Sunday, April 09, 2006
Prisoners are Vanishing in Iraq
This news is as upsetting as it is unsurprising.
The British newspaper "The Observer" has printed comments by Blair's Personal Envoy on Human Rights Ann Clywd. It seems that coalition forces have been arresting lots of innocent people and then torturing them.
She's gives the story of an old woman who dissapeared and was found in an American-run jail months later. This woman was only found after Clywd personally talked to Steven Hadley, Bremer and Wolfowitz. Clywd's concern basically comes down to, "What about everyone else?"
There could be hundreds of people that were rounded up, sent to abusive prisons, had their lives ruined, are humiliated, and have now become the exact kind of person that would wrap themselves in explosives and walk into a marketplace.
How does this happen? Who's doing this? All good questions. Clywd's answer is that the Americans are not going around and arresting random people and torturing them out of cruelty or malice. Actually, the Americans are going around and arresting random people and torturing them out of sheer incompetence. Bad translators, no knowledge of Arabic phonetics, and general mismanagement are probably the real culprits.
Yet another example of the dangerous incompetnce that has become a trademark of our friends in the White House and the Pentagon.
From an article in the Observer
The British newspaper "The Observer" has printed comments by Blair's Personal Envoy on Human Rights Ann Clywd. It seems that coalition forces have been arresting lots of innocent people and then torturing them.
She's gives the story of an old woman who dissapeared and was found in an American-run jail months later. This woman was only found after Clywd personally talked to Steven Hadley, Bremer and Wolfowitz. Clywd's concern basically comes down to, "What about everyone else?"
There could be hundreds of people that were rounded up, sent to abusive prisons, had their lives ruined, are humiliated, and have now become the exact kind of person that would wrap themselves in explosives and walk into a marketplace.
How does this happen? Who's doing this? All good questions. Clywd's answer is that the Americans are not going around and arresting random people and torturing them out of cruelty or malice. Actually, the Americans are going around and arresting random people and torturing them out of sheer incompetence. Bad translators, no knowledge of Arabic phonetics, and general mismanagement are probably the real culprits.
Yet another example of the dangerous incompetnce that has become a trademark of our friends in the White House and the Pentagon.
From an article in the Observer
