Safer Than You Were Four Years Ago? Part III/Torture Of Naked, Innocent Detainees Unlikely To Increase Goodwill Among Arabs Edition

Short but sweet editorial on the Abu Ghraib abuses by Nick Gillespie in Reason. Gillespie sticks it to the excuse-makers [aren't bleeding-heart lib-ruhls supposed to be the ones blaming it on society?--ed.]:

The reaction of the some of the domestic punditocracy is almost as embarrassing as the abuse itself. Rush Limbaugh said that what took place at Abu Ghraib was "no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation," as if hooking blindfolded POWs up to electrical wires or sodomizing them with chemical light sticks was the same as a fraternity circle jerk. Columnist Linda Chavez invoked a Girls Gone Wild scenario, fingering gender integration of the troops as the key. Women like Lynndie England, she wrote, "look like they're showing off at some wild party trying to impress everybody with how 'cool' they are." (Unlike Limbaugh, Chavez admitted that the malefactors "dishonored their country and deserve severe punishment.")

The Orlando Sentinel's widely syndicated Kathleen Parker didn't hesitate to collar the real culprits: the sibling auteurs behind the gross-out comedy There's Something About Mary. What we witnessed "was 'The Farrelly Brothers Do Baghdad,'" she wrote. "There's not much difference between what those soldiers enacted in Abu Ghraib for digital cameras and 15 seconds of instafame back home and what America's increasingly debased culture embraces as good harmless fun... How else to explain the giddy photographs of young soldiers mugging for cameras and giving the thumbs-up sign beside humiliated prisoners, naked and masturbating? Another Farrelly movie, 'Dumb and Dumber,' comes to mind."

As Gillespie points out elsewhere, the (lib-ruhl?) Red Cross "believes up to 90 percent of Iraqi detainees have been arrested 'by mistake.'" Add that to the widespread reports that most of the prisoners were petty crooks and thugs, not in any way connected to the jihadist insurgency.

And no, we haven't heard the worst of this yet. Words like "rape" and "homicide" aren't comfortable, but they will be unavoidable. Total number of high-ranking officials fired over Abu Ghraib: 0. [Total number of administration officials fired over intelligence failures before 9/11 or over intelligence failures regarding WMD in Iraq: 0--ed.]