argh.

[sisyphusshrugged]

The Clinton administration picked this guy.

On the contrary, there is a HUGE difference between burning somebody alive because you think she is a witch, and killing the possessor of a radiological bomb acquired from a terrorist organization. THERE ARE NO WITCHES. WHEN YOU BURN A "WITCH," YOU ARE TORTURING AN INNOCENT, INTELLIGENT BEING TO DEATH SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU HAVE A FALSE CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD.

There are times--like after reading the Rubin-Weisberg book, In an Uncertain World--when I think that the hallmark of true intelligence is to recognize that one may not know everything, and that one should take special care to avoid actions that are impossible or very costly to reverse--like burning a "witch", or attacking Iraq in the belief that even though you don't know of any links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda you're bound to find a piece of paper that will serve as such somewhere in Baghdad. Even if I believed in witches, I wouldn't burn them. Deprive them of the chalk they use to draw pentagrams, yes; separate them from their familiars, yes (sorry kitty); deprive them of the ability to use their knowledge of the magical laws of similarity and contagion, yes; but kill? No.

As Oliver Cromwell said: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, consider that you might be mistaken."

The Bush administration picked this woman.

Last June, Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was named commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade and put in charge of military prisons in Iraq. General Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone, was an experienced operations and intelligence officer who had served with the Special Forces and in the 1991 Gulf War, but she had never run a prison system. Now she was in charge of three large jails, eight battalions, and thirty-four hundred Army reservists, most of whom, like her, had no training in handling prisoners.

General Karpinski, who had wanted to be a soldier since she was five, is a business consultant in civilian life, and was enthusiastic about her new job. In an interview last December with the St. Petersburg Times, she said that, for many of the Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib, “living conditions now are better in prison than at home. At one point we were concerned that they wouldn’t want to leave.”

A month later, General Karpinski was formally admonished and quietly suspended, and a major investigation into the Army’s prison system, authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq, was under way. A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.) Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

...Karpinski was rarely seen at the prisons she was supposed to be running, Taguba wrote. He also found a wide range of administrative problems, including some that he considered “without precedent in my military career.” The soldiers, he added, were “poorly prepared and untrained . . . prior to deployment, at the mobilization site, upon arrival in theater, and throughout the mission.”

General Taguba spent more than four hours interviewing Karpinski, whom he described as extremely emotional: “What I found particularly disturbing in her testimony was her complete unwillingness to either understand or accept that many of the problems inherent in the 800th MP Brigade were caused or exacerbated by poor leadership and the refusal of her command to both establish and enforce basic standards and principles among its soldiers.”

Yet, somehow, this is the adminstration of grown-ups who God really likes.

I think I'll go scrub my frontal lobes with Brill-O now.

If you have a very strong stomach, the pictures are here.

Recognizing, wise men that they were, that governments, unlike individuals, have absolutely nothing to gain from behaving humanely and decently that they can't gain more of faster by skipping that step, our founding fathers built us a nice solid constitution with neat stuff like the first, fourth and even fifth amendments, although I hear there are folks who think we don't really need some of them any more.

Well, if we are done with any of them, I'll bet these people would be happy to take them off our hands. They seem to need them pretty badly.

Two hundred years of hard wear and all.