Bush fights child pornography

So, Bush et al are trying to block the release of more photographs and video of torture in Iraq by American forces and those working for American interests.

Why?

Perhaps because the visuals are too upsetting, they fear a backlash. I mean, a comment about the Quaran being flushed in Newsweek supposedly brought more instability to Afghanistan. Imagine what will happen when video of children being raped in Coalition-run prisons will do. Seymour Hersh, having seen the evidence in question, describes them in part:

"The women were passing messages out saying please come and kill me because of what’s happened. And basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children, in cases that have been [video] recorded, the boys were sodomized, with the cameras rolling, and the worst above all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. That your government has, and they’re in total terror it’s going to come out. It’s impossible to say to yourself, how did we get there, who are we, who are these people that sent us there."

It's not just Hersh, a Pullitzer Prize winning journalist who also exposed the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam War. I've been putting a tag line to this article from the Sunday Herald (UK publication) in my e-mails for nearly a year now. It summarizes witness accounts of some abhorrent sexual torture of prisoners, and torture of children designed to get their parents to talk.

Mr. President, Mr. "All AMERICAN life is so sacred I'm going to legislate what you can do with your body and fight for the rights of zygotes" - you KNOW about this, and you can't say you don't condone it because you haven't done anything about it yet, over a year later! Amnesty International is upset, too. In the linked press release of April, 2005, it documents the sexual abuse of a twelve-year old in Coalition hands in July, 2004. PFC Lindsey and company were "exposed" to the American public months earlier.

I agree that the last thing we need in Iraq is negative publicity about how we are mistreating Iraqis in the name of "Freedom." That doesn't mean we should pretend that this isn't happening and block the release of documentation of these terrible crimes. I say that If we are going to try Saddam Hussein for crimes against humanity he ordered or allowed as President of Iraq, them certainly Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice should be brought before an international war crimes tribunal themselves.

PBU30