Whether you're outraged by the outrage or just a member of the blowing off steam crowd the one thing everyone must understand about the prison abuse in Iraq is that it was not just "a few bad apples". Notice I say in Iraq and not Abu Ghraib or "abugah-rayp" (audio)as your President said. The reason they refer to the name of the prison and not Iraq as a whole is because it makes it seem less widespread.

So who or what is being hidden with this "bad apples" defense. Well Robert Fisk has an idea,The Trail of Torture

But we're in danger again of missing the detail. Just as the unsupervised armed mercenaries being killed in Iraq are being described by the occupation authorities as "contractors" or, more mendaciously, "civilians"--so the responsibility for the porno interrogations at Abu Ghraib is being allowed to slide into the summer mists over the Tigris river. So let's go back, for a moment, to the long weeks in which the Department of Bad Apples allowed its jerks to put leashes around Iraqi necks, forced prisoners to have sex with each other and raped some Iraqi lasses in the jail.

And let's cast our eyes upon that little, all-important matter of responsibility. The actual interrogators accused of encouraging US troops to abuse Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail were working for at least one company with extensive military and commercial contacts with Israel. The head of an American company whose personnel are implicated in the Iraqi tortures, it now turns out, attended an "anti-terror" training camp in Israel and, earlier this year, was presented with an award by Shaul Mofaz, the right-wing Israeli defence minister.

I'm not a Middle East expert but whenever Israel is put in the mix it's like throwing gasoline on a fire. This is just reinforcing a previously held notion of why we are in Iraq -- to setup an Israel friendly Iraq. It's also important to understand that this didn't just start in Iraq. It all started with this:

Cofer Black, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counter- terrorism chief, was said to have testified at a U.S. Senate hearing in 2002 that interrogators had now been given more latitude in interpreting the law because of the importance of the information they were seeking. "After September 11 the gloves came off," he was quoted as saying.

We also find out that more horrible things have happened in Afghanistan which -- unless a person gets their news form something other than the mainstream media, i.e. the internet, -- you probably never heard about. There was even a documentary about the massacre of POW's in Afghanistan.

It's hard to imagine how those soldiers feel that "took the gloves off". I'm sure in some weird patriotic way they thought they were just doing their little part to keep their country safe from terrorism by following these orders, whoever they came from. But now to hear their Commander in Chief label them as, "...a few American troops who disregarded our country and disregarded our values", must make them feel betrayed. There truly is no honor among thieves.



- posted by Mom/Dad @ 8:59 AM