The last time I saw these specific photos in a story (== propaganda piece), it turned out they were from a Balkan porn movie involving consenting (I guess) actors, with a military theme, taken out of context. This was maybe 8 years ago.
I'm certain US forces have committed rape. Generally, against other US forces. There were probably some cases of US vs. Iraqi rape, such as the Tikrit child-rape referenced in the story, but murder or other non-sexual violence was generally a lot more likely than sexual violence. Plus, the trade embargo, war, breakdown in law and order, and occupation did both directly kill people and contribute to violence which killed or otherwise caused bad things to happen, and I think the US has a lot of responsibility for that (along with Saddam, and the militias, etc.)
The US isn't even perfect at prosecuting US on US rape in the military (although a lot of the most recent fuss about it conflates sexual harassment statistics with rape, which does a disservice to everyone; there is a world of difference between "rude or inappropriate comments" and "forced sex", and blowing up the stats by combining them trivializes the problem by making it seem universal). The US isn't particularly good at finding and prosecuting US vs. LN crime in a war zone, although it's probably better than any military ever has been before (traditionally, the concept of invader vs. LN civilian crime didn't even exist). Once it gets to USA CID or USAF OSI, I'd probably trust the investigation as much as I'd trust a US civilian investigation, but they were very underresourced so it took a long time, and there was a lot of pressure to not let anything actually get reported to them (think the ghetto "no stiching" rule, combined with self-interest.)
Promoting fake images as real doesn't help anyone, though.
(I just tried to find the original of this video; failed, but also now I hate humanity slightly more too. Ugh.)
Just verified that these are in fact the same photos the Boston Globe ran and then retracted because they were fakes from a pornography video.
@mladenkovacevic The story of those horrific events has been told many, many times in news outlets, television programs, and books. I think there's even a whole section in The Shadow Factory about it, which I assume is pretty much required reading on HN these days.
This story wasn't "killed" in any sense, it's simply old. The only ostensibly new information here was the photographs, which were fakes.
It makes me wonder. How the fuck does the Boston Globe manage to publish fake pictures? Like how does that happen?
I don't know the answer to that question, but what I do know is that the psychological end result is "so those horrible pictures I saw weren't of the real event? Ok that makes me feel a little better."
edit: not to mention that it discredits the story for many others. "Well if the pictures weren't real how do I know anything else was."
UPDATE: for anyone still following this thread which was promptly killed here is the story which did in fact happen (although the real pictured were killed by Obama no doubt):http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-201_162-3133434.html
This has been a classical demonstration of how unwanted stories are killed and buried in a sophisticated machine called American War Propaganda and PR
The facts remain, however.
-a 14 year old girl's family was shot dead while they lay asleep (including a 5 year old)
-the 14 year old girl was gang raped by a bunch of US soldiers
-the girl was also shoot dead and her body was burned with kerosene
-the soldiers all got between 5 and a 100 prison sentences
-the story was very effectively killed and discredited by publishing it alongside fake pictures... Then again we can't have our freedom dispersing heroes at risk of retaliation attacks based on the acts of these few isolated cases right?
It is fairly hilarious how gullible a good chunk of HN is now. If they were really serious about removing the US as a tech and world leader they would start building services in their own country instead of posting bullshit stories and falling all over themselves when Stripe finally comes out in their country.
Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.
Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He later confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph in May 2009.
The London newspaper further noted “graphic nature of some of the images may explain the US President Obama’s attempts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published.”
Maj. Gen. Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.
“The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.”
[...]
The leaked Public Affairs Guidance put the 101st media team into a "passive posture" — withholding information where possible. It conceals presence of both child victims, and describes the rape victim, who had just turned 14, as "a young woman".
... So, that's why we can't take even their word for it. The English language is pretty powerful, expressive, and descriptive, but when people intend to use it to disguise the true nature of something, they can.
I'd just add: if the people involved in both the crime and the coverup (which is all the way up to the Command in Chiefs !) don't get life sentences, our justice system has totally lost all shred of whatever hint of credibility or authority they still clung to. The DoJ must start locking up their fed buddies now or our country is going to have a bleak future. Also, free Bradley Manning and bring Snowden home! Support our whistle-blowers.
The CIA would never be capable of finding some woman to claim the photos were of her even though no trace of their presence on the porn site could be found. That would be totally unbelievable. Much more likely that the disturbing images of murder and rape showed these incidents to be totally not a big deal. /sarcasm
Whether they're real or fake, I'd imagine these possible fake images are a more accurate description than what descriptions we've heard.
No. The Boston Globe and the New York Times ran a massive investigation of this, and the editor of the Globe was nearly fired for their publication.
Personally I can tell you the uniforms, equipment, settings etc. are all wrong.
"Whether real or fake" is just about the most inane excuse for journalistic malpractice that I've ever heard. It's akin to Dan Rather's "The story wasn't true, but I felt that it needed to be told."
You want to be one of the cool kids, wear a Che t-shirt and a Guy Fawkes mask, claim the mantle of truth and justice while decrying the evil empire? That's fine. But it is wholly unacceptable to play the apologist for publishers of false rape photographs. It endangers lives, insults rape victims, and makes a mockery of true journalism.
Trigger warnings are important. A rape survivor may have braced themselves for a textual story on rape, but have been completely unprepared for the images.
Do we have trigger warnings for people who have been through other horrible things in life? That would be a lot of warnings on a lot of posts. Saying the post is NSFW should be enough.
the headline as it's now "Rape of Iraqi Women by US Forces as Weapon of War (asiantribune.com)" does not in any way suggest that pictures of said rape are present in the page.
As your sibling poster mentioned, and I hadn't quite realized, a "trigger warning" is a legitimate context for this complaint. The not-safe-for-work crowd has no truck here, regardless of what time or day it is.
NSFW is generally used as a synonym for "potentially inappropriate". And yes, they do have truck here.
I clicked the article expecting some further developments or prosecution over Abu Ghraib, I wasn't expecting to see graphic rape images. A NSFW tag would have been very welcome.
Not what I wanted to see when having breakfast with my family and reading the news...
I remember similar article was posted on reddit a few weeks ago along with those images. There was byline which suggested that images were take from some p0rn movie.
Your comment should be upvoted to the top. I think the consensus is that they originally came from a porno. The Boston Globe had to apologize for running with them when the story originally aired:
You are absolutely right. The images are not of a real rape but a porno one. The fact that the real images haven't been leaked yet is an indication of how protected the troops are, as in "showing this would endanger the troops by making them targets for retaliation". It makes me wonder though, who is making this site writing about the real rape, murder and torture by US soldiers, then attaching fake porno pictures. It's almost as if it deligitimizes the whole story.
"In May, [Obama] said: “The most direct consequence of releasing [the pictures], I believe, would be to inflame anti-American public opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”"
Is that supposed to be an explanation?
Moreover I can't understand why they let pictures like that be taken.
Then don't do stupid stuff. This is what pisses me off about Obama's policy regarding stuff like this, and deciding to protect the people doing the wrong stuff, and prosecuting the people who expose them instead.
I don't know if it's because he's corrupt, or because he actually thinks he's taking the right decision in "protecting the troops/spy agents/whatever", but ultimately the decision is a bad one, as it encourages that sort of behavior.
Americans (no, not just the American government) think their actions of aggression have no consequence and that there's no blowback.
> "Paul Waldman lays out a list of significant U.S. military actions over the past 50 years, and it adds up to 15 separate episodes, ranging from full-scale wars (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) to smaller incursions (Grenada, Haiti, Panama). For those of you who are math challenged, this means we've launched a significant overseas assault every 40 months since 1963"
When you're such a hostile nation, do you really expect no blowback, no retaliation whatsoever? If nations as a whole can't win against US, and can't take their vengeance for their destroyed lives and murdered families, individuals will, one way or another. And no, it won't matter if they murder civilians, too, because that's pretty much US' policy overseas, too. So in their minds, fair is fair.
Americans need to take a long hard look at what they're doing overseas, and find the root of the rapidly increasing anti-Americanism, and hatred towards US. The government is lying its own population that it's protecting it against the terrorists, when all they're doing is creating more and more of them [1], with each nation they (illegally) attack (the government thinks that if it's "only" using drones instead of troops on the ground, that's somehow fine), and with each innocent life taken.
As long as that's US' policy overseas, you should expect nothing less than increasing hatred towards Americans, worse international relationships, and more retaliations.
> Americans (no, not just the American government) think their actions of aggression have no consequence and that there's no blowback.
I know it feels good to direct your outrage and hate toward the general "American," but this is no different than someone saying things like "Muslims (not just extremist ones) are violent and want to destroy Western culture." That is, you are engaging in the same kind of prejudice that underlies atrocities like this.
Many Americans, and especially those reading HN, find this every bit as disturbing as you do and fully realize its repercussions.
> And no, it won't matter if they murder civilians, too, because that's pretty much US' policy overseas, too. So in their minds, fair is fair.
It seems to me that "fair is fair" in your mind as well, and this comment, in a different way, is as unsettling as the article.
These are just to humiliate the victims beyond the physical act of the abuse, but also to destroy them emotionally by holding on to video footage of their abuse.
That's what makes it worse because we don't know how to get the people that did it behind closed doors.
I know some one who was in Kuwait during the Gulf War and they told me how their women were raped and killed.
Terrible story; but why is this relevant on Hacker News?
Edit: Furthermore, where's the skepticism? Why did this so quickly become the top story? Another comment suggests they are from a porn site, and may actually not really be american soldiers committing rape.
Addendum: I really need to find another source for my regular startup news and advice.
Maybe most of the moderators are sleeping in since it's a holiday weekend in the U.S.
But that this isn't getting flagged into the basement is really sad. I hope pg is happy with how letting things off the leash with Snowden stories went.
If this pattern hold up, the anti-Israel posts start up next.
EDIT: Aaand a minute later it's dead. Thanks, mods!
This is a disgusting atrocity. I can't believe Americans aren't sufficiently disturbed about it to do something, and the rest of the world is powerless to do anything in the face of such gross violations of human rights.
Everyone can see how these "soldiers" aided the enemy and put American lives at risk. Oh but aiding the enemy is a crime just for whistle blowers, not rapist torturers, right. Obama and the military even admit that this harms American interests as they refuse to release the photos!
The evidence seems to be rather thin. Those photos don't even prove that the rapists where white Americans (as opposed to lets say Arabs), that the rapes happened in an American installation and that the victim was Iraqi. Let's see if other media can substantiate these claims.
Also "rape as a weapon of war" is a very constructed explanation of whatever happened or did not happen. Soldiers, historically, don't need orders to rape anyone, quite the opposite is actually enforced quite rigorously...
Apparently in Vietnam there was contempt for local life, massacres like My Lan were almost policy, fueled by the need to present bodycounts. But policy and incentives alone wasn't what caused this - courts martial were ineffective, even if they had plenty of evidence and the military culture encouraged massacres.
I'd have to wonder what part of this remained. Is it possible that drone strikes operators also have bodycount incentives - kill n number of terrorists, get a day off a raise and maybe a promotion.
But more importantly how much of its just "war", the real one, not seen on TV. Maybe the president of the US is right: exposing atrocities and punishing the perpetrators will expose US troops to risk; but in that case isn't the case for war even weaker? How can you claim to prevent crime when you are doing it yourself?
I recently read on http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ that for every American who died in the Vietnam war, Americans killed roughly 50 Vietnamese soldiers and (mostly) civilians.
There will always be reasons for war. We can just hope that the reasons appear ever more rarely. Punishing Assad for chemical warfare - without mounting a full scale invasion - is one of the better reasons we've seen yet.
"essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
While I don't have much hope for enough public outrage to make a specific change, I still feel that leaks like these change the world. Not by any public actions, rather it plants a seed of accountability in minds of every individual and official involved on every level. It's the probability of unstoppable leaks that will make all of this no longer ok. Such behavior is no longer safely hidden away under the "fog of war". Even if up to this point many didn't get punished for these atrocities, what matters is that in the future they might, increasingly likely. Somehow the anger from this post made me feel almost optimistic.
And yet the government wants you to blindly accept and not question why every person who signs up in US military automatically becomes a true patriot and a "hero". Here they are, look at the heroes.
This is a war. Yes it is disgusting, I know, but don't be suprised.
Every war looks like that. This is no fking video game or propaganda video from CNN or other TV news station.
Well U.S army is no better than USSR army or Nazis.
Only difference is that, American fight for money/oil and not philosophy or politics.
The USA are by far the biggest terrorists in the world.
Invading and destroying countries for oil, spying even on allies, gathering information about anyone, blackmailing every country, killing millions of civilians and they never have to deal with the consequences.
And Obama has been awarded the Nobel Piece Prize. What a f'in joke.
Because there is considerable doubt that this is even a genuine news story, rather than fake sensationalism, it is best to flag this story for the attention of the moderation team here. Hacker News is supposed to be about NEWS, not propaganda.
I'm certain US forces have committed rape. Generally, against other US forces. There were probably some cases of US vs. Iraqi rape, such as the Tikrit child-rape referenced in the story, but murder or other non-sexual violence was generally a lot more likely than sexual violence. Plus, the trade embargo, war, breakdown in law and order, and occupation did both directly kill people and contribute to violence which killed or otherwise caused bad things to happen, and I think the US has a lot of responsibility for that (along with Saddam, and the militias, etc.)
The US isn't even perfect at prosecuting US on US rape in the military (although a lot of the most recent fuss about it conflates sexual harassment statistics with rape, which does a disservice to everyone; there is a world of difference between "rude or inappropriate comments" and "forced sex", and blowing up the stats by combining them trivializes the problem by making it seem universal). The US isn't particularly good at finding and prosecuting US vs. LN crime in a war zone, although it's probably better than any military ever has been before (traditionally, the concept of invader vs. LN civilian crime didn't even exist). Once it gets to USA CID or USAF OSI, I'd probably trust the investigation as much as I'd trust a US civilian investigation, but they were very underresourced so it took a long time, and there was a lot of pressure to not let anything actually get reported to them (think the ghetto "no stiching" rule, combined with self-interest.)
Promoting fake images as real doesn't help anyone, though.
(I just tried to find the original of this video; failed, but also now I hate humanity slightly more too. Ugh.)