Robert Higgs, an anti-interventionist libertarian and Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, on The Crimes at Abu Ghraib Are Not the Worst:
Recent days have been hectic ones for the Supreme Rulers in Washington, D.C. President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have ceased their accustomed swaggering, put on their most somber faces, and issued one apology after another for the mistreatment of prisoners by U.S. soldiers and mercenaries at Abu Ghraib prison. Although the government had known about these disgusting, sadistic, and idiotic amusements for a long time, Rumsfeld kept a close hold on the information, the better to brush it under the official rug. (We know that the government knew, because the International Committee for the Red Cross, which made several inspections of the prisons in Iraq, confirms that long ago it “told the Americans that what was going on at Abu Ghraib is reprehensible.”) Once the photos got out, of course, more than one kind of hell broke loose, and now the government's top dogs all have their tails tucked shamefully between their legs. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham warned reporters after Rumsfeld’s Senate interrogation on May 7 that “there’s more to come” and “we’re talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges” against U.S. soldiers and civilian employees in Iraq.
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