Blogjack.net

Ogged of Unfogged writes:

Unfogged: Oh my Lord.

U.S. military officials told NBC News that the unreleased images showed U.S. soldiers severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to death, having sex with a female Iraqi female prisoner and “acting inappropriately with a dead body.” The officials said there was also a videotape, apparently shot by U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.

This will define America for generations. (Note, please, that they "have sex" with the woman, but "rape" the boy.)

Do you really think it's alarmist to point out that Americans can be put away indefinitely on nothing more than one man's whim; that we have a collection of legal black holes: at Guantanamo, on ships around the world, in Iraq; that our soldiers blithely torture detainees; and that fully half the country still thinks the President is doing a good job? Do you wonder how totalitarian regimes come about? This is how: with the consent of the governed.

Look, I, and my friends and family, all live in urban areas, assuming our share of the risk of terrorist attacks. If this is being protected, I'll take my chances. I don't want to live like this, and I don't want these things done in my name. What happened to death before dishonor? Or is it already too late for that?

The NBC article containing the offending quote has been replaced, but you can still find it in google's cache from several news sources. Here's one. And here's a UK news article containing the same quote.

Meanwhile,Katherine of Obsidian Wings aggregates information:

Obsidian Wings: "They Opened the Door to a Little Bit of Torture, and a Whole Lot of Torture Walked Through.": That's a quotation from Carroll Bogert of Human Rights Watch, in this Newsweek article.

Why am I so convinced of this, and that not only a few bad soldiers in the 372nd bear responsibility for Abu Ghraib? Not just because of this, this and this. There's also this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this....

(via too many people to credit individually, as well as Google News--this isn't original research on my part, just an effort to put as much of it as possible in one place.)

As a libertarian/anarchocapitalist, I expect political structures to be prone to corruption and abuse, so I shouldn't be shocked at any of this. But I am. War is the health of the state, and our state is way too "healthy" right now.

I thought it was bad, but it's worse.