I went through the masochistic exercise of watching CNN, briefly, this morning. They were talking about how bad it would be for Americans when Iraqis learned of the abuse of prisoners by the Americans, the story that came out on 60 Minutes. Rahul Mahajan of Empire Notes has republished the photos of abuse. I think the photos say quite a lot. It’s a good thing that our culture is so deeply racist that it forbids people from seeing the utterly obvious. If it didn’t, all that sanctimony about the ‘barbarians’ in Fallujah celebrating the brutal treatment of the US mercenaries might ring hollow. But in fact, that kind of sanctimony and this kind of callous brutality are perfectly consistent with one another.
