What a top journalism prize says about America's shocking treatment of its own troops

From Attytood:

On Monday night, they announced the winners of the George Polk Awards for Journalism, honoring the best news reports and articles that appeared over the course of 2006. For those of you unfamiliar with the Polk Awards, run by Long Island University, they are arguably the second-most prestigious journalism prizes, sort of like the Golden Globes to the Oscars of the Pulitizer Prizes awarded in April.

And three out of the 12 winners. amazingly, were for stories that chronicled mistreatment or abuse or unnecessary risk to Americans fighting in Iraq -- along the lines of the Walter Reed story, yet arguably worse in some cases, because in these instances young men and women actually died. Read through these award-winning stories, and you'll be as baffled as I am over how a great nation can neglect or mistreat its own soldiers in this fashion.