Tag Archives: iraq

The Hurt Locker

  By Niamh | August 28, 2009 - 12:58 pm | Movies & TV, The Culch
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The Hurt Locker is another war movie, set in Iraq and following some American soldiers. Except for the most part it is about three men’s journey’s as they enter the last 39 days of their tour there. The Hurt Locker is billed as a “riveting, suspenseful portrait of the courage under fire of the military’s unrecognized heroes: the technicians of a bomb squad”. These guys battle every day to defuse bombs left in public places in Baghdad to save civilians from being killed but at the same time they are alone in public settings and cannot stay for very long. The longer they take to defuse a bomb, the more likely they are to become sitting targets for insurgents. For the most part the movie follows the story of Staff Sgt James (Jeremy Renner) who arrives to Camp Victory to take the place of a Sgt Thompson who died defusing … There’s more →

Interviewing the Abu Ghraib interrogator - Joshua Casteel

  By darraghdoyle | June 29, 2009 - 11:08 am | Politics, The Arts, Theatre
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The name Abu Ghraib conjures up a lot of images, primarily of abuse, of shame for America, of some of the cruellest actions by a leading military power that has come to the world’s attention. The Wikipedia page is very grim reading: Beginning in 2004, accounts of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, including torture, rape, sodomy, and homicide of prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to public attention. These acts were committed by personnel of the 372nd Military Police Company of the United States Army together with additional US governmental agencies. Prisoners were subjected to severe physical and psychological abuse. The abuse included using dogs to scare and bite prisoners, death threats and sexual abuse. Joshua Casteel was a military interrogator in Abu Ghraib at the age of 24, shortly after this scandal broke. He was there from June 2004 to January 2005. He received an … There’s more →