Breaking Hearts and Minds - one victim at a time
America's new MO - threats of violence and intimidation.
In the early hours of Jan. 6, Laith al-Ani stood in a jail near the Baghdad airport waiting to be released by the American military after two years and three months in captivity.Before Mr. Ani was released, American guards asked him to select a sentence to describe his treatment by his captors.
He struggled to quell his hope. Other prisoners had gotten as far as the gate only to be brought back inside, he said, and he feared that would happen to him as punishment for letting his family discuss his case with a reporter.
But as the morning light grew, the American guards moved Mr. Ani, a 31-year-old father of two young children, methodically toward freedom. They swapped his yellow prison suit for street clothes, he said. They snipped off his white plastic identification bracelet. They scanned his irises into their database.
Then, shortly before 9 a.m., Mr. Ani said, he was brought to a table for one last step. He was handed a form and asked to place a check mark next to the sentence that best described how he had been treated:
“I didn’t go through any abuse during detention,” read the first option, in Arabic.
“I have gone through abuse during detention,” read the second.
In the room, he said, stood three American guards carrying the type of electric stun devices that Mr. Ani and other detainees said had been used on them for infractions as minor as speaking out of turn.
“Even the translator told me to sign the first answer,” said Mr. Ani, who gave a copy of his form to The New York Times. “I asked him what happens if I sign the second one, and he raised his hands,” as if to say, Who knows?
“I thought if I don’t sign the first one I am not going to get out of this place.”
Shoving the memories of his detention aside, he checked the first box and minutes later was running through a cold rain to his waiting parents. “My heart was beating so hard,” he said. “You can’t believe how I cried.”
His crime?
Through it all, Mr. Ani was never actually charged with a crime; he said he was questioned only once during his more than two years at the camp.
Welcome to America's evil empire - breaking hearts and minds, one victim at a time.
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Thanks, Susan
I'm sitting in a quiet apartment, far away from the war. I don't have any close friends who are one of the troops. So, it would seem I would have an almost impossible time trying to understand why an American would abuse people this way.
I believe it's important for us to understand why these Americans, or anyone, really, would put anyone in such a situation.
It would be important to understand the why, because I would want them to cease and desist. I want to say, "I understand why you feel you need to threaten these people, or why you thought beating them or torturing them would help. But, you were wrong about that. You were wrong in these various ways. So, please, see the error of your ways and stop."
I could imagine, too, that someone might say in their defense, "This is something that needs to be done there, because of the special circumstances of threat there. The same Americans would never think to do the same here to any of us Americans."
I would not be so sure that an army allowing itself to torture and brutalize non-Americans could not be made to do the same, given an argument to them, or some other inducements, to Americans.
It is easy to think that the death squads and torture camps Americans create for others who go against the will of their leaders today, would not do the same to Americans who would go against the wishes of their leaders tomorrow.
Whe the New York Times writes and publishes these stories of what Americans are doing, do they also give the argument that they are aberant or unusual situations that won't happen again?
I would hope the Times would make some kind of an argument that this is unacceptable in any case and for anyone to be treated.
steven andresen
War leads to atrocities, 'our side' has to be taught that the enemy is evil, beyond reasoning, willing to send their own toddler or child strapped with a bomb to kill you, our soldiers are taught that they are sub human, the rest becomes easy.
Stupidity is no excuse. Poverty is no excuse. Here's hoping these troops of ours get massacred over there, so we don't have to deal with them here. There are no jobs, and these idiots will just drift into criminal activity.
Anybody stupid enough to put on a uniform to make Dick Cheney richer deserves to die.
American military personel can expect the most brutal type of torture in the next war - Pike's third world war.
All my posts will from this point forth contain a verse from the talmud; too many still don't know what this secret book says.
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1. "All vows, oaths, promises, engagements, and swearing, which, beginning this very day or reconciliation till the next day of reconciliation, we intend to vow, promise, swear, and bind ourselves to fulfill, we repent of beforehand; let them be illegalized, acquitted, annihilated, abolished, valueless, unimportant. Our vows shall be no vows, and our oaths no oaths at all." -Schulchan Qruch, Edit. 1, 136.
This is the Jewish Kol Nidre ("All Vows") Oath which has even been set to morbid Jewish music, and is often heard on the radio. It is even sung as a chant at each Yom Kippur [Jewish New Year service]. Yet the oaths of Talmudic Jews are still accepted in courts of law around the world as though the oaths were actually binding on the Jews, which the Talmud itself denies!
The Jews have their homeland --- let them go there, in the greatest haste, now, or suffer the consequences.