IN IRAQ: Images feed fury in the street

[LittleApple81]

Pictures only showed what most Iraqis already knew was going on
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad

16 May 2004

A Baghdad newspaper last week printed a front-page photograph so graphic that it would normally never appear in an Arab publication. It purported to show US soldiers sexually assaulting an Iraqi woman with a rifle butt.

While the picture is almost certainly fake, it was run alongside genuine photographs of Pte Lynndie England and her comrades abusing male inmates at Abu Ghraib prison. For an angry Iraqi public, it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, and the news that the Daily Mirror has admitted being hoaxed is of little interest to Iraqis all too aware of genuine abuses. The damage is already done.

Most Iraqis, it is true, have also been incensed by last week's video showing the decapitation of Nick Berg, a 26-year-old American contractor, apparently by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an ally of Osama bin Laden - a killing specifically linked to Abu Ghraib by the kidnappers. But mingled with the moral revulsion felt among many Iraqis, there was also fury. The reason? They believe it will distract attention at a time when the world was for the first time confronting American abuses against Iraqis, because of the Abu Ghraib photographs.

When Baghdad fell last year, many Iraqis were waiting to make up their minds about American intentions in Iraq - albeit with a great deal of scepticism. But now the abiding image of the US-led occupation in the minds of Iraqis is of Pte England dragging a naked, humiliated Iraqi prisoner on a leash.

more at link:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=521741

[LittleApple81]

1. Sh*t ---------> Fan..... Whammo!!!!

This is my comment for this article.

[WastedPotential]

2. I bet they are longing for the good ol days now

back when Saddam was in power.