calm down, already
wow, do we need a new news story. the past week, all i've heard about is the iraqi torture scandal and the fallout thereof. now, i know that what these people did is unconscionable. the way these people were treated is absolutely inexcusable, and needs to be corrected immediately. punish those responsible, insert new controls to prevent it from happening again, all that good stuff.
now, having said that, could we please just get over it? is everybody as shocked by this as the media is making out? you take a bunch of reservists (the 372 had already done several months in bosnia, if i remember correctly, then came back and got turned around and sent to iraq, they're in the same brigade as my reserve unit), stick them in the desert for months and months, give them absolute control over the lives of people that act like animals and spend all their time trying to figure out ways to kill you, what do you expect to happen?
i used to refer to baghdad as the wild west in the middle east, american soldiers there are told "run this jail" or "set up a police station" and are let loose to do it. the details of how it gets done are usually decided at platoon or squad level. which isn't to say that these people didn't know better, or that it was permitted, but you get the stray sadist and shit like this is going to happen. what do you do? nail him or her to the wall, learn from it, figure out how to stop it from happening. if they were told to do it, nail 'em all. anybody that knew about it, get them too. nobody that permits something like this has a place in the army i know.
but where is this orgy of self-flagellation getting us? demanding useless apologies from men that had nothing to do with it and have much bigger problems to worry about
(and which don't do a damn bit of good anyway), investigating every crevice and nuance and showing these pictures 24/7, getting quotes and breaking out the proctiscope for every detail, where is it getting us? have we learned anything useful over the past few days? we knew it was wrong, and the folks doing it should be punished, but is interviewing their second grade teacher to see if they liked to hit their doggie and bringing paid finger-pointers onto cnn really what we need?
i, for one, can't wait for this story to finally blow over. unfortunatly, it is going to get worse before it gets better, and i'm sick of it already.
this would be a good time to bring osama out of the cave the cia's been holding him prisoner in for the past six months, give the press something else to talk about. or plant some wmd in the desert so that the engineers can "find" them the next day, something, any number of the wacky stunts the moonbats are insisting that bush is going to pull, this would be a good time to pull it, to push this story off the front page.
