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Can I just ask the mods: why is this on Above Top Secret? There is no conspiricy angle whatsoever. Just some US military propoganda followed by the usual futile arguments. I completely fail to see why it is on these forums.
Also, US military propaganda? What gives you that idea?
Originally posted by WestPoint23
Umm... there doesn't have to be a conspiracy angle to it, its a news story concerning the Iraq war, look up the purpose of this forum.
Also, US military propaganda? What gives you that idea?
Otherwise one might get the idea that you disbelieve anything non negative about the US military.
And since were on the topic of propaganda, have you seen some of the threads started on here? And you have the gall to call this thread propaganda!? :shk:
Originally posted by Mdv2
Agree, in the end it was all for oil and for nothing else.
Iraq is going to end up as Vietnam did, the great US army retreating from the battle.
I thought the Ami's would have learned something from Vietnam.
Originally posted by Gembelindo
I have a friend who has a tutor that's serving there and he said that the words that come of the moughts of militarymen is are words of truth, only the truth and nothing but the truth plus some trashtalk
America can just nuke the hell any country.
you cant just say that everything that the US Military says is Propaganda! I have a friend who has a tutor that's serving there and he said that the words that come of the moughts of militarymen is are words of truth, only the truth and nothing but the truth plus some trashtalk that will deter any Iraqi Insurgent!
America can just nuke the hell any country.
Perhaps you dont even own a television to see whats going on there
Study shows TV news viewers have misperceptions about Iraq war
A just-released report by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy (PIPA) finds a majority of respondents have misperceptions about the war.
"The more closely you followed Fox, the more misperceptions you had," said Clay Ramsay, PIPA research director. "No other news outlet came anywhere near that."
Originally posted by Icarus Rising
Just goes to show that when you mess with the Marines, you better be ready to get handed your butt in your cap.
Thank you, WP23, for posting a story in its entirety about the kind of tactics encountered by our brave troops. I agree that coordinated attacks like these are more the norm than the exception, while the car bombings begin and end most stories about the ongoing insurgency in Iraq.
Brave?!? What bravery is that, sending planes and helis, and tanks to do all the dirty work. An adult beating up a 10 year old child is bravery?I think that your concept of bravery is a little bit distorced.
You also use the bogus claim, "Using tanks and helicopters to do the dirty work!"
He told us not to believe any of the stuff in the media, that the military in Iraq is "...winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people over there"
One of our Drill Sergeants told us it smells like "...pi** and sh**" over there." None of these sergeants made Iraq sound like a nice place to be. In fact, they made it sound like a total sh**box.
After three months in Baghdad, Ben Griffin told his commander that he was no longer prepared to fight alongside American forces.
Ben Griffin told commanders that he thought the Iraq war was illegal.
He said he had witnessed "dozens of illegal acts" by US troops, claiming they viewed all Iraqis as "untermenschen" - the Nazi term for races regarded as sub-human.
... the Abu Ghraib case, as if the actions of a few U.S. soldiers represent the entire military.
The new classified military documents offer a chilling picture of what happened at Abu Ghraib -- including detailed reports that U.S. troops and translators sodomized and raped Iraqi prisoners. The secret files -- 106 "annexes" that the Defense Department withheld from the Taguba report last spring -- include nearly 6,000 pages of internal Army memos and e-mails, reports on prison riots and escapes, and sworn statements by soldiers, officers, private contractors and detainees. The files depict a prison in complete chaos. Prisoners were fed bug-infested food and forced to live in squalid conditions; detainees and U.S. soldiers alike were killed and wounded in nightly mortar attacks; and loyalists of Saddam Hussein served as guards in the facility, apparently smuggling weapons to prisoners inside.
During the Muslim holy period of Ramadan, Hilas saw Spc. Charles Graner Jr. and an unnamed "helper" tie a detainee to a bed around midnight. "They . . . inserted the phosphoric light in his ass, and he was yelling for God's help," the prisoner testified. Again, the same female soldier photographed the torture.
COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: About the situation at Abu Ghraib, I was first informed by an email that I received on classified – what they call “classified traffic.” I opened it up late one night on the 12th of January of 2004. And it was from the commander of the Criminal Investigation Division. He sent me an email and said, “Ma'am, I just want to make you aware, I'm going in to brief the C.G.,” meaning General Sanchez, “on the progress of the investigation at Abu Ghraib. This involves the allegations of abuse and the photographs.” That was the first I heard of it.
I did not receive that email or phone call or a message from General Sanchez himself, who would ultimately attempt to hold me fully responsible for this, but from the C.I.D. Commander. And I was alarmed at just that short email. I was not in Baghdad at the time. I was at another location very close to the Iranian border, so we made arrangements to leave at the crack of dawn to drive down to Abu Ghraib to see what we could find out about this ongoing investigation and went through the battalion over to Cell Block 1A. The people who would normally be working on any shift were not working. The sergeant that I spoke to said that their records had been seized by the investigators, and they started a new log to account for prisoners, make sure that their meals were on time, those kind of things, and he pointed out a memo that was posted on a column just outside of their small administrative office. And the memorandum was signed by the Secretary of Defense, and –
AMY GOODMAN: By Donald Rumsfeld.
COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: By Donald Rumsfeld. And said – it discussed interrogation techniques that were authorized. It was one page. It talked about stress positions, noise and light discipline, the use of music, disrupting sleep patterns, those kind of techniques. But there was a handwritten note out to the side. And this was a copy. It was a photocopy of the original, I would imagine. But it was unusual that an interrogation memorandum would be posted inside of a detention cell block, because interrogations were not conducted in the cell block.
AMY GOODMAN: This was the command of Donald Rumsfeld himself?
COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Talking about the techniques?
COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: The techniques that were allowed. And there was a note – handwritten note out to the side of where the list of tactics, interrogation tactics were. It said, "Make sure this happens." And it seemed to be in the same handwriting as the signature. That's what I could say about the memorandum.
AMY GOODMAN: People understood it to be from Rumsfeld?
COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: Yes, they certainly did. And I never heard a word – I did – certainly did see the reference to photographs in the original email, but when I asked the soldier, when I asked the sergeant, when I asked the commanders out at Abu Ghraib, what did they know about, they knew nothing about it. They had heard that there were some photographs, but they did not know any specifics.
The mistreatment of prisoners has led to a loss of moral authority for the occupying forces. But there are claims of other abuses of power by the US troops. Widespread stealing by American soldiers during raids are common knowledge in Iraq, but they are rarely reported.
SHEIK SAMMI ABBAS AL ARAWI: I see the soldier American and go...
Sheikh Sammi Abbas al Arawi is a former general in Saddam's army. He'd been imprisoned by Saddam Hussein. When the Americans arrived last year he reported to them and was given a letter acknowledging he'd been an enemy of the former regime and therefore a friend of the new one. He ran a construction company which had contracts with the coalition. Then the Americans raided his house and he says they stole US$65,000 from him.
SHEIK SAMMI ABBAS AL ARAWI (Translation): The raid took place at 2am on the night of 1 March 2004. We were asleep at night when we heard the sound of explosions inside the house. I got up and came face to face with the American in the hallway. They tied us up and gathered the women and children in the kitchen, guarding them and aiming their weapons at them. After that they searched the house in a very ugly manner, like savages. They smashed all the televisions, electrical appliances like fridges and freezers and wooden things. And they stole $65,750 from me, and 15,350,000 Iraqi dinars and all 280 grams of the women's gold jewellery.
The experience has changed his opinion of the Americans. Iraqis believe the money is either taken by the soldiers themselves or used by the Americans to pay informers.
SHEIK SAMMI ABBAS AL ARAWI (Translation): God's mercy exists. Through your television I say to Bush, Rumsfeld and the commander of the coalition forces in Iraq... I hope they'll hear what I have to say. If they don't return the money looted from my place and compensate me materially and emotionally for my losses, I will resist the occupation with all my might. And I'll recruit my clan and all my friends to resist them.
Is his platoon leader, the one who gave him the commendation? Is Rumsfeld? Are any of the MI or CIA guys who set him on his course?
In the months leading up to the riot, the insurgency had taken hold and the Americans were desperate for intelligence to stop the killing of their troops. In September 2003 General Geoffrey Miller, who was in charge of Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, was sent to Abu Ghraib to upgrade interrogation techniques. When Javal Davis arrived, soon after Miller's new regime had started, things were already far from normal.
JAVAL DAVIS: When we took over from the 72nd MP Company, you know, the guys were butt naked in the jail cells and had like panties on their head. I'm like, I'd never seen that before. I'm like, "Why are these guys naked?" Our company commander was even like, "What's going on with all the nakedness? Why are all these guys naked?" And they're answering back to them from the other MP company was, "Hey, this is what the MI guys - this is what they want", you know. That's how it goes, so.
Putting MI or military intelligence in charge of the MPs was one of General Miller's recommendations, even though it runs counter to army doctrine.
....
KEN DAVIS: Graner [a soldier convicted of abuse at Abu Ghraib] actually came to me early in October and had told me that they're making him do things that are legally and morally, he feels are legally and morally wrong.
REPORTER: He said that?
KEN DAVIS: He did, and that was early October. Late October is when all the pictures, a lot of the events started taking place.
When people slate Graner and these seven as monsters, you have to ask yourself who created the environment for this to go on? Who opened the door for these people, these young soldiers to walk through? Those are the monsters.
On November 16, 2003, a few weeks after the torture had begun, Graner got a commendation from his platoon leader, Captain Brinson.
STATEMENT: "Corporal Graner, you are doing a fine job in tier one. You have received many accolades from the military intelligence units here and specifically from Lieutenant Colonel Jordan.
Continue to perform to this level and you will help us succeed at our overall mission".
KEN DAVIS: For someone, after they've done all this, to get a counselling statement praising the work you're doing on Tier 1A in the hard site, you're not going to stop. You're going to keep going and you're going to take it up a notch. You're going to take it up a level, especially when you're getting high fives and that-a-boys and "keep up the great work", you know, from officers of military intelligence and OGA.
Charles Graner is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence.
Well, I can look at Iraq for myself on a map. Although unlike many of your countrymen, I can actually find it unaided. And why would I bother to compare it to a US state for an estimate of its size? Asking me to do that is but a tiny example of the insularity that is so offensive to citizens of the wider world. I'm much more likely to compare it to the size of France.
Now, let's look at the size of Iraq. Iraq is twice the size of Idaho. If you don't know how large Idaho is, go look at a map of the United States.
The Bush administration justified its 2003 invasion of Iraq as necessary to eliminate Hussein's purported stockpile of WMD.
"As matters now stand, the WMD investigation has gone as far as feasible," Duelfer wrote in an an addendum to the report he issued last fall. "After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted."
That, in case you didn't notice, is an admission that anything that does turn up was either lost or accounted for.
Another addendum noted that military forces in Iraq may continue to find small numbers of degraded chemical weapons most likely misplaced or improperly destroyed before 1991.(my emphasis)
That takes a lot of time and is very tiring (something the "experts" on the news channels never seem to mention). You can fit over 7 million people into New York City alone. You know how many New York City's you could fit into Iraq? Quite a few. Which means a few dozen thousand soldiers is a very small number. So if you've got less than 100,000 soldiers doing the work to search for these WMD, a very slow and tedious process, especially considering since much of the country is big ole' desert, AND doing the fighting, well, you can see that it will take a long time for the United States to find WMD in Iraq.
The media makes out as if it should've taken weeks or months. It could take years (and probably will).
More important, Duelfer believes that Iraq destroyed its WMD in the summer of 1991, and finds nothing to document any programmes after that time. Far from confirming Tony Blair's reported reading that Saddam "had every intention of reviving his WMD programmes", the report suggests Saddam gave his officials the impression that he was interested in resuming programmes "if sanctions were lifted". This is the new straw to which the governments concerned have begun to cling.
Personally, I think the rest of the world should be more concerned with what we think of them, rather than us be concerned with what they think of us.
As you can see, any claims that the U.S. went into Iraq "illegally," are ridiculous. It was perfectly legal. You can also see that the reasons the U.S. went into Iraq were far, FAR different from the reasons Nazi Germany started warfare.
as an argument is a non-starter. Plus, it's that old BS about the US being the greatest country in the world. You know what? Some people, perhaps even a majority, might not agree. They might even find it offensive. It always makes me laugh when I hear Americans say that everyone wants to live there. I certainly don't. I worked there for a few years and couldn't wait to get out. And if you didn't trash the economies of all your Latin American and Caribbean neighbours, you wouldn't have so many illegal immigrants, because they'd be able to get jobs at home rather than have to slip across the border to do the minimum-wage crap there.
As for your complaint that the U.S. doesn't sign up to the International Criminal Court, in case you haven't noticed, this is the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. We have our own system of justice. We do not adhere to the "system" of the world, which doesn't even make sense anyhow, considering that different countries have different views on things.
But the all-out diplomatic effort in New York continued, and on 31 January
Ms Gun, a translator of Chinese at GCHQ, the government's communications
monitoring organisation in Cheltenham, came across an email from Frank Koza,
a senior official of the National Security Agency, GCHQ's (much bigger)
equivalent in the US. It sought British help in spying on the UN delegations
of six nations which were temporary members of the Security Council. Their
votes were seen as potentially making the difference between success or
failure for a second resolution.
Whether Britain complied with the request or not is unknown, but the email
found its way to a Sunday newspaper after Ms Gun showed it to a friend with
journalistic contacts. Once it was published, she immediately confessed her
part and acknowledged having breached the Official Secrets Act. Why the
Government dropped its case against her, therefore, can be explained only by
looking at her planned defence, which was that the war was illegal. The only
way this could have been countered was by making public Lord Goldsmith's
final opinion, the one on which Britain went to war.
Dude, so many of the posters on this board who AREN'T American disagree. Even people who aren't vocal like me think the US is a big fat bully going into other countries for oil. Everyone knows about the network of torture prisons, the rendition flights, Abu Ghraib... and people like me know about how this little network of companies is profiteering massively from the war. THAT's your image across the world. Anyway, I've spent more than enough time on this nonsense, I have things to do. Laters.
As for our "image" to the world, it seems fine I think.
Originally posted by WheelsRCool
He told us not to believe any of the stuff in the media, that the military in Iraq is "...winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people over there" (quoting him).
One of our Drill Sergeants told us it smells like "...pi** and sh**" over there." None of these sergeants made Iraq sound like a nice place to be. In fact, they made it sound like a total sh**box.
If you can bury an entire field's worth of aircraft in Iraq, you can definitely easily hide something like WMD, which whether the WMD are chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, biological weapons, etc....are a heck of a lot smaller than aircraft. A bio weapon could be hidden in a refrigerator, or buried in a little box.
The media makes out as if it should've taken weeks or months. It could take years (and probably will).
Another thing blown out of proportion is the WMD itself. WMD were not the main reason we entered Iraq. They were number 3 on the list. The main reason for taking out Saddam was he was defying international law and the UN mandates prescribed in 17 UN resolutions.
www.cnn.com...
"Powell's speech, delivered on February 5, 2003, made the case for the war by presenting U.S. intelligence that purported to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction."
6. Saddam Hussein's removal would help in the war on terror by initiating the democratization of the Middle East. (Imagine that, nobody ever talks about this one and recent events prove this to be true)
7. Saddam Hussein is a ruthless dictator and war criminal, he and those members of his régime need to be brought to account for their crimes on humanity (confirmed by The UN Commission on Human Rights, the UN General Assembly, the International Red Cross and Amnesty International).
Torture
Executions and Repression of Political Opposition
Disappearances, including over 16,000 Kurds and Shiites
The above stated reasons were presented to the United Nations and were rejected. Because of this, Bush decided the United States would go in without the UN.
For example, the French people are not the same thing as American people, only they speak French.
The United States does not sign up to any international justice system because we are our own country.
Personally, I think the rest of the world should be more concerned with what we think of them, rather than us be concerned with what they think of us.
hardly surprising really since many of the population centres have been bombed back to the stone-age. If your Drill Sergeant thinks it's a 'sh**box, imagine what your average Iraqi civilian family is having to put up with.
Originally posted by WestPoint23
Do you have any idea of the military capabilities that the US has? If you did you would know that those cities affected by missiles or bombs have not even been scratched when you consider what we could have done. If you want to see “stone age” bombing go check out German and Japanese cities after WWII.
www.globalissues.org...
# The US military spending was almost two-fifths of the total.
# The US military spending was almost 7 times larger than the Chinese budget, the second largest spender.
# The US military budget was almost 29 times as large as the combined spending of the six “rogue” states (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $14.65 billion.
# It was more than the combined spending of the next 14 nations.
Originally posted by Gembelindo
Westpoint is right, i checked out an 8 hour long documentary about world war II and it takes up an average of 200 bombs to hit a single factory on American Daylight Raids. However the Brittish use a different method, they use incindenary bombs without regard for civilian casualties and turning hamburg into a roofless city literaly! Infact World war 2 air raid were so unprecise that bombs would actually kill more civilian lives rather than thr Nazis/Ittes/Japs or vichy and other axis dudes.