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Thanks for your posts. You are a thoughtful person.

I suggest you read a few good books on the prison systems in America. From the days of Toqueville to present, American penal systems(from the root word pennance) has been a global oddity.

While Africa and Islam were selling their undesireables off into slavery or executing them and their entire families, America was spending the public treasury to house, clothe, and feed undesireables and then putting their families on public assistance.

We Americans have such a huge GDP, we can afford a justice system and somehow we think that's a shared global priority. It's not. Ninety percent of the world spends most of it's governing time figuring out how to cull the herd. We spend it pampering the herd because we can afford it.

My dad spent twenty years working in the prison system(maximum security) and you do have a right to be concerned about the treatment of prisoners, but your concerns would be more genuine right here at home, not in Iraq. You also need some reality checks on the behavior and management of prisoners. They have nothing but time and resources to do you harm, which in Iraq is why they got there. You must keep them off balance and confused 24/7. It's a science I'm sad to say.

You also need some reality checks on the behavior and management of prisoners. They have nothing but time and resources to do you harm, which in Iraq is why they got there.

I'm less concerned about the prisoners here in the US who have been completely through our justice system, have attorneys and many liberal organizations looking out for their welfare. In the battlefield, enemy combatants have none of that; in addition, are subject to conventions on the treatment of enemy prisoners to which we are a signatory. Few of those prisoners are anything more than suspects; few have had any charges levied, and it's doubtful that the MPs there had any responsibility for "working" the prisoners to keep them off balance.

I don't have a problem with tough interrogation, and much less of a problem with what happens in the heat of battle. But I do believe that no one up the chain of command had any hint of this. Sometimes it's best to just be out in the open and admit a problem rather than build a justification that might not withstand the test of time. Take care.