I will confess that I have been really tired of this whole Iraq War thing for… oh I don’t know, since before it began, and never have had any desire to put anything about it on my blog before today.
However, since these torture pictures came out I keep thinking about the people that took the photos of the prisoners. Yeah, the photos disgust me and all, but what I don’t get is why the soldiers took these pictures in the first place.
Not so much because only a moron would be stupid enough to take them without thinking that eventually the press would get ahold of them, but what the hell were these people planning to do with these photos in the first place?
Were they going to put them in their “Iraq War” photo album so that years down the road they could browse through the pictures and tell their grandchildren, “Look Sara, these are the pictures of the Iraqi prisoners that your grandfather tortured back in the days when war was about oil and anyone who was a Muslim was a terrorist?”
Man, I just don’t get it!
Be says:
Excellent points raised in this post. One does wonder what they planned to do with them disgusting photos. Probably, they thought they’ll never get caught.
10 May 2004 at 17:57
LuxGirl says:
Do you think the soldiers were actually _thinking_ of something?
ps. lovely blog!
11 May 2004 at 23:06
Steve says:
Yeah I don’t get it either. I think they probably just weren’t thinking.
12 May 2004 at 04:27
Nina says:
Yes, I share your view. They must have not just been cruel and “sick”, but simply delirious in their endeavours.
I am disgusted by it all. The whole pallaver seemed to say “In WAR there is NO GOOD MAN”.
12 May 2004 at 13:22
susie says:
Seeing their smiles and easy poses makes me think that the people involved didn’t see anything wrong with what they were doing.
Apparently there was quite a lot of trading going on of these photos — I read this morning that people were sending them to their military friends (and their families) and that there were thousands of them. Apparently the Washington Post has amassed quite a collection. I imagine more of them will come to light soon — and a lot more people will be implicated.
The bad thing is that this kind of behavior had to be encouraged by an atmosphere of lax discipline and disregard for human rights, but the source of something so nebulous as an “atmosphere” is difficult to pin down. It’s going to be hard to identify how far up the chain of command culpability goes.
I have absolutely no confidence that people will tell the truth about what they did or why they did it. This is all so depressing.
12 May 2004 at 15:47