Faux Outrage

Please spare me before I puke on my brand new shoes.

Hands in the air, expressions of surprise - "Who? Us? Couldn't be us, we don't do things like that."

I'm as disgusted as any one could and should be by the nasty pictures of grinning soldiers and tortured prisoners that have flooded television screens and the Internet. I am also not in the least surprised, and neither should you be.

Our military, government, and intelligence services have excelled at the extraction of information from unwilling subjects through the use of intimidation, humiliation, mental and physical abuse, threat of death, and just plain death. We've practiced these arts all over the world over the past 60 years in service of our expanding empire. I could list a bunch of countries where we've employed these tactics, but that is a matter of history - go read a book.

More importantly are the consequences of these acts, and the further consequences of the publicity surrounding these specific cases.

The former is something the rest of the world either knew or suspected, which is why liberating Armies sporting American flag patches are often seen not as liberators but as killers, oppressors. We the citizenry, believing every instinct we have to be a good one, fail to recognize how our military adventures are percieved by others.

In the latter case, our leaders are very disappointed - that those pictures ever came to light. "A few rogue soldiers" we are told. Those old enough to remember will recognize that phrase from the glory days of the CIA, when an operation that went horrifically wrong (as in, became public) would be blamed on "rogue agents."

Watching this play out has been highly educational, and not a little bit entertaining. We have Rush limbaugh equating the entire episode to a fraternity prank. While it is true that fraternity pranks have resulted in severe injury and death, that was not their intention.

Tonight, the Reident-In-Thief will once again appropriate the nation's airwaves to explain his policy in Iraq, as if therre is anything left to explain in the face of indiscriminate torture and murder. Remember that wedding celebration bombed by US warplanes? The one that the head of our armed forces in Iraq said was not a wedding celebration, but a terrorist conclave? That there were only weapons found, but no food or any evidence a wedding had taken place?

Now there is a videotape of the event. A video shot by a man killed in the raid. Scenes in the video, which show the celebration following a wedding ceremony, match those of the location where the bombing took place.

More importantly, faces in the video match those on the bodies in the morgue.

Indictments are in order, all the way to the top.