ACLU; US Military hides attrocities in plain sight

Yes, the AMERICAN Civil Libeties Union is busy bashing our troops again. I emphasized the AMERICAN part of their moniker because they’ve lost sight the fact that their stated purpose is to protect AMERICAN civil liberties, yet they want to interject themselves into Iraqi civil rights. From an Associated Press article;

New documents released Tuesday regarding crimes committed by U.S. soldiers against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan detail a troubling pattern of troops failing to understand and follow the rules that govern interrogations and deadly actions.
 
The documents, released by the American Civil Liberties Union ahead of a lawsuit, total nearly 10,000 pages of courts-martial summaries, transcripts and military investigative reports about 22 incidents. They show repeated examples of soldiers believing they were within the law when they killed local citizens.

Wow! 22 incidents and 10,000 pages – that’s a lot. And the government is hiding this from us? Well, no.

In the suffocation, soldiers covered the man’s head with a sleeping bag, then wrapped his neck with an electrical cord for a “stress position” they insisted was an approved technique.

Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer was convicted of negligent homicide in the death of Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush following a January 2006 court-martial that received wide media attention due to possible CIA involvement in the interrogation.

Oh, so he was convicted in a publicized court martial. That’s hardly being secretive.

But even after his conviction, Welshofer insisted his actions were appropriate and standard, documents show.

“The simple fact of the matter is interrogation is supposed to be stressful or you will get no information,” Welshofer wrote in a letter to the court asking for clemency. “To put it another way, an interrogation without stress is not an interrogation — it is a conversation.”

Oh, I see it’s the government’s fault because this fellow didn’t know that the military frowned upon strangling people. I guess he’s the first person in history to deny culpability in his actions by appearing to not know the difference between right and wrong.

Considered against recent cases, including soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division convicted of killing detainees in Samarra, Iraq, last year and the ongoing courts-martial of Marines accused of killing 24 civilians in Haditha, these new examples shed light on the frequency soldiers and Marines may disregard the rules of war.

Nasrina Bargzie, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said the documents also show that theres an abundance of information being withheld from public scrutiny.

Oh, so how do I know about the incidents in Samarra and Haditha if this is all being witheld from public scrutiny WHILE THE INVESTIGATIONS AND TRIALS ARE ALL ONGOING, you pinheaded dorks? Oh, and by the way, most of the Marines in the Haditha incident have been cleared of wrong doing – I guess you just failed to mention that for the sake of space, huh?

“The government has gone out of its way to hide the human cost of this war,” Bargzie said. Releasing the documents now “paints at least a part of that picture so people at least know what’s going on,” she said.

They’ve gone out of their way? Then why are they releasing the documents to you? Seems they didn’t can’t go far enough out of their way, does it? ACLU must be having a fund drive this month and they can’t find any US citizens being abused so they’re fishing for some Iraqis to represent.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Legal, Politics, Society, Terror War