Quote: Captain Sammitch said: Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't torture defined as inflicting actual bodily harm on someone? Everything else seems to fall under the heading of abuse which is still not the best way to go, but certainly isn't an atrocity on par with Japanese mistreatment of American POWs in WWII or any other incident of actual torture in history.
At the risk of tossing in another political stereotype, I'm not terribly surprised that politicizers who equate hurt feelings with offensive violation of their civil rights would muddy the definition of torture and waste valuable campaign time attacking the straw man by insinuating that Bush or his administration is ordering war crimes, which is essentially unprovable.
If I have you bound and repeatedly threaten to shoot you with a rifle, I would be imprisoned.
Why should that not be a crime if I happened to be a member of the US Army, and I was doing it to an Iraqi detainee?
Good question. My best guess is that as an American citizen, I would have rights that were protected by law-enforcement officers on US soil and by the American Embassy on foreign soil. As there was no de facto government in place when these events unfolded, there was no authority to respond to these incidents - unless superior officers were there all along and did nothing to stop what happened. I doubt any of those officers would be that eager to destroy their careers.
Harsh as it may sound, though, they weren't citizens of a government that protected their rights, and they had nobody to intervene. Doesn't make it morally right, of course. But in a situation like that, all you have to go on is Geneva, which we're beginning to see is a pretty outdated and rather open-ended standard. So there might actually not be anyone to say the US soldiers violated the Iraqis' civil rights if there wasn't a government or constitution or treaty in place establishing those civil rights.
At any rate, there's nothing to establish that incidents of this nature continued after this came to light, and all reports suggest they were isolated incidents themselves. It's nowhere near proportional to the kidnapping and murder of American civilians and other foreign nationals - who, by the way, do have rights protected by their respective governments. I personally think that the Iraqis at Abu Ghirab were wronged and mistreated and they didn't deserve it at all - but what happened to them is pretty tame compared to what's been happening to all the foreign civilians over there. You put on the uniform, you pick up a gun, you're no longer a civilian - all bets are off as far as what will happen to you.
