Where's the outrage on torture?

[NVMojo]

IN AUGUST 2003, when he was commander of the military base at Guantanamo Bay, Major General Geoffrey Miller visited Baghdad with some advice for US interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison. As Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the military police commander in Iraq, later recalled it, Miller's bottom line was blunt: Abu Ghraib should be ''Gitmo-ized" -- Iraqi detainees should be exposed to the same aggressive techniques being used to extract information from prisoners in Guantanamo.

''You have to have full control," Karpinski quoted Miller as saying. There can be ''no mistake about who's in charge. You have to treat these detainees like dogs."

Whether or not Miller actually spoke those words, it is clear that harsh techniques authorized for a time in Guantanamo -- forced nudity, hooding, shackling men in ''stress positions," the use of dogs -- were taken up in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they sometimes degenerated into outright viciousness and even torture. Did the injunction to ''treat these detainees like dogs" give rise to a prison culture that winked at barbarism? Should Miller be held responsible for what Abu Ghraib became?

The latest Pentagon report on the abuse of captives, delivered to Congress last week by Vice Admiral Albert Church III, doesn't point a finger of blame at Miller or any other high-ranking official. It concludes that while detainees in Iraq, Guantanamo, and elsewhere were brutalized by military or CIA interrogators, there was no formal policy authorizing such abuse. (On occasion it was even condemned -- in December 2002, for example, some Navy officials denounced the Guantanamo techniques as ''unlawful and unworthy of the military services.")

But surely, Church was asked at a congressional hearing, someone should be held accountable for the scores of abuses that even the government admits to? ''Not in my charter," the admiral replied.

So the buck stops nowhere. And fresh revelations of horror keep seeping out.

the accounts are here ...

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/03/17/wheres_the_outrage_on_torture/

[TheFarseer]

1. Sorry to tell you but

No one gives a sh*t about torturing terrorists. You and I know that not all of them are terrorists, but that is how it's been framed.

[shraby]

2. I received a reply to one of

my letters about the torture from my Senator Feingold. In it he said that documents he asked for in 2003 from Ashcroft about the torture memos at hearings still haven't been produced for him.

[Briar]

6. Even if they are terrorists, torture is wrong

It is both immoral and illegal. Thinking itself above the law (and worse, imagining that it is God's moral arbiter on Earth) is one of ways in which Imperial Amerika is most disgusting.

[Warren Stupidity]

3. Jacoby? I'm all disoriented!

Jeffy is the Globe's resident rightwing a-hole. That he is miffed about torture is a bit surprising.

Just to balance things out the Globe also ran "The ACLU is out of line" on the op ed two days later by some schmuck named Anil Adyanthaya, the thesis of which is that since it is only foreigners who are suing about our fine military getting all medieval over them, the ACLU has no business providing pro bono legal services. If you care to read this tripe:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/03/19/the_aclu_is_out_of_line/

The foreigners in question include somes of the folks we tortured in Abu Grahib. The fact that the ACLU's charter is somewhat extended by our going around the planet toppling governments and occupying countries seems not to have occured to Adyanthaya.

I am amazed at the explanations people come up with to rationalize barbarity.

[NVMojo]

4. that's why I posted this! He's an extreme conservative ...the eyes

slowly pop open!

[louis-t]

5. Right-wing crazies have compartmentalized

Separated into: 1."We don't torture people." (denial compartment) 2. "A few bad apples did it." (the closest they'll ever come to outrage) 3. "It's OK to torture terrorists." (revenge compartment) None of the 3 compartments ever intermingle, any evidence of torture triggers a shift to a different compartment. Being a conservative idiot is getting more complicated.
edit for clarity.