This entire thing with the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and the reactions to it is literally beyond my understanding.
But, first, we must say how horrified and disappointed we are with our people there. This is the Age of the Great Preface where no assertion or word of rhetoric may be ventured without those initial qualifications, lest we leave ourselves open to other serious charges.
So, I am angry with our military men and women at Abu Ghraib for abusing and humiliating those prisoners. I don't know whether those prisoners "had it coming to them," but it makes no difference. Our people should be above that. They should be professionals and conduct themselves honorably, efficiently, and with a more refined sense of political decorum than what was practiced there.
Our people at Abu Ghraib very obviously violated some important articles of the Geneva Conventions, which we profess to observe. And this will be used against us time after time in ways that we would rather not consider. We will be held out as hypocrites and as the lawless, heedless bullies our enemies and former allies have been saying we are.
But that is all the rope you get, motherfuckers.
It is an absolute perversion, both of intellect and morality, to even compare what a handful of stupid and sadistic US Army prison guards did to humiliate the prisoners under their charge with the countless crimes of torture and genocide perpetrated by Saddam, his sons, and their whole regime of psychopaths. But that is what's happening, anyway.
And why's this? Because the anti-war left and their idols who are fighting against a new Iraq and killing our boys in the process have found a perfect tool with which to bash us on the head. They can all join in and feel unified and vindicated against their common enemy, which is this Administration and our military. It doesn't matter that these same goddamned cowards couldn't have cared less about the brutality that Saddam visited upon his own people and his neighbors: what really matters in this fucked up and perverted world we live in is that the bodily humiliation of a handful of prisoners now trumps decades of Ba'athist horrors. Real horrors, you fucking perverts. The ones where whole villages are gassed and the families of troublemakers are rounded up and butchered. The ones where brides are snatched up from their own wedding ceremonies, raped, have their throats slit, and get dumped on the ground before their families.
I mean, is it really possible that a morally sane person would compare the sodomizing of a prisoner to the dozens of mass graves we have uncovered throughout Iraq? I sincerely do not understand this degree of perversion of sense and reason, unless it is caused by either or both of the following:
Those who would even think to compare the American military's abuses at Abu Ghraib with the atrocities of the Saddamite regime are either morally insane or Democrats.
It is also intellectually perverted to believe ---actually believe--- that Don Rumsfeld or Dick Myers or Ricardo Sanchez are somehow responsible for those guards' behavior. Sure, people can believe what they want about the chain of responsibility in bureaucratic hierarchies, but you don't sack the entire Pentagon in the middle of a war just to get a nice jump in the polls on the mythical-magical-unicornical "Arab street." Who gives a good goddamn what Mo thinks about anything? All I want from him is the promise to get a job, buy some American goods and services, and shut the fuck up. He can get mad about some guy being made to wear women's panties some other time. But, right now, we're trying to get that fucking place under control ---and what he likes or dislikes doesn't make a damn to me.
Abu Ghraib will go down as one of the most perverted episodes in the history of common sense. It is a scandal being driven entirely by the need of anti-war/anti-Bush Leftists and Buchananite isolationists to find some wedge to pound into this Administration and its war effort. There is no sane or just way to put what has been done to those prisoners above the enormity of the crimes of the regime we have now replaced. There simply isn't. Therefore, to suppose such a case can be made is to confirm to me that you are a degenerate hypocrite.