Abu Ghraib

It's clear it's not the Iraqi prisoners that are being humiliated by this.

Olivia Rousset from SBS - Australia - Dateline: "These are the photos the American Government doesn't want you to see. While researching a story on guards at Abu Ghraib, I obtained a copy of the unreleased photographs and videos. Taken at the same time as the photos released in 2004 and often of the same abuses, this is the first time they have been shown to the public.

Click here to watch the video and reads interview with Amrit Singh, Lawyer for the American Civil liberties Union.

Mike Whitney: "The photographs illustrate in excruciating detail the commitment to physical coercion that the Bush administration has vigorously defended in its legal memoranda and justified in terms of its war on terrorism. The battered faces and hooded victims of American brutality attest to the shocking inhumanity of the present campaign. This is the real face of the Bush’s global democratic crusade. The rest is just gibberish.

How can anyone look at these appalling photographs and fail to grasp the brutality and cynicism that animates the policy?

How can anyone listen to the glib palavering of the torturer-and-chief as he pontificates on a "culture of life" that protects the unborn, but leaves others naked and bound, in a pool of blood?"

Full article here.

In terms of the attempts to suppress this information it's interesting to think what a pre-internet society wouldn't have known. If anything censorship becomes even more explicit. Yet there's also the terrible feeling that somehow the sharing of this debases it. Is that a form of denial? Is that sophisticated escapism?