The Bush administration continues to tell us that everything is going just fine in Iraq, that the insurgency is in its "death throes", and all our prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere are being treated like royalty.
Let's do a little reality check. I just stumbled upon a speech made last year by journalist and author Seymour Hersh (who uncovered the Abu Ghraib torture scandal) at the ACLU's 2004 Membership Conference.
Here is an excerpt regarding Abu Ghraib:
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Some of the worst things that happened that you don’t know about. OK? Videos. 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], which is about 30 miles from Baghdad - 30 kilometers, maybe, just 20 miles, I'm not sure whether it's - anyway. 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 [video] recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. That your government has, and they’re in total terror it’s going to come out. It’s impossible to say to yourself, how did we get there, who are we, who are these people that sent us there.
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[Read entire speech and watch video.]
But the Bush administration and its followers insist that we should be pointing fingers instead at Amnesty International.
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