Ah how convenient. We invade a country, then label everyone we round up 'terrorists' (whether they actually are or not), and that gives us carte blanche to do whatever the hell we want with them.

Rumsfeld's sickening (and ironically Clintonesque) dodge around 'torture' v. 'abuse' is also symptomatic about how morally bankrupt this administration and their defenders are, despite any nattering about compassion and Christianity.

Blumenthal may be a hack, but that's a far lesser crime than defending the administration's policies that led us to this.

Jackass!

You're sure we're "labelling everyone we round up" a "terrorist?"

And who's doing "whatever the hell we want" with them? Consequences are happening...

...like they never did with the people who ran the *real* Gulag.

What happened was *not* torture, in the sense that any rational person recognizes it; it was gross hazing, and culturally humiliating (there and here), and *should and will be punished severely*, but everyone lived, and nobody was physically harmed.

But being a Democrat, you don't know anything about the real Gulag, do you?

What's vile about what our soldiers did, was that they took prisoners into custody and then abused them.

What's vile about what happened in the prison /before/ our soldiers took over was how many left with disfigurments or not at all.

What's similar to what our soldiers did in that prison happens almost daily without comment here in the US. Men and women, not in custody, often by their choice, suffer abuse in order to gain credibility within an organization. Ever hear of frat initiation? Remember that high school hazing incident? I don't recall hearing as much horror over those cases.

Further, because our military was on the job, it's being dealt with already. Before any trials for the original jailors. Tell me what country follows /that/ tradition?

That's what I love about doing this blog - I hardly need to respond in the comments at all.

What gryf and fingers said.

Re: fingers:
Nice. Way to elevate the discourse. Now I'm completely swayed to your point of view, the logic is impeccable.

Re: mitch:
You don't know anything about what I do or don't know, or what (if any) party I belong to. But that isn't important to your line of reasoning, when it's so much easier to brand someone you disagree with as part of a collective enemy (Democrats or liberals) and then attack them for what other Democrats or liberals do.

Re: gryf:
So these Iraqis are there voluntarily, like a freshman pledging for a frat? As if there isn't any difference between that and pissing off an entire region, lowering our already stellar image with the rest of the world, and encouraging MORE attacks against our troops and unfortunate corporate employees working for war profiteers? No, you're right, it's the same thing.

Jeff,

I think I get it. I have to know everything there is to know about you, your background, your every motivation, before I respond to Blumenthal's...words fail me...morally-vacant (he has to climb a ways to reach "morally-bankrupt") statement - but you, Jeff, you man of mystery, you, are allowed to give blanket condemnations of things you - I'll be charitable - clearly don't understand?

Comparing Abu Ghraib to the Gulag is on the same morally-null plane as comparing, say, police profiling to the Holocaust; recoverable errors with punishable consequences and no fatalities versus the mass extinction of entire ethnic groups. That Blumenthal can do it with a straight face is a damning comment on his, for lack of a better term, "character".

"Fingers" response may have been a little more curt than we were taught in debate clase, but I personally know he's done more to defend both Iraqis *and* you and I from being subjected to the sort of things we see in Iraq (after and especially before the liberation) than you or I ever will. I think the comment stands.

Your protestations aside, your response to gryf would seem to confirm that you have drunk the far-left koolaid.

Feel free to prove me wrong.

Sorry, I forgot to include the Comm Brevity definition.

Jackass: One who intentionally spouts assinine drivel while drawing unsupportable parallels. -or- One who uses words like 'all' or say, "everyone," "their defenders" to group related and unrelated things in an attempt to increase magnitude while actually revealing ignorance.

Jeff:

You're incorrect about the terrorist designation - read the transcript. Rumsfeld specifically said that the prisoners at Abu Ghraib who were part of Iraq's war effort were being treated under the Geneva Conventions.

Mitch: If I google chuzzlewit, will I get more than one hit? I have no idea what it means, yet I know precisely what it means. If you know what I mean.

Mitch, reread your first reply to me and my subsequent reply to that and tell me where I say you need to know anything about ME to critique Blumenthal. I don't. That's not the point, and you should know it.

Patton, Mitch was the one that called the prisoners 'terrorists' in his initial commentary. Your dispute is therefore with him for being inaccurate, and possibly with Blumenthal (although neither of us likely dispute that).

And yes, it is pretty clear it IS torture and not simply abuse. Torture is intended to coerce, and these morons were told to do it to make the prisoners' lives hell so they would break. Never mind that a human being will likely say ANYTHING YOU WANT THEM TO is such a situation, just to end it.

I don't know about the kool-aid Mitch. I just call it like I see it, and I continually see this administration (and the byproducts of its actions) flushing our image down the toilet with every passing day of this adventure in nation building (something Bush roundly criticised in the 2000 debates, where did THAT conviction go I wonder?).

First, I reject the premise that I'm "inaccurate". "Accuracy" can only be assessed based on defining truth; you dn't know how many of the prisoners were innocent. Given the record of these sorts of things, I'll hold my judgement - but I'll bet that the vast majority are guilty as hell, and if they'd been taken prisoner by any other government fighting a brutal counterinsurgency (read: Russia, France), they'd have long since been lined up and machine-gunned.

You call it like you see it? Or like MacAuliffe and Atrios and Josh Marshall see it? I ask because of your last statement, re: the nation building; Where did that conviction go? Out the south wall of the south tower of the WTC, in a cloud of other burning trash. Events obsoleted it. Seems clear to any rational observer.