The Chomsky Tarot

[Michael Bailey]

specifics on the prison camp photo here
http://www.david-campbell.org/photography/atrocity-and-memory/

links on that page to longish articles open up funky pop-ups but they
aren't any more annoying than pdf's, really, and they detail the facts
of that picture of the guy with all the ribs showing...and the court
case...and so forth...

not really a leftie myself (my heart belongs to pacifism/non-violence)
I was inclined to doubt the photos simply because Bush the elder used
them as PR when he offloaded a bunch of ordnance into the
Balkans...exactly the kind of stuff that he used in Iraq I with the
Kuwaiti princess and the stuff that she brought to Congress -- next
thing I'll be learning those stories were true???

(straight outta W'pedia: Shortly after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the
organisation Citizens for a Free Kuwait was formed in the U.S. It
hired the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton for about $11 million,
paid by the Kuwaiti government.[21] Among many other means of
influencing US opinion (distributing books on Iraqi atrocities to US
soldiers deployed in the region, 'Free Kuwait' T-shirts and speakers
to college campuses, and dozens of video news releases to television
stations), the firm arranged for an appearance before a group of
members of the US Congress in which a woman identifying herself as a
nurse working in the Kuwait City hospital described Iraqi soldiers
pulling babies out of incubators and letting them die on the floor.
The story was an influence in tipping both the public and Congress
towards a war with Iraq: six Congressmen said the testimony was enough
for them to support military action against Iraq and seven Senators
referenced the testimony in debate. The Senate supported the military
actions in a 52-47 vote. A year after the war, however, this
allegation was revealed to be a fabrication. The woman who had
testified was found to be a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family, in
fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US[22] She had not
been living in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion. The details of the
Hill & Knowlton public relations campaign, including the incubator
testimony, were published in a John R. MacArthur's Second Front:
Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (Berkeley, CA: University of
CA Press, 1992), and came to wide public attention when an op-ed by
MacArthur was published in the New York Times. This prompted a
re-examination by Amnesty International, which had originally promoted
an account alleging even greater numbers of babies torn from
incubators than the original fake testimony; after finding no evidence
to support it, the organisation issued a retraction. President George
H.W. Bush then repeated the incubator allegations on television.

At the same time, the Iraqi army committed several well-documented
crimes during its occupation, such as the summary execution without
trial of three brothers after which their bodies were stacked in a
pile and left to decay in a public street.[23] Troops also ransacked
and looted private Kuwaiti homes, one residence was repeatedly
defecated in.[24] A resident later commented, "The whole thing was
violence for the sake of violence, destruction for the sake of
destruction... Imagine a surrealistic painting by Salvador Dalí".[25])

but the main reason that I prolong this thread is to insert an
on-topic thought in the Vineland discussion: these are the types of
photos that 24fps was trying to produce

oh, and here's a follow up on rib-dude:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/aug/04/warcrimes.balkans


-- 
 - "Be groovy or B movie" - the old 24fps signoff