There are those who argue that U.S. officials who authorized waterboarding and who performed waterboarding should not be held criminally accountable, notwithstanding the fact that the U.S. government prosecuted Japanese military personnel who waterboarded U.S. POWs during World War II. Their reasoning goes as follows: Since the president’s attorneys redefined torture to mean only those actions that threaten death or serious injury to bodily organs, waterboarding did not meet that redefinition.

What about rape? It would seem that rape, like waterboarding, would not meet the Bush administration’s redefinition of torture. Rape doesn’t threaten death or serious injury to bodily organs. Should U.S. officials who authorized enhanced interrogation techniques be let off the hook for rapes committed by U.S. officials as part of enhanced interrogations of detainees?

That of course begs the question: Were people raped as part of the U.S. government’s enhanced interrogation techniques?

Well, think back to the Abu Ghrab photos and videos, which depicted sordid sexual acts being committed by U.S. personnel on Iraqi prisoners. You may have forgotten that there was a particular set of photos and videos that were never released to the public because they depicted acts that were apparently much worse than anything that was shown in the photos that were released. Therefore, U.S. officials decided to keep those particular photos and videos under lock and key.

What do those photos and videos reflect? We don’t really know, but according to an article dated July 15, 2004, on Salon.com, Seymour Hersh is quoted as saying in a speech to the ACLU:

Debating about it, ummm ... Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying “Please come and kill me, because of what's happened” and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out.

The Salon article concludes with the following paragraph:

(Update: A reader brought to our attention that the rape of boys at Abu Ghraib has been mentioned in some news accounts of the prisoner abuse evidence. The Telegraph and other news organizations described “a videotape, apparently made by US personnel, is said to show Iraqi guards raping young boys.” The Guardian reported “formal statements by inmates published yesterday describe horrific treatment at the hands of guards, including the rape of a teenage Iraqi boy by an army translator.”)

It should be noted that that batch of photos and videos is a different batch from the ones that the Obama administration is now doing its best to keep secret.

The pentagon spokeman has just denied the Telegraphs claim that these photographs show rape and also denied a previous claim that some of these photos were shown on SBS. I know for a fact both these claims are true. In fact, here is a link to five of the SBS photos:
 http://www.elmundo.es/albumes/2006/02/15/torturas_irak/index.html

The reason the pentagon are able to lie is there are in fact two batches of photographs and videos, one set taken by Spt Charles Graner and one set taken by Spt Sabrina Harman. Why they would lie now when their own investigations and witness testimony has already stated this is incomprehensible.

I personally don't think these photographs and videos should be released to the public. As with all documentation of torture they only serve to demean the victims and encourage similarly venal behaviour. They must however be released to the prosecutors of these crimes. By lying so obviously the Obama regime is complicit in this torture. By failure to prosecute the Obama regime is complicit in these rapes and should themselves face prosecution.



WASHINGTON, May 28 (Reuters) - The Pentagon on Thursday denied a British newspaper report that photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse, whose release U.S. President Barack Obama wants to block, include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the Daily Telegraph newspaper had shown "an inability to get the facts right".

"That news organization has completely mischaracterized the images," Whitman told reporters. "None of the photos in question depict the images that are described in that article."

Thursday's Telegraph quoted retired U.S. Army Major General Antonio Taguba, who conducted a 2004 investigation into abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, as saying the pictures showed "torture, abuse, rape and every indecency."

The newspaper said at least one picture showed an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Others were said to depict sexual assaults with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

In an interview with the New Yorker magazine published in 2007, Taguba was quoted as saying that he saw a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.

Photographs of abuse at the jail outside Baghdad that were published in 2004 damaged the image of the United States as it fought an escalating war against insurgents in Iraq that caused deep resentment throughout the Muslim world.

Whitman said he did not know if the Telegraph had quoted Taguba accurately. But he said he was not aware that any such photographs had been uncovered as part of the investigation into Abu Ghraib or abuses at other prisons.

OBAMA BLOCKING PICTURES' RELEASE

He said the Telegraph also wrongly reported earlier this month that some of the images whose release Obama is trying to block had previously been aired on Australian television.

"I would caution you whenever you see a subsequent story on photos in this particular publication," he told reporters. "They now have, at least on two occasions, demonstrated an inability to get the facts right."

the photos may or may not show rape and until we can see them then ill reserve my judgement until then

but i would say that these people were probably driving cars and destroying the environment so me and my other climate change friends think it was deserved

This is a fairly important story, and I'm a fairly trolled poster, so I'd ask for a tight reign on this thread. Until you do, I will take this comment at face value but am prepared to explain my involvement - and the involvement of an IMC from Indymedia Scotland. You will as always hide eventually that info.

>the photos may or may not show rape and until we can see them then ill reserve my judgement until then

Why would you wish to see photos of rape when other unimpeachable witnesses already have testified that they exist?


>but i would say that these people were probably driving cars and destroying the environment so me and my other climate change friends think it was deserved

Distraction, bullshit, standard PRovocative PRopoganda. I'm developing an immunity to that now, but not on this issue. This is more important than that bullshit, and the editting here is why I won't be publishing the story first here.

I suspect there are a few subtle trolls here, but malcolm is an obvious one.

But I don't think these image should be publicised without the consent of the people in them.

Imagine if the UK was invaded by Iraq and you were raped by Iraqi guards in a prison camp. Would you want images of yourself being raped displayed all round the world, even if your identity was partially obscured? I know I wouldn't. Wouldn't it be illegal to do that anyway? (not that such technicalities would stop them, but still...)

"But I don't think these image should be publicised without the consent of the people in them".

I fully agree. There is no way people like me should see photos and videos like this, Maj Gen Tabuba is 100% correct. That would be just sick when other people have described in words what they show.

What is far sicker though is that this decision by Obama to hide these photos also hides them from legal prosecutors. Some of this is crucial evidence for plaintiffs in civil trials in the US. The current US administration hasn't prosecuted these rapes, murders and worse, so it has no moral or legal right to deny the civil prosecutors, and hopefully in the near future state prosecutors, who do prosecute these crimes photographic evidence of these crimes.

Taguba exposed this a long time ago, under the Bush regime, It only made news today because the Telegraph interviewed him, It is major news that the Pentagon have denied this and smeared the Telegraph. It is an indication that the current US administration have no plans to prosecute these crimes, and that was the only legal defence against a prosecution anywhere else - in Europe for example - of these unpunished crimes.

The only images I want to see are of the abusers leaving court towards prison.

In response to the Telegraph account, Bryan G. Whitman, a deputy assistant secretary of Defense, attacked the newspaper. “That news organization has completely mischaracterized the images," he said. “None of the photos in question depict the images that are described in that article.” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, later in the day, widened the assault to a general one against British journalism. “If I wanted to read a writeup today of how Manchester United fared last night in the Champions League Cup, I might open up a British newspaper,” Gibbs said. “If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I'm not entirely sure it'd be in the first pack of clips I'd pick up.”

The Obama administration’s decision to challenge the Telegraph account presents a dilemma because many of the photographs have already been leaked, and they match the very images that Taguba described and which Pentagon spokesman Whitman denied. The already leaked photographs can be seen at the Web sites of Salon.com, the Sydney Morning Herald of Australia, the Australian Broacasting Corp. Dateline program, and the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

The suppressed photographs and videos are the subject of a Freedom of Information Act litigation brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU prevailed against government claims of secrecy both in the federal district court and in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. (Full disclosure: I supplied a legal expert’s opinion on the Geneva Conventions, which was cited by both courts in reaching their conclusions.) Yesterday, the Justice Department filed papers asking the court to reconsider its decision directing that the photographs be made public. In its papers, the Justice Department suggested it would seek to have the matter reviewed in the Supreme Court if its motion were to be denied.

The immediate pushback against the Telegraph story from the Pentagon, coupled with the decision of White House press secretary Gibbs to chime in, suggests the sensitivity of the issue. The full-scale strike against the Telegraph, the leading conservative quality newspaper in Britain, broadened into an offensive against the whole of British journalism, suggesting the precariousness of the public-relations effort.

The Pentagon spokesperson, Bryan G. Whitman, who came to prominence during the Bush administration, has drawn on standard operating procedures honed during the Rumsfeld era. Instead of offering correction of supposed factual inaccuracies, he has slammed the credibility of the publication itself. Yet his statement is both sweeping and extremely vague, and the claim that none of the photos reflect the descriptions in the article is immediately belied by an examination of the photos that have already been leaked...

Bryan Whitman remains on the job in the Pentagon today. But the effort to suppress the shocking photographs is already failing, as they leak to the public and reliable sources verify their authenticity. A senior military officer told me that in the months before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Pentagon officials engaged in strange maneuvers to avoiding viewing the pictures. That, he noted, didn’t make the photos any less real. But it apparently made it easier for Pentagon officials to dissemble about them. That process hasn’t stopped.

Scott Horton is a law professor and writer on legal and national-security affairs for Harper's magazine and The American Lawyer, among other publications.

While reporting my book, Monstering, I heard about an interpreter who had worked at the prison and allegedly raped a 14-year-old boy, and that there was a video or a photograph of the crime that had been recorded by a female soldier. (It wasn’t Lynndie England -- I asked her about it.) Military investigators looked into the alleged crime against the boy – but half-heartedly -- and the investigation was eventually dropped. Since there was no photo or video that had been released to the public, it was not a priority.

So what happened to the alleged perpetrator? I spoke (briefly) with the interpreter who was accused of raping the boy as part of research for my book. After returning from Iraq, the interpreter had gotten a job at a LensCrafters in a shopping mall in suburban Maryland, and when I saw him, he was in good spirits, walking through the mall with a take-out pizza in a cardboard box. No word on the 14-year-old boy, who has been released from the prison. The military investigators who were looking into this alleged crime did not put much effort into finding him, at least based on the notes from the investigations that I saw. It was clear that this incident, however terrible, was not a priority for the investigators, apparently because no pictures of what had happened were released to the public. That is a travesty of justice: Government officials should black out the identities of the boy and of the other people who are depicted in the photographs so they are not humiliated once again by their abusers, and then release the images, and all of the horror that they depict, to the public. Maybe then there will be investigations -- serious ones this time -- and, if warranted, prosecutions.