Unfortunately, I was unable to comment all last week while the whole Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal was going on since the Anthropik Network was down in preparation for the public beta. But we’re back now!

Sadly, that this sort of thing happens in war really comes as no surprise to me. Even in the American military which has an almost unbelievably clean record in regards to this sort of behavior, there are still going to be a few incidents like the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. That is what war is.

What shocked me more than the abuse itself is the public’s reaction to the story. CNN conducted an online poll on May 3 in which they asked, “Is torture ever justified during an interrogation?” Forty seven percent answered “yes.” That’s almost half of the 237,123 people who voted. Even taking into account that this is by no means a scientific poll, that number is far too high.

I’ve also been seeing a lot of letters to various news organizations trying to explain away the torture. One viewer by the name of Peg wrote an e-mail to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Reports last Monday in which she wrote, “I don’t understand why people are so upset over these pictures of the Iraqi prisoners. This is nothing compared to what some of the Iraqis have done to our contractors, who they burned and hung from a bridge.”

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette published a letter from Tony Rozzi May 9 that read, “Once again Arabs are outraged and angry at Americans; this time because of pictures showing mistreatment of Arab prisoners. While the alleged mistreatment is indeed offensive, I was and am still outraged and angry over the images I saw of Arabs flying airplanes into buildings, killing almost 3,000 people, and attempting to curtail American freedoms. Amazingly, this action as well as hundreds of car bombs, suicide murders, etc. do not seem to outrage the Arabs.

“While the ’so-called voices of reason’ keep urging Americans to recognize and understand the cultural reasons for Arab hatred for Americans, I think Arabs should try to understand the growing hatred many Americans feel toward Arabs. They might find that many Americans could care less about their plight or their fate.”

This sort of nonchalant attitude toward the abuse and torture of Iraqis by American soldiers is simply appalling. Is torture ever justified? This should not even be a question. The torture and degradation of another human being is never justified ever.

Don’t make the mistake by my saying this to think that I am some sort of naive innocent with no concept of how the real world works. I fully understand that there a certain extreme situations in which some form of torture may be necessary in order to achieve a greater good. But there is a difference between what is “necessary” and what is “just.” Even when torture is necessary, it is never just, and there must be consequences for such disgusting behavior. Frankly, this incident of torture was neither necessary nor just. It was nothing more than a sickening display of cruelty and sadism.

Unfortunately, I continue hearing people excuse the behavior of these villains. Usually, the argument is something along the lines of, “Well, Hussein was worse.” Because we all know that two wrongs don’t make a right. So we’ll keep racking up the wrongs until we find out how many do make a right. I can only assume from how often America is compared to Hussein’s Iraq that this is the paragon we are striving for. We’re not quite as evil as Hussein was yet, but we’re getting there as fast as we can. Maybe one day when the American version of Saddam Hussein is in the White House, and these people who think torture is a good idea are having electrodes strapped to their genitals, they might rethink whether this is the goal we want to shoot for.

Even Bush and Rumsfeld have admitted that the abuse that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison was wrong. Bush even apologized for the torture, an act of responsibility totally unprecedented in the Bush Administration. Of course, I am still unsure why the apology was directed toward Jordan’s King Abdullah II. He sort of missed the target, and I don’t think acting as though the Middle East is a homogenous whole wherein Jordan and Iraq are the same thing is the best way to get back on the right track. But it’s a start. Rumsfeld offered his apologies during his 6 hour marathon testimony before Congress on May 7 saying, “To those Iraqis who were mistreated by members of the armed forces I offer my deepest apology. It was inconsistent with the values of our nation.”

These apologies show us that even Bush and Rumsfeld know that this was wrong or at the very least that Rove told them such an apology tested well among white males 18-34. Nonetheless, they admitted that it was wrong. I would expect at least as much from the average American. After all, Bush and Rumsfeld are corporeal manifestations of pure evil. Bush is the man who was found guilty of war crimes by a citizens tribunal in Japan for dropping Daisy Cutters, cluster bombs, and depleted uranium shells on civilian targets in Afghanistan. This is after launching another war in Iraq based on false information–a war which according to the Christian Science Monitor could be “the deadliest campaign for noncombatants that US forces have fought since Vietnam.” Rumsfeld is the man whose visit to Baghdad in the 1980s helped normalize relations between Iraq and the United States and set the stage for America’s support of Iraq in its war against Iran. If even they can admit that the torture of these Iraqis was wrong, anybody still defending these actions needs to check themselves for a pulse to see whether they are still human.