Dr. Ivan Eland, an anti-interventionist libertarian and Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute, on Torturing Iraq in an Unnecessary War
The humiliation, abuse, torture and perhaps even murder of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. and British forces have enormous implications—if the American and British publics choose not to deny them. In the “us” versus “them” climate that wars often bring, however, excusing or downplaying abuses by “our team” is quite common. In the current Iraq prison scandal, many American newspapers—including the flagship New York Times—buried the shocking photos of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and tortured in their interior pages. American newspapers and media outlets, conscious of the bottom-line, know that their readers and viewers feel uncomfortable when being exposed to gross misconduct by “Team USA,” especially when many prisoners should already have been released in accordance with the Fourth Geneva Convention. A U.S. Army report noted that more than 60 percent of the civilian inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison were deemed to be no threat to society. Unfortunately for the Anglo-American war cause, the rest of the world’s newspapers and media outlets showcased the story of prisoner abuse rather than burying it.
Read the rest here.