Abuse at Abu Ghraib
On April 28, CBS’s newsmagazine 60 Minutes II broke the story of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison after more than a year of verbal and written notices to U.S. officials by organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Evidence of wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib had initially been revealed to the White House in January after Joseph Darby, a military policeman at the prison, handed over a CD of photographs documenting the abuse to the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division.
The abuse, originally thought to be the acts of a few errant individuals, was revealed to have possibly been much more in Seymour Hersh’s expose “Gray Zone,” published in the May 24 issue of The New Yorker. Hersh wrote, “The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq.”
That operation, according to Hersh, “encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.”
In his keynote address to the American Civil Liberties Union July 15, Hersh also revealed that the Pentagon has videotapes of children being abused in Abu Ghraib.
“Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys … the boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling,” he said. “They are in total terror.”
German television newsmagazine Report Mainz reported that the International Red Cross has found more than 100 children who were detained at Abu Ghraib. Several international media news outlets, including The Scotsman, Al-Jazeera, Der Spiegel, Australian ABC Radio, and TV2 and NKR television in Norway, have also reported the abuse of children as young as 12 at Abu Ghraib.Nicholas Berg
A U.S. military patrol found the decapitated body of Nicholas Berg, a U.S. businessman who sought work in Iraq during the reconstruction, May 8 on an overpass in Baghdad. On May 11, one day after Berg’s family had been informed of his death, a video titled “Abu Musa’b al-Zarqawi slaughters an American” began broadcasting on the militant Islamic group Muntada al-Ansar’s Web site (both Muntada al-Ansar and al-Zarqawi are associated with al-Qaeda).
The video, in addition to showing Berg being beheaded, shows a man the CIA has identified as al-Zarqawi (a claim disputed by Al-Jazeera) reading the statement, “We tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins … slaughtered in this way.”
The video also includes threats to U.S. President George W. Bush and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
Many members of the Muslim world – including academics at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the Western group Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Shiite Islamist group Hezbollah, and the Palestinian nationalist group Hamas – condemned Berg’s murder. Some also noted the violations of Islamic law by Berg’s murderers: Hezbollah issued a statement saying Berg’s death was a “horrible act that does immense wrong to Islam and Muslims by a group which falsely pretends to follow the precepts of the religion of pardon.”
Berg’s father, Michael, has publicly condemned the U.S. government for its war against Iraq, and for Nicholas’s death.
Gays and lesbians face hurdles
on way to marriage, parenthood
On May 17, Massachusetts became the first state where same-sex couples can legally marry, joining Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, and Yukon as the only places in the world where same-sex marriages are legally recognized. Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court had ruled 4 – 3 in November that, under the state’s constitution, citizens had the right to enter same-sex marriages. Same-sex couples residing outside Massachusetts who wished to take advantage of the court’s ruling encountered a roadblock on their wayto the altar: the state’s 1913 marriage statue prohibits nonresident couples from marrying in Massachusetts if their union would be illegal in their state of residence. Officials in Provincetown, Somerville, and Worcester declared they would disregard that statute, despite threats from the state’s Republican Governor Mitt Romney, who threatened legal action against clerks who issued marriage licenses to nonresident same-sex couples.
On July 22, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta handed down a 6 – 6 decision upholding a controversial Florida law that prohibits gays and lesbians from adopting children. The four plaintiffs (Douglas Houghton of Miami, Steven Lofton of Oregon, and Wayne Smith and Daniel Skahen of Key West) have been foster parents or guardians to children in Florida’s foster care system, yet have not been permitted to adopt, which they claim violates their constitutional right to equal protection. Nearly 4,000 same-sex couples who were married in San Francisco this spring had their marriages annulled August 12 after the justices of the California Supreme Court ruled 5 – 2 that San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom had issued marriage licenses illegally. California legislation and a voter-approved measure both define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
The Enron scandal continues
On June 1, CBS News revealed it had obtained audio recordings of Enron energy traders from the company’s West Coast trading desk making disastrously transparent statements about the disgraced energy giant’s role in California’s energy dereglation and the subsequent Western energy crisis. The tapes, which confirm long-held suspicions that Enron traders deliberately spiked energy prices by forcing power plants to close, includes the following statements from former Enron employees: