Who’s Your Buddy, Who’s Your Pal…?
Heard about the four hostages rescued by the Marines yesterday? Gitmo does indeed sound like a Gulag if you’ve only read the WaPo’s version. Jeez, even the headline “At Least 50 Insurgents Killed In Western Iraq, Marines Say” makes no mention of what they found. That finally appears paragraphs down, describing the unfortunate fellows only as…
“After a firefight Saturday morning, they raided a house and found four Iraqi men blindfolded, shackled and badly bruised in a room concealed by curtains.” and “The rescued men, all of whom appeared to be in their twenties and thirties, had welts and bruises on their faces and backs and were taken to a medical facility for treatment, Chase said.“
The Marines who found it were “shocked” and it appeared to be a “very bad place”, but the guys were just ‘badly bruised’? What gives? Sounds like Senator Durbin’s Gitmo, doesn’t it?
But then, CNN, damn their eyes, has an actual correspondant with the troops, who had a whole different take on what those four guys looked like, not to mention their headline:
“Arraf: Marines rescue tortured hostages as battle rages“.
Tortured? Read on.
Jane Arraf, CNN’s senior Baghdad correspondent, is embedded with U.S. troops taking part in the mission. She spoke with CNN anchor Betty Nguyen by phone during the pitched battle.
ARRAF: What I see in front of me is absolutely heartbreaking. It’s two of four hostages who are being taken away, rescued. They were rescued this morning. They’re Iraqi, and they were found in this complex that Marines first thought was a car-bomb factory. In fact, they did find what they believe was a potential car bomb or suicide car bomb.
But inside this complex, they found something even more sinister — four Iraqis who were handcuffed, their hands and feet bound with steel cuffs. They’re now being taken away for medical treatment, one being borne away on a stretcher.
The man in intense pain that they’re trying to get into a vehicle, has been tortured, he says, and has all the marks of being tortured with electricity. His back is crisscrossed with welts. The other man is even … in worse shape. Their crime was to be part of the border police.
The Marines came in here this morning, rescued them. The battle is still raging around us. I don’t know if you can hear the gunfire, but this is a major offensive to get rid of insurgents and foreign fighters in this city near the Syrian border….
… Two young men say they don’t know why they were seized. They say they didn’t hear the voices of their captors, only people whispering in their ear that they were going to be killed.
But we have just watched the two who were most badly treated be carried out of here for medical equipment, one of them on a stretcher, an older man who worked for the border police, along with his colleague…the Marines showed us the room where he says he was hung by his feet, his head dipped in water and then tortured with electric shocks repeatedly.
One of the other men, the other border police, was too weak, really, to tell us what had happened. But he obviously was in very, very bad shape.
They were rescued this morning as Marines and Iraqi forces came into this complex, which included an underground bunker, weapons stockpiles and other things, and found them here. Their captors have fled.
According to Joe Biden on Meet the Press this morning, Senator Durbin has released a ‘big mistake to say that’ letter, but, as of this moment, I haven’t seen that anywhere. The cynic in me wonders if the CNN version (and the video of Marines using bolt cutters to release emaciated ankles and wrists from shackles…) had anything to do with his sudden bout of remorse. What an ass. And he should send a big juicy fruit basket to the WaPo for trying to help him out.
Morality | tree hugging sister | 
June 19, 2005 1:57 pm
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But don’t you see? The insurgents are just like the Minutemen.
Did they find any Christine Aguilera records though? I think the Genevea Conventions requires them for the term ‘torture’ to be used.
When Osama-rama first hit the fan, I remember going down to Sleazeside and taking in the boardwalk with some friends. (Yes, this habit goes back a ways.) At the paintball mini-range, they were ready, with large targets of bin Ladin hobnobbing with the usual suspects: Britney and Christina.
I wondered what would be more insulting to him, being a target for drunken bennies or sharing the bill with professional strumpets.