Season of Lies

The cold months grip half the world, and this shall pass.

The Season of lies is upon us. And perhaps for quite a while.

Enter a smoke and mirrors world where grief is real and truth is illusive.

For if Iraq is a world gone through-the-looking-glass then that glass may be in a house of mirrors; a strange place where nothing is as it seems.

Peek through the door of the house.

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Occupation officials unveiled a short video they say shows that U.S. troops who raided a Sunni mosque and uncovered a cache of weapons did not trash the place, as some have suggested.

Bemused and concerned? Not too worried? Then step through the portal to our mirror world.

Where is the hard truth in this tale?

The events of May 12 - when the mistreatment allegedly occurred at Camp Bucca, a detention center in southern Iraq - remain controversial.

Harris said that Brig. Gen. Ennis Whitehead 3d, acting commander of the 143d Transportation Command, found that the three soldiers had maltreated the prisoners. Two of the soldiers were demoted, and all three were ordered to forfeit their salaries.

The general found that Master Sgt. Lisa Marie Girman, 35, of Hazelton, Pa., knocked a prisoner to the ground, "repeatedly kicking him in the groin, abdomen and head, and encouraging her subordinate soldiers to do the same," Harris said.

<...>.

Staff Sgt. Scott A. McKenzie, 38, of Clearfield, was found to have dragged a prisoner by his shoulders and then held his legs apart, "encouraging others to kick him in the groin while other U.S. soldiers kicked him in the abdomen and head," Harris said.

McKenzie was also found to have thrown the detainee face-down to the ground and to have stepped on "his previously injured arm."

<...>

Spc. Timothy F. Canjar, 21, of Moscow, Pa., was found to have made a false statement to the Army's criminal investigators and to have held a detainee's legs apart "while others kicked him in the groin," in addition to "violently twisting his previously injured arm and causing him to scream in pain."

<...>

The fourth soldier, Sgt. Shawna Edmondson, 24, of Chinchilla, requested and received an "other-than-honorable" discharge from the military last year rather than face a court-martial.

In an interview last month, Edmondson said that she and the other soldiers had been made responsible for transporting prisoners, duties for which they had not been adequately trained.

(More here and here)

Are there two sides to every story? Would that it were so simple. There are an infinite number of sides to every story. Perhaps our mirror is a prism?

Or a rhetoric-spewing machine?

Let's turn the ugly dial up a bit, shall we?

Part II here