The new barbarians.

Rage of the day: The Edmonton Journal's headline on today's article on the torture and abuse of detainees in Iraq's Abu Gharabi prison reads "Anguish, soul-searching at home of rogue U.S. soldiers" (emphasis mine).

The use of the word rogue is telling, in that it reinforces the notion that the acts of barabarism committed by the "liberators" in Saddam's most infamous house of pain were the isolated acts of a few MPs. However, the evidence is mounting to show that such horrific acts (acts which would be horrible in their own right, yet are worsened by the fact that most of the detainees housed at Abu Gharabi are non-combatants. In other words, the very people the smirking ape of a president and his goon squad claimed to be liberating from tyrrany.) are not isolated, but institutionalized.

(The Whisky Bar has some of the best analysis of the situation, hands down.)

So are we seeing a quiet push in the North American so-called "liberal" media to isolate these acts and draw attention away from what Sid Blumenthal (the Whisky Bar's favorite pundit) calls America's gulag, a prison system that "stretches from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan and almost 700 in Guantánamo, but no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary. There has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union."? Or was the choice of words in the above-mentioned headline simply the handiwork of a bored and inattentive copy editor? I don't know, but what I do know that we're talking about the United States of Whatever, nothing is impossible.

(UPDATE)
I wa smulling over America's gulag, and suddenly it hit me: America already has more of its population in prison than any other. Now, in the true spirit of capitalism, they're starting franchises. I wonder what the signs will say? "More than 15,000 served (so far)"?

It also occurred to me that, despite all the "anguish and soul searching" going on in Middle America, how many anguished soul searchers will still vote for that sonofabitch Bush? The thought that people can look at the pictures coming out and still be able to say they support the policies of the man who made them possible makes me sick to my stomach.