Is This How Bush Was Hazed At His Frat?

The Washington Post on US soldiers' brutal treatment of prisoners, all of which they believed was "approved" from above.

Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush was being stubborn with his American captors, and a series of intense beatings and creative interrogation tactics were not enough to break his will. On the morning of Nov. 26, 2003, a U.S. Army interrogator and a military guard grabbed a green sleeping bag, stuffed Mowhoush inside, wrapped him in an electrical cord, laid him on the floor and began to go to work. Again.

It was inside the sleeping bag that the 56-year-old detainee took his last breath through broken ribs, lying on the floor beneath a U.S. soldier in Interrogation Room 6 in the western Iraqi desert. Two days before, a secret CIA-sponsored group of Iraqi paramilitaries, working with Army interrogators, had beaten Mowhoush nearly senseless, using fists, a club and a rubber hose, according to classified documents....

"The indig were hitting the detainee with fists, a club and a length of rubber hose," according to classified investigative records.

Soldiers heard Mowhoush "being beaten with a hard object" and heard him "screaming" from down the hall, according to the Jan. 18, 2004, provost marshal's report. The report said four Army guards had to carry Mowhoush back to his cell.

Not exactly "Animal House," is it? Mowhoush was killed, of course.

"The interrogation techniques were known and were approved of by the upper echelons of command of the 3rd ACR," [the lawyer for one of the soldiers] said in a news conference. "They believed, and still do, that they were appropriate and proper."

And you know what? They were wrong to do what they did, but right to believe the people in power were all for it. Bush has made that perfectly clear again and again. If not, why has no one in charge during these outrages been reprimanded in the least? Why instead has almost everyone involved been promoted and praised? This is the sort of vile nastiness we used to condemn the bad guys for -- the sort of cruel, nasty torture our soldiers endured from the OTHER side during Vietnam and Korea and from the Nazis and the Japs in the last righteous war. It is not a sign of strength -- torture is always a sign of weakness. And it is beneath the dignity of the United States.