Well, I'm glad you're so easily convinced. I'm not. I'm not sure what is "abusive" about strip-searching enemy combatants. I don't know what constitutes a "scandal" when an investigation was launched immediately upon hearing the allegations.
And as for the mileage our enemies will get, so what? These aren't people who liked us anyway, and never will. If we served wine with the prisoners' meals, they'd hate us because it wasn't chilled properly. Why degrade yourself to curry favor with those who hate you?
And if those hateful images are to be part of America's legacy, how about the images of smoke-smudged soldiers handing out flowers to adoring schoolchildren, or Army nurses treating wounded civilians? How about a "before" and "after" of Abu Ghraib, you know, as it was under the previous management?
To hell with our enemies. Foreign and domestic.
We're signatories to the Geneva Conventions. Anytime prisoners are treated outside those standards it is abuse. Forgive me but it's highly disingenuous to contend that these were "strip-searches," as if these people were naked during some kind of in-processing routine. Nor were they naked because the MPs were "following orders" (an obviously self-serving charge that I will believe only when I see hard evidence for it). They were naked because they were being humiliated for sport by incredibly undisciplined, foolish and sadistic American MPs.
I don't know what constitutes a "scandal" when an investigation was launched immediately upon hearing the allegations.
A scandal exists when American soldiers in uniform in a war zone film one another blatantly violating the Geneva Conventions, grinning like bozos all the while.