Lord Reiseng

I vaguely recall seeing this many years back, so I had to go look it back up again. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse

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Pretty terrible stuff made even worse because some people said "they are the enemy, so don't worry about what happens to them". According to that wiki article, many soldiers were tried for their crimes, but others did go free and I think it is implied that there was other bad stuff going on and the images for it were never released.

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So, I don't mean to sound a bit mean about this, but when folk say "The _____ should appreciate everything our soldiers do for them", shit like this is probably at least a part of why those folk don't appreciate American intervention all that much(there were apparently plenty of rumors in Iraq that this kind of torture was going on).

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And you know, it would be nice if this was an isolated incident and perhaps this was the only case of something this horrid and sadistic (who tortures people like that only to take photos with your thumbs up?), but the torture didn't stop here. The recent CIA report released last year demonstrated that up until recently, they were still torturing people. Combine that with how little public information is actually disclosed (both in that report and perhaps in general) and you quickly start getting suspicious.

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Sure, sitting here in our comfy seats we might claim that this is only indicative that a very small part of the military or US personnel in general do this, but those folk in those countries who are already feeling iffy about the West are only going to get angrier and anti-west sentiment will only grow stronger and attacks by terrorist groups will only become more frequent.

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Contrary to what the politicians think though, hiding stuff like this won't stop anti-US sentiment. I am pretty sure the citizens near any such prison would hear rumors or see bad things for themselves, so they'd still be pissed. Hiding might only stifle anti-government or anti-military sentiment in the US itself and that hatred will explode when stuff comes to light (as we have seen far too often).

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tl;dr: Proper reports should be conducted into all military/intelligence operations overseas and these reports should be completely disclosed to the public. Serious effort should be made to make sure shit like this doesn't happen and that when it does, all of the perpetrators should be punished severely.

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(Note: In the above I make the assumption that this was all caused by a large number of psycho militants. I'd rather try and keep my faith in humans and pretend this wasn't actively encouraged across the board, but I may very well be wrong in believing that.)

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