BoatBanter.com - Losing the War?

Come on, how can you American be influenced, brainwashed, manipulated,
convinced, tricked. Dont you have a mind of your own? I only read the first
two paragraphs so I do not care about the rest but hey,,,,,

"""''Here's the saddest and most infuriating truth out of the abhorrent news
of
the alleged torture and sado-sicko abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq:

Osama bin Laden has just scored his greatest victory over the armed forces
of the United States of America."""''

The saddest and most frustrating truth here is that the insurgents side
would do far, far, far more inhumane things to their prisoners. Like rape,
shoot them in the feet, demand ransome, rape, rape, beat, burn, etc etc
etc,, then kill. And you people focus on a few problems that are caused by
less than 1% of your coalition forces. And those people have lost their
careers now. So it wasn't condoned.

wrote in message
.net...

"NOYB" wrote in message
ink.net...

"Harry Krause" wrote in message

news:c3dhc2g=.0c1b6460d56db3cdc793b38f5b3089d5@108 4207569.nulluser.com...

Martin Schram of the Naples (Florida) Daily Times

Ahem. There is no Naples Daily "Times". Martin Schram writes for
Scripps...and his column is sometimes run in the Naples Daily "News".
However, he never wrote an article that was published in the Naples
paper
stating "the scandal gave bin Laden his greatest victory."

Do you have a link for the article you quoted?

Must be hard to not be able to read the first article found when a search
is
done by the authors name

http://www1.naplesnews.com/npdn/pe_c...860037,00.html
Martin Schram: Handing bin Laden his greatest triumph
The abuse of prisoners in Iraq may have given Osama bin Laden the
propaganda
victory he has been waiting for.

By MARTIN SCHRAM, Scripps Howard News Service
May 9, 2004

Here's the saddest and most infuriating truth out of the abhorrent news of
the alleged torture and sado-sicko abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq:

Osama bin Laden has just scored his greatest victory over the armed forces
of the United States of America.

America's enemy-at-large, believed to be hiding in the mountains of
Afghanistan or Pakistan, triumphed without commanding any of his mind-bent
minions of al Qaeda to blow up more innocents, nor crumble more capitalist
or military citadels by ramming them with hijacked jetliners.

But make no mistake. Bin Laden has just won the victory for which he
always
plotted and schemed. U.S. and world terror experts have always told us
that
the ultimate goal behind his acts of terror was to goad America into
committing the sort of catastrophic blunder that would resonate not just
through the Middle East but the entire world. He wanted a horrific
over-response, captured on film so that the world would no longer believe
that Americans are global good guys - but closet evildoers. Just as bin
Laden has been saying in his periodic videotaped rants.

Now the pictures pouring through the Great News Funnels into living rooms
around the planet seem to be proof of just that. It is sad beyond words
for
all of us who have long praised the courageous and admirable men and women
of the United States military for having served their nation so well.

The best that U.S. military and civilian spin-meisters can say of the
propaganda victory the U.S. military has handed bin Laden is that it was
handed to him by just a handful of military grunts and maybe a handful of
military intelligence grunts who gave them orders. Unless the complicity
extends far up the chain that links the grunts to the generals.

For years, Bush administration officials proclaimed that one difference
between the evil Saddam Hussein and Uncle Sam is that America doesn't
torture its enemies.

Now this. CBS News' "60 Minutes II" got the first scoop of the abuse of
Iraqis being interrogated at this prison that used to be Saddam's house of
torture. Complete with photos of Iraqis forced to be naked in the cold,
naked piled atop each other, forced to simulate oral sex with each other
and
more. All while male and female U.S. soldiers guffawed and posed. The New
Yorker magazine's excellent national security correspondent, Seymour
Hersh,
weighed in by obtaining a secret 53-page Pentagon investigation report by
Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba that detailed all of the above.

Stunningly, although Taguba's report was finished in February, neither
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld nor Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, had even read it as of May 1! Last Sunday, Rumsfeld
ducked in the weeds, dispatching the general to work the Sunday TV-talk
circuit.

"It's just working its way up - up the chain," Myers explained lamely,
when
pressed by "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer on CBS. Later, he told an
equally persistent George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week": "I'm not
going to comment on it until I have a chance to read it and see what the
context is. ... This sort of reporting can often be very, very wrong."

Understand this: Taguba's report cited systemic illegal abuse of Iraqi
detainees and quotes that the incidents were done at the direction of
military intelligence officials. But Myers, who hadn't read the report,
insisted: "I would say that categorically there is no evidence of
systematic
abuse in this system at all."

Rummy surfaced Tuesday to tell reporters that the Defense Department had
been investigating this for months and had even told reporters of the
probe
on Jan. 16. But no, he hasn't read the report yet either.

Back at the White House, nothing is known about anything. Had National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice briefed President Bush about Taguba's
shocking evidence and conclusions in February? March? April? Had he read
the
report? He surely could have gotten a copy quicker and easier than Sy
Hersh
did - just by commanding, one more time: "Bring it on!"

Tone is set at the top. Bush failed to demand urgency inside and inoculate
America's image by moving quickly and publicly on the outside. He needed
to
take strong public action against the culprits before the photos poured
through the Great News Funnels around the world.

Now, somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan, bin Laden is
probably prepping to make yet another of his videotapes. One wonders if
America's No. 1 enemy will be able to resist the urge to perform his spiel
in front of a hideaway cave festooned with a banner that reads: "Mission
Accomplished."

(Martin Schram writes political analysis for Scripps Howard News Service.)