SwiftVets.com

[fortdixlover]

From http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/04/0504/052804.html

Given the horrible abuses at the [Abu Ghraib] prison, there’s no reason to trust America. Have you read the latest? Steel yourselves:

Detainees were met by two lines of baton-wielding guards forming a human gauntlet, and received a punishing beating before entering the facility. At least one detaineedied at the facility on January 11, 2000, when an earlier head wound was aggravated during the intake beating.

Detainees were beaten both during interrogation and during nighttime sessions when guards utterly ran amok. During interrogation, detainees were forced to crawl on the ground and were beaten so severely that some sustained broken ribs and injuries to their kidneys, liver, testicles, and feet. Some were also tortured with electric shocks.

At night, guards were given free rein for wanton abuse and humiliation. Often drunk and playing loud music, guards would subject detainees to beatings and humiliating games. Some of the most severe beatings took place at night: detainees report being beaten unconscious, only to be revived and beaten again. Detainees were forced to crawl across rooms with guards on their backs, and were beaten if they performed too slowly. In their cells, detainees were ordered to stand with their hands raised for entire days, and guards used teargas if their orders were disobeyed. Convincing evidence exists that men and women were raped and sexually assaulted with police batons.

Detainees were also met with a gauntlet of soldiers who beat them with batons, and suffered continuing severe beatings while at the detention facilities. Dwere sodomized with batons, forced to walk between ranks of guards while being beaten and kicked, and beaten in their testicles. A doctor in reported receiving a patient who had severely swollen genitals and appeared to have been raped, as he suffered from internal injuries to the colon.

Detainees were often kept in overcrowded prisoner transport vehicles, even during the bitter cold of winter. A nineteen-year-old woman who was believed to be mentally retarded was raped for three days by numerous soldiers at. Men were severely beaten there, including during interrogations, and at least one was tortured with a soldering iron. In April, two badly disfigured corpses were recovered, and it is likely that the two men were tortured and executed at the facility.

Did I say “latest stories”? My bad. That’s the Human Rights Watch report on Russian prisons in Chechnya ( http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/russia_chechnya4/summary.htm#_1_3 ). Does that excuse what we did? Not at all. Just balance the world's reaction. We all remember how they dealt with the problem, how Putin called up foreign leaders and apologized, how there were trials, a never-ending global firestorm of publicity and public Russian self-recrimination ( http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/russia_chechnya4/detention-center.htm#_1_26 ) :

The Ministry of Justice issued a press release stating that "cases of violence, harassment, torture, and even shootings of persons kept in the investigation ward located in the residential area of Chernokozovo…do not correspond to the [sic] reality and grossly distort the real state of affairs." On March 1, after Andrei Babitsky had been released and made public the treatment to which he was subjected, Minister of Internal Affairs Vladimir Rushailo responded with snide skepticism. "All of [Babitsky's] stories about 250 blows with a baton--I seriously doubt them, as I think we all do."

[sparky]

Hip, hip, hurray! The Russians are as bad as we are!

Man, Foxdicklover, you really set the bar low!