Letters to the Editor
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Shocked & Disappointed
I'm honstly shocked by the extreme cowardice you have just displayed. Let's be honest, what risk have you run by publishing these photo's? Will there be violent protests by crazed mobs in front of your offices? Nope. Will you be receiving credible death threats from organized terrorist groups? Nope again. Oh, you will get heaps of praise from those on the far left, anti-American groups, Islamo-Fascists, etc., but you completely chickened out on publishing the Mohamed cartoons. Face it, you actually had to run a risk to do that and you clearly don't want to run risks. Much better to look edgy without any actual danger.
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Cartoon Nonsense
Good job Salon and it's about time. I was about at my limit with the tiresome "lifestyle" Broadsheet stuff. The Danish cartoon angle is a classic false equivalency and a rather stupid argument. Ignore it and carry on...
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Thank you for doing the right thing.
There is a poison eating out the core of American values. And it is often being spread by the very people who make the biggest show of wrapping themselves in what they tell us are those values.
Thank you for doing the right thing.
Even if it is extremely painful and deeply troubling.
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Who gets to be played by Redford & Hoffman in the Salon movie??
Great job congratulating yourself. You posted photos that are available in about 5 seconds to anyone with an Internet connection.
But you did provide some unintended entertainment with the weepy letters from people who shed tears at pictures of insurgents, who the day before were most likely plotting ways to kill American soldiers, with panties on their heads. So sorry that we "offended their Muslim beliefs".
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If Americans Really Cared It Would Have Stopped By Now
I agree with the letter writer who exposed the haughty assumption that Americans don't care about Abu Ghraib anymore. Because it really isn't a journalist's job to report their own interpretations and call them public opinion. I mean, nobody really knows what Americans think, do they? When was the last time anybody asked, in a non-biased way?
But I also have to object that, by one important measure, America seems to have let it all pass: If we cared, we would have stopped this by now. Abuses continue in prisons, even domestic ones. Bills limiting interrogation techniques seem always to get lost somewhere in Congress. Who hired these people -- Congressmen -- anyway? We did. So stop pretending that America cares but is being hoodwinked by politicians. The responsibility to stop this is ours.
My first encounter with torture was not with Abu Ghraib, but with foreign students in the '80s. I was nearly forced by conscience into an ill-conceived marriage to keep my boyfriend from being deported to the U.S.-allied country where his friends were being tortured and killed. I had to see my country for what it was, good and bad; I had to grow up and claim citizenship and responsibility in a superpower. When did so many other people get a free pass on growing up?
I hope that journalists, both courageous and cowardly, will keep publishing photographs like these, right in our faces. The point is, they're being published, so nobody can say they didn't see them.
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Publishing yet more Abu Ghraib photographs
Kudos to Salon for publishing more Abu Ghraib photographs. Now all that Muslin rage against Europe can be redirected where it belongs: toward the United States.
That was your intent, wasn’t it?
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HORROR OF ALL HORRORS!
All these poor people ever wanted was love and kindness and we invaded their country and hurt them and took their oil and yelled at them and stuff. These men just wanted to give us flowers and bunnies and christmas presents. and sing us little love songs. 9/11 was just a bunch of loving spiritual boys trying to show us a new way of landing airplanes on skyscrapers, just like the Germans wanted to do with the Hindenburg.
Imagine the horror of having underpants on your head! OH MY GOD! We Americans don't deserve to Live! (Of course, they already think that, which is why they have underpants on their heads).
I am embarrassed as an American that these people were treated this way. WTF is up with the underpants on the head and the sex toys? They should have been beaten senseless. Repeatedly. That's how these people should have been treated.
-Erik Olson
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Where is the Journalism?
Salon is becoming a mindless parody of a publication. Your convenient display of "courage" in following the Australian press in publishing these 2.5 year old photos, combined with your recent display of "prudence" in not publishing the Mohammed Bomb Head cartoons is revealing you as a publication that is sliding down the slippery slope of questionable 'journalistic' decision making. You are well on your way to the irrelevance reserved for sensationalistic grocery store checkout counters, or hopelessly reactionary left wing (or right wing) syncophants.
Where was your courage when you needed to stand with a global free press, and stand with the Danish people?
Where was your courage when you needed to say "We will not be silenced by intimidation." to the the hyper-reactionary militants who are attempting to truly dictate what is said and not said in free press around the world?
These photos and the activities that they portray are reprehensible. Your choice to ONLY bring a spotlight to THIS reprehesible event, 2.5 years after the fact, without showing the same commitment to openly discuss and portray the current, newsworthy, important reprehensible events that define the world we live in, and the middle east, is also reprehensible.
You are not brave, you are not incisive, and you certainly shouldn't adopt this pose of quiet journalistic bravery. You haven't earned it. You are becoming an irrelevant left wing we-only-exist-to-conveniently-shout-insults-at-the-current-administration news journal.
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We Have Met the Enemy
The only thing more disgusting than the behavior shown in those damning photographs is the fascist toady justification letters praising the torture. If you doubt we live in a fascist state, check the photos and read the letters. We have met the enemy, and he is us. Thanks for exposing yourselves, again, all you trailer park goosesteppers. Heil Bushit.
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System "Breakdown"
Your story about the Abu Ghraib photos indicates that the abuses resulted from a breakdown in the system. There was no breakdown in the system. The system operated EXACTLY the way the Bush administration wanted it to work. The American people need to recognize the true nature of their nation.