The pixie witch

Lynndie England, 21, a rail worker’s daughter, comes from a trailer park in Fort Ashby, West Virginia, which locals proudly call “a backwoods world”. She faces a court martial, but at home she is toasted as a hero. At the dingy Corner Club Saloon they think she has done nothing wrong.

“To the country boys here, if you’re a different nationality, a different race, you’re sub-human. That’s the way girls like Lynndie are raised.

“Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here you’re hunting something. Over there, they’re hunting Iraqis.”

Speaking of turkey shoots: Footage of a US helicopter shooting unarmed Iraqis has surfaced.

The French cable television station Canal Plus on Tuesday will broadcast images, stolen in Iraq, of a US army helicopter killing three Iraqis, one of them wounded, who do not appear to be posing any threat.

Watch the video

Lynndie’s mother says:

“She told me nothing happened which wasn’t ordered by higher up,”

“They are trying to pin all of this on the lower ranks. My daughter was just following orders. I think there’s a conspiracy.”

That’s quite correct. The military has tossed Lynndie to the pit bulls. They will scapegoat her as much as possible, saying it was just a bunch of out-of-control trailer trash who did all this and we are simply aghast and mortified at what happened.

It appears all the solidiers in the prisons were rural Anglo-Saxons. Not a single person of color that I’ve seen. What a coincidence.

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Critics pressure Rumsfeld to resign

Front page, LA Times website

Pressure mounted today on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to step down, as a clash erupted between the White House and the Pentagon over the handling of the Iraq prison abuse investigation.

Also

U.S. decries faked pictures (the photos of apparent rape of Iraqi women)

“We have done a thorough investigation of the origin of these photos and have conclusive evidence that they originated on a pornographic website”

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More photos, these from the Washington Post

Click here for all the photos

Mixed in with more than 1,000 digital pictures
obtained by The Washington Post are photographs of naked men,
apparently prisoners, sprawled on top of one another while soldiers
stand around them. There is another photograph of a naked man with a
dark hood over his head, handcuffed to a cell door. And another of a
naked man handcuffed to a bunk bed, his arms splayed so wide that his
back is arched. A pair of women’s underwear covers his head.

The photographs were taken
by several digital cameras and loaded onto compact discs, which
circulated among soldiers in the 372nd Military Police Company, an Army
Reserve unit based in Cresaptown, Md.

So, the alleged humans responsible for this
were just passing out the photos like party favors, huh? And none of
their commanding officers had a clue. Yeah, right.

Bush spanks Rumsfeld

President Bush privately admonished Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday, a senior White House official said, as other U.S. officials blamed the Pentagon for failing to act on repeated recommendations to improve conditions for thousands of Iraqi detainees and release those not charged with crimes.

But
what we’ve seen apparently is mild compared to what is out there.. As I
type this I’m listening to Democracy Now, where Amy Goodman quotes the
Red Cross saying, “the photos are bad, but ours are worse”.

Red Cross says repeatedly warned U.S. on Iraq jail

The
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Thursday it had
repeatedly urged the United States to take “corrective action” at a
Baghdad jail at the center of a scandal over abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

Yet Dubya pretends he didn’t know anything…

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Iraqi prisoner photos. Extraordinary interest.

This story is generating interest unlike any since I started Polizeros.

My web referral logs show four times more traffic to PoliZeros than normal. Among other things, these logs detail the search phrases being used by people finding this site from a search engine - and virtually all of them yesterday were looking for the Iraqi prisoner and apparent rape of Iraqi women by soldiers story and photos. All manner of different phrases are being used, but everyone is looking for the same thing. I’ve never seen this  volume of searching for what, in effect, is one story - abuse of Iraqis by Americans in uniform.

This site averages about 1,200 unique visitors a day. Yesterday was probably closer to 5,000 (I don’t have the final numbers yet.)

Call it the shifting of tectonic plates, call it a phase shift, call it what you will - something big is happening. The mask is gone. The ugliness of US foreign policy is obvious to all. Correct that, the US is now being forced to see the ugliness, something most the rest of the world already knows too well.

The danger of course is, as the Bushies lose their grip on power, they will do something extreme to hang on.

The Republican National Convention is in NYC on Aug 29. Every, and I do mean every, even vaguely progressive group is mobilizing to be there. I’d thought just a few weeks ago there might be 500,000 protestors. Given the mobilizations going on now, that figure is now too low. It could easily hit one million; it could be one of the biggest demos in history. Seriously. Be there!

Arab world scorns Bush’s TV ‘apology’

Car bomb near US offices in Baghdad

Outrage over the prisoner torture

In another Arab quarter, some dismissed outrage as the domain of those who are sheltered from Arab reality.

“In order to be shocked, you have to be a Westerner and believe that the world is good, fair, liberal,” Algeria’s influential French-language daily Le Quotidien d’Oran editorialized. “You have to possess a house, a car, the right to go wherever you wish, a wife and be happy. The Arabs do not have all that.”

From the Beeb: The W word - withdrawal

Events in Iraq have been spinning out of control - and out of control of the spinners - so fast on so many fronts that the W word - withdrawal - is now being mentioned.

The Guardian is more acid

This torture started at the very top. A profound racism infects the US and British establishments.

and

If the pictures showed Arab troops humiliating British prisoners, there would be howls of indignation and no one would be rushing to make excuses about their authenticity

And the war machine continues to run rabid

47,000 US soldiers told they will go to Iraq as clashes continue.

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Thousands of Afghani POWs brutally executed, CBC alleges US military complicity

This CBC documentary on war-crimes committed against Afghani prisoners with the complicity of the US military is shocking. It alleges that thousands of Taliban POWs were murdered — most by being locked in baking shipping containers in the middle of the desert, with the survivors brought to a remote place and executed with 30-50 US soldiers in attendance. The source — the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — is hardly known for alarmism or irresponsible journalism.

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Past US diplomats criticize Bush’s handling of Mideast

Over 60 former US diplomats and civil servants signed a letter issued to US President George W. Bush Tuesday, contending that his “unqualified support” for Israeli policies is undermining the United States’ credibility and foreign relations in the region, as well as placing the country’s citizens abroad at risk.

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Green Party nominating convention

From Progressive Review newsletter (the full article may still be on the home page, although you might have to hunt a bit for it, it’s worth reading the whole thing.)

Things aren’t looking so bright for the Green national convention where a train wreck is possible over a choice between Ralph Nader, David Cobb and no candidate.

Ironically, Nader, who undeniably helped the Green Party grow in 2000, may do more harm this year to the Greens rather than the Democrats. Local Greens depend upon sympathetic Democrats for money and votes; with a Nader candidacy both will be in short supply. It is entirely possible that Ralph Nader will prove responsible both the rise and the fall of the Green Party, all in just four years.

To make matters trickier, however, events are not totally in anyone’s hands. Continued stupidity on the part of the Bush regime could cause a spurt in the anti-war movement with Nader as primary political beneficiary.

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California Senate panel favors banning e-voting in November

A proposal to ban all electronic voting machines in the November election was approved by a Senate committee Wednesday, less than a week after Secretary of State Kevin Shelley’s decision to decertify the machines unless they meet certain conditions.

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Those freeway imps are back in Southern California!

And you can expect a flurry of such freeway signs to be appearing elsewhere.

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