I won't hold my breath waiting for the Malkin right to gleefully post these new Abu Ghraib pics the way they've splashed the anti-Muslim cartoons all over their blog pages, on the theory that these, too represent the Western style free exercise of speech and the free flow of information, however inflammatory that information might be to the Muslim world... No, the right will argue that these pics shouldn't be seen, because they will cause additional violence and endanger U.S. troops serving abroad ... as if the Muhammad cartoons don't ...
The Bush administration is currently locked in a legal battle with the ACLU to keep the photos from being seen inside the U.S. But they've already been shown on Australian public television, and they're all over the Internet, as well as hitting the American press in bits and pieces. Et tu, secular humanists of the right...?
Never mind that the underlying issue with the Abu Ghraib photos is that they appear to show U.S. practicing torture on prisoners of war -- something we accused Saddam Hussein of doing to his own people and which the U.N. is now laying at our door. And that the photos are evidence, therefore, of potential crimes. The cartoons, on the other hand, are gratuitous garbage evidencing nothing but the naivete of a bunch of dillettente Danish illustrators, plus the ignorance and malevolence of a bunch of right wing bloggers and European newspapers. Funny enough, both will have the same result on the "Muslim street," but for entirely different reasons...
The Malkin brigades have an interest in covering for the U.S. administration, so they don't want the torutre pictures shown. They enjoy baiting Muslims, so they're more than happy to endanger U.S. troops with their in-your-face postings of the Muhammad cartoons.
Go figure...
In fact, doesn't this quote from Stop the ACLU rings absolutely true... for the Muhammad cartoons???
The public has seen enough, and while a simple description of the photos could have been satisfactory to the court of public opinion, the international media decided that graphic photos should be released instead. And the “hate America groups” are eating it up! Indeed... Even the Bush administration has been more consistent than its base on this one, opposing the release of both the cartoons and these latest Abu Ghraib photos. But keep in mind that the administration has a good reason to want the photos held back: the torture accusations being leveled at the U.S. by the U.N. presently have to do, not with Abu Ghraib, but with Guantanamo, where many of the same practices seen in Iraq appear to have originated. In other words, for all the right's braying about the U.S. having discovered and prosecuted the outliers behind Abu Ghraib, the fact remains that the outliers were not a bunch of kids from West Virginia, who somehow picked up the exact same interrogation and humliation techniques used at Gitmo, thousands of miles and a world, militarily, away -- but rather the top civilians in the Pentagon, who cooked up the atrocities with the help of virulently racist, anti-Arab pop psychology, neocon Stalinism (remember "they only understand force?") and Pentagon incompeteace in spinning a small black operation out of control. The roots of these abuses lie at the feet of the neocon cult of Cambone, Feith, Wolfowitz, Pearl, Rumsfeld and their three- and four-star underlings, plus useful idiots like Alberto Gonzalez, not with a bunch of part-time soldiers from the American South. That's the real scandal here. And that's why the U.S. doesn't want you to see those prison pictures. The cartoons hurt the West more broadly. These pics are all about us. Previous: Tags: Abu Ghraib, Torture, Pictures Muhammad cartoon, Cartoons, Religion, Islam, Muslims, Denmark, Jyllands-Posten,Right wing, Hypocrisy |
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