Losing Hearts and Minds Over the Abu Ghraib Abuses
So, the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal continues to widen (and to draw much-needed attention to the profoundly un-American obscenity that is the Guantanamo Bay detention center). Of particular note to me are the growing number of people who find themselves struggling to reconcile their views about the rightness of the war with the obvious wrongness of how it is being carried out. People like Thomas Friedman: Restoring our honor. And Christopher Hitchens: Prison mutiny.
I have to give them credit for being willing to face up honestly to the latest news. Still, there are plenty of other people who aren’t burdened by the need to explain how they could have been so wrong in the first place, and so are able to follow the trail of implications even further. People like Sidney Blumenthal: This is the new gulag. And Juan Cole’s wife Shahin: America in the balance: Sex, lies and prison abuse.
