Quotes of the Morning: Hitting the Rummy

“Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday he is deeply troubled by the success of terrorist groups in ‘manipulating the media’ to influence Westerners.
‘That's the thing that keeps me up at night,’ he said during a question-and-answer session with about 200 naval aviators and other Navy personnel at this flight training base for Navy and Marine pilots.
[…]
‘They are actively manipulating the media in this country’ by, for example, falsely blaming U.S. troops for civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.
‘They can lie with impunity,’ he said, while U.S. troops are held to a high standard of conduct.”
-Associated Press, August 29, 2006

“Dang straight! It is terrible the way that the media is reporting on all of those civilian deaths. They are just playing into the Enemy’s hands. Meanwhile our forces are being held to a high standard.”
-Skippy

“It was American soldiers serving as military police at Abu Ghraib who took these pictures. The investigation started when one soldier got them from a friend, and gave them to his commanders. 60 Minutes II has a dozen of these pictures, and there are many more – pictures that show Americans, men and women in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners. There are shots of the prisoners stacked in a pyramid, one with a slur written on his skin in English.
In some, the male prisoners are positioned to simulate sex with each other. And in most of the pictures, the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing, or giving the camera a thumbs-up.”
-CBS News, April 29m 2004

“Photos broadcast by CBS's 60 Minutes II last week showed grinning U.S. soldiers alongside a pyramid of hooded and naked Iraqi detainees. Adding to the growing scandal, The New Yorker magazine this week reported details from an internal U.S. Army report that said prisoners were beaten and threatened with rape and electrocution to coerce them to talk. And former Iraqi detainees have alleged to U.S. media that they were forced to perform humiliating sexual acts.”
-USA Today, May 3, 2004

“A military intelligence analyst who recently completed duty at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said Wednesday that the 16-year-old son of a detainee there was abused by U.S. soldiers to break his father's resistance to interrogators. T
he analyst said the teenager was stripped naked, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, splattered with mud and then presented to his father at Abu Ghraib, the prison at the center of the scandal over abuse of Iraqi detainees.
Upon seeing his frail and frightened son, the prisoner broke down and cried and told interrogators he would tell them whatever they wanted, the analyst said.”
-Chicago Tribune, May 20, 2004

“You’d have thought that Rummy would have remembered that..”
-Skippy

“Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in a surprise visit to boost the morale of U.S. forces in Iraq, dismissed as ‘garbage’ Thursday any suggestion that the Defense Department tried to cover up the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers.
But Rumsfeld, who visited the facility at the heart of the uproar, the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, warned that the scandal would get worse before it got better, and he said Bush administration lawyers were advising the Defense Department not to publicly release any more photographs of the abuse.”
-NSNBC, May 13, 2004

“Still, Abu Gharib was just one instance.. Most of the time our troops have been held to a much higher standard. Abu Gharib was different.”
-Skippy

“In March, Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who investigated abuses at Abu Ghraib, criticized the holding of ‘ghost’ detainees as ‘deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law.’
Rumsfeld was asked how this case differed from the practice Taguba criticized. ‘It is just different, that's all,’ he said.”
-Reuters, June 17, 2004

“Three former members of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division say soldiers in their battalion in Iraq routinely beat and abused prisoners in 2003 and 2004 to help gather intelligence on the insurgency and to amuse themselves....
The abuses reportedly took place between September 2003 and April 2004, before and during the investigations into the notorious misconduct at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. Senior Pentagon officials initially sought to characterize the scandal there as the work of a rogue group of military police soldiers on the prison's night shift. Since then, the Army has opened more than 400 inquiries into detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, and punished 230 enlisted soldiers and officers.”
-New York Times, September 24, 2005

“Of course Abu Gharib isn’t the only incident that the terrorist-sympathizing media has noticed.”
-Skippy

“Survivors of the attack in Mogr el-Deeb, a desert village inhabited by members of the Bou Fahad clan, said they had just finished a wedding celebration when bombs fell before dawn Wednesday. More than 40 people were killed, including women and children.
Associated Press Television News footage taken at the site Thursday showed broken musical instruments, pieces of bloodied women's hair and the bodies of children. Kimmitt said no musical instruments were found, however. “
-Boston Globe, May 22, 2004

“In its report of the U.S. attack, Al Arabiya showed pictures of several shrouded bodies lined up on a dirt road. Men were shown digging graves and lowering bodies, one of a child, into the pits while relatives wept.”
-Reuters, May 20, 2004

“The military didn’t know about that wedding. You cannot hold those civilian deaths against the military. By even reporting it the press was obviously working for the Enemy.”
-Skippy

“The Army is investigating complaints that soldiers posted photographs of Iraqi corpses on an Internet site in exchange for access to pornographic images on the site, officials said Tuesday.”
-Associated Press, September 27, 2005

“Rumors and lies! I blame the press for even mentioning it. A bunch of fifth-columnists and Communists!”
-Skippy

“Marine commanders in Iraq learned within two days of the killings in Haditha last November that Iraqi civilians had died from gunfire, not a roadside bomb as initially reported, but the officers involved saw no reason to investigate further, according to a senior Marine officer.
The commanders have told investigators they had not viewed as unusual, in a combat environment, the discrepancies that emerged almost immediately in accounts about how the two dozen Iraqis died, and that they had no information at the time suggesting that any civilians had been killed deliberately.
But the handling of the matter by the senior Marine commanders in Haditha, and whether officers and enlisted personnel tried to cover up what happened or missed signs suggesting that the civilian killings were not accidental, has become a major element of the investigation by an Army general into the entire episode.
Officials have said that the investigation, while not yet complete, is likely to conclude that a small group of marines carried out the unprovoked killings of two dozen civilians in the hours after a makeshift bomb killed a marine.
A senior Marine general familiar with the investigation, which is being led by Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell of the Army, said in an interview that it had not yet established how high up the chain of command culpability for the killings extended. But he said there were strong suspicions that some officers knew that the Marine squad's version of events had enough holes and discrepancies that it should have been looked into more deeply.”
-New York Times, June 3, 2006

“Four more soldiers have been charged with the rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman and her family, the most explosive of the five war crimes investigations currently under way in Iraq.
A fifth soldier was charged with dereliction of duty for failing to report the events of the night of March 12 when a group of soldiers are alleged to have abandoned their checkpoint to enter the home of an Iraqi family in the town of Mahmudiya. They allegedly raped and killed a young woman inside the house, and shot dead her parents and young sister.”
-Guardian (UK), July 11, 2006

“Hey, it takes two people to commit a war crime. One to shoot the innocent person in the head and one to report it, yet I never hear anyone arguing that we should lock up all the reporters. Just goes to show how ‘fair and balanced’ the terrorist-loving media really is. Just remember, the media never reports on the tens of thousands of troops that DON’T shoot someone in the head, just the few bad apples.”
-Skippy

“Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday defended the training of the American troops in Iraq and insisted that the overwhelming majority respect the rights of Iraqi civilians.
‘We know that 99.9 percent of our forces conduct themselves in an exemplary manner,’ Rumsfeld said. ‘We also know that in conflicts things that shouldn't happen do happen.’
His comments followed charges by the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al- Maliki, on Thursday that American forces had regularly infringed on the rights of Iraqis.
He also said that his government would take this conduct into account in determining how long American troops should remain in Iraq.
‘They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion,’ Maliki said. ‘This is completely unacceptable.’"
-International Herald Tribune, June 3, 2006

“I salute you Donald Rumsfeld. Your denial of reality is an absolutely perfect example of what this Administration is all about. Well done.”
-Skippy