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Abu Ghraib has given our leftist journalists a club with which to beat President Bush and the war to overthrow Saddam. The same rotten crew who never seriously protested Saddam's vile tortures and mass murders are now using the reprehensible behaviour of a handful of rogue troops to discredit the liberation of Iraq To top it off, the same faux journalists insist on painting the liberations as a failure, despite the destruction of Saddam's vicious regime. So addicted are these lying scribes to their America-hating mindset that murderous terrorists are now routinely described as "resistance fighters" or the "Iraqi resistance"....

Until now, I have not commented on the abuses at the Abu Gharib prison for lack of solid information. Were, for example, the Iraqi prisoners captured after firing on Americans and other Iraqis? Or, were they caught with weapons on them or in their homes or cars? Or, were they only under suspicion. Or, thouht to be spies? Who they are means quite different treatment according to the Geneva Conventions. Indeed, in almost all these cases, as the rebellion against the American occupation is being fought by those in civilian dress, those captured would not be considered prisoners of war...

HIGH-FIVING IN THE NEWSROOM [Tim Graham] The Washington Post touts its latest poll showing that President Bush's approval rating in the war on terror has collapsed since...the Abu Ghraib obsession. Here's my first question: do the people surveyed have any idea what John Kerry would do to protect us better? The pattern of the press all year has been pound Bush, and leave Kerry alone. The pattern of the press all year has seemed to designed to do exactly this: erase Bush's polling advantage on national security. When will it be time to put Kerry in the hot seat? Or...

Apropos of Rich's post about the Navy, I found this email particularly interesting: I’ve been an Army interrogator since 1990, and just finished up a hitch as an interrogation instructor and interrogation training developer. I think that was a good piece (Barbarians at the Geneva Gates), but I think there are a couple points people never seem to mention. But first let me say, Abu Ghraib was idiotic and it wasn’t interrogation or interrogators. The first thing is that these “harsh” techniques that make the press quite often are not the standard procedure. The US Army has only about 500...

Whatever else can be said about the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, the forces arrayed against the U.S.-led coalition have welcomed the episode as a bonanza. Which forces? We don’t mean the vaunted “Arab street”—everyone is still waiting for that Godot—but rather the phalanx commanded by The New York Times, CNN, the BBC, Newsweek, and their satellites and support staff. The kingdom of the fourth estate contracted in one brow of grateful outrage and titillated horror as the photographs of naked Iraqis decorated the nightly news and front pages of newspapers everywhere. “The prisoner scandal has...