in Paris. But according to a 2002 USA Today article, she was an Army brat. That's right, she was born in France because her father had chosen to go to that part of the world to protect the surrender monkeys from Soviet depredations. Kerry and Furs's attack on Karen Hughes's patriotism truly marks a new low in American politics.
Is This Really a Job for Frat Boys?
"Greek Pledges to Probe Defense Contracts"--headline, Middle East Newsline, May 5
The Telltale Tank
"A large anhydrous ammonia tank helped Sarpy County Sheriff's deputies bust a suspected methamphetamine lab Tuesday night," reports Omaha's KETV:
Anhydrous ammonia is the key ingredient in meth, and officers spotted a 9,600-gallon tank in front of a house at 151st and Chandler streets. The owners had run a hose from the tank inside the house, according to deputies.
Several arrests were made.
There is a lesson here. If you ever find yourself in such a situation, make sure you have an excuse ready for the cops. Here's one that's never failed us: "This isn't my 9,600-gallon anhydrous ammonia tank, officer. I was just holding it for some dude." |
