"I always tell people Abu Ghraib was Apocalypse Now meets The Shining,"

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=robotripping_at_abu_ghraib

Robo-Tripping at Abu Ghraib

Soldiers' videos and photos show how obscene games and simulated violent acts became part of everyday life and led to a culture of abuse in Iraq's detention facilities.

Tara McKelvey | June 15, 2007 | web only



Adapted from Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War (Carroll & Graf)

One fall morning in 2003, Sam Provance was wandering around a building complex, the 519th/325th Logistical Support Area of Abu Ghraib, and found himself alone in a small room. Part of the area had been blown out -- in some kind of mortar explosion, apparently. "There were brains splattered across the wall. The wall was red -- a really old, dark, dried-blood red. There were pieces of matter in it," he says, sitting at a table in the Hartley Inn Restaurant in Carmichaels, Pennsylvania, more than three years after the incident. "I was like, 'Oh, my God, where am I?'"
At 32, Provance has blond hair, blue eyes, and a slightly dated Goth look with a black, lace-up tunic-style shirt and "Harley Davidson boots," as he describes them. A former student at Holmes Bible College in Greenville, South Carolina, Provance is now an avid reader of the late Anton Szandor LaVey, author of The Satanic Bible. Like many whistleblowers, Provance is unconventional.

He belongs to a small group of individuals who alerted the world to the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib and in U.S.-run detention facilities in Iraq. From September 2003 to February 2004, Provance says he saw how detainees were mistreated at Abu Ghraib: A 16-year-old boy, for example, was hooded, shackled, and interrogated not because he knew anything about the insurgency but because it would upset an Iraqi general, Hamid Zabar, who was his father. Provance also heard about beatings and assaults of other detainees. He reported the abuses, but he says no one aggressively pursued the leads. Out of frustration, he agreed to appear on ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings on May 18, 2004.

Three days later, Provance was reprimanded, he told lawmakers on Capitol Hill at a briefing, "Protecting National Security Whistleblowers in the Post-9/11 Era," for the House Committee on Government Reform on February 14, 2006. "There were all sorts of intimidating acts against him," says Scott Horton, a human-rights lawyer who met with Provance in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2004. "His commander wanted to court-martial him."

[babylonsister]

1. K&R! nt

[NNN0LHI]

2. Yep n/t

[BrklynLiberal]

3. IT was the inevitable trickle down effect of what was happening at the top in DC.

Everyone of them, Bush included, would have been a part of the torturing and
humiliating if they had been given the opportunity.
It so obvious to me that they all, from Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Norquist and the whole goddamn bunch of Nazis, would have liked nothing better than to have been a part of that disgusting process.
They all would have been shining stars at the Nazi death camps.




Nero Bush

[DemReadingDU]

4. morning kick

[Solly Mack]

5. already recommended it

let's keep all the reports of America's war crimes front and center