My take on that: fortunately, the material that got out will no doubt finger the identities of the torturers as well as the victims.
Bear in mind, though, the double standard afoot that while it's not
acceptable for a western power to run afoul of the Geneva Conventions
(assuming that country is a signatory power), it may be the will of Allah/God/(insert metaphysical superentity here) that it's okay for some subgroup of Arab (what's an Arab? Many disagree on this WITHIN the category, whatever it is) to enslave or kill all the other Arabs, never mind those ethnics from outside.
I say that toothless backwoods KKK-boosters = Al-Sadr militia. Just a different part of the world and a different religious cover to use as a justification for the local variant of subhumanity.
Al-Sadr = the Tokyo sarin guy = Tim McVeigh. This is the scary part of the future: there have been kooks/smooth operators bearing religious/ethnic justifications for millenia; it's just that now they can get more effective weapons...
3 Comments
One thing that has been bugging me about this whole mess is who they were going to show those pictures to? I mean, torture is one thing, but taking photographic evidence of it is pretty stupid. These weren't exactly snapshots for homemade postcards...
Dunno if it explains the matter in large or small part, but apparently, certain Muslims view being photographed as a sin. All part of breaking them down, I suppose. As for the content of said photos ... different matter alltogether.
"As for the content of said photos ... different matter alltogether"
I'm not rooting for the torturers, but content? Consider this characterization of the possible conventional wisdom on the Arab "street":
'Well, it was difficult to take our people being dismembered and killed by such as Saddam Hussein, but being pushed around by foreigners - that simply won't do. Saddam may have been a brutality-soaked freakazoid, but he was OUR brutality-soaked freakazoid.'