From: John Beckett 

Phil Payne  wrote in message
news::
> Pretty nasty.  How about posing "thumbs up" over the body of
someone just
> beaten to death?

You're preaching to the choir on that one! I'm quite happy to call the
Liberation of Iraq the Invasion of Iraq, and to denounce the subsequenct
civilian deaths, and other nasty side effects.

The people posing with brutalised and dead prisoners are denouncing
themselves as evil and stupid. I can vaguely see how such pathetic actions
came to occur - you need to imbue a certain barbaric and un-thinking streak
in soldiers if you want them to risk life and limb while following orders
and killing other humans. However, the posing is still evil and stupid.

BTW I think 3 to 6 months imprisonment is about the right punishment for
each of the participants. Their superiors and Government leaders should get
10 years either for encouraging the actions, or for not discouraging them.
They should also get life for stupidity.

I follow the thoughts proposed here by Antti: Even if we choose to not
judge the merits of whether the prisoners should have been abused, surely
the dumbest member of the US military could see that photographing the
whole disgrace was going to lead to BIG trouble. If taking photos was part
of the humiliation, why use working cameras!??

What about the US intelligence system? Why didn't someone contemplate all
the ways the Iraq invasion could back fire on the US?

John

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