Sullivan Nails It

Watch him break down America's torture problem. Hell, here's the whole thing:

A CULTURE OF ABUSE: Let's review. We have the horrors of Abu Ghraib; we have several murders and rapes of inmates in Iraq and in Afghanistan; we have separate abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib after the scandal broke; we have the use of electric shocks, beating to unconsciousness, scarring chemicals, one instance of "water-boarding," using dogs to terrorize and sometimes bite inmates, forced sodomy, and any number of bizarre pieces of sexual humiliation, designed specifically to abuse Arabs. Got all that? We have at least 130 convictions. Now we have this:

In Karbala in May 2003, one Marine held a 9mm pistol to the back of a bound
detainee's head while another took a photograph. Two months later, in Diwaniyah,
four Marines ordered teenage Iraqi looters to kneel alongside holes and then
fired a pistol "to conduct a mock execution." In April of this year, shortly
before the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal shook the U.S. military, three
Marines in Mahmudiya shocked a detainee with an electric transformer, forcing
him to "dance" as the electricity hit him, according to a witness, one document
states.

The ACLU also discovered a document containing a statement taken in October by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service in which a Navy corpsman who had been attached to the Marines in Iraq stated that it was routine to take a prisoner to an empty swimming pool, place cuffs on his hands and legs, put a burlap bag over his head, and then "the EPW [enemy prisoner of war] would remain in the kneeling position for no longer than 24 hours while the EPW was awaiting interrogation."

It's also increasingly clear that these kinds of abuses - the use of nakedness, exposure to extreme heat and cold, hooding, sexual abuse, real and faked electric torture - are themes across these disparate acts. In other words, there seems to be an informal methodology for the abuse and humiliation of prisoners. Do we really believe that these common practices are the result of completely spontaneous imagination by soldiers with no idea of what they were doing and no culture of acceptance from their superiors? These were not just some untrained grunts, coping with Rumsfeld-engineered chaos. These were elite Navy SEALs and Special Forces. And we have no idea how many incidents have gone unreported or have been covered up.

WHAT WE DON'T KNOW: We don't know - and may never know - the full extent of the torture. But we do now know that this wasn't just "abuse"; it was torture, used as part of the interrogation process or just randomly. We do know it wasn't a handful of hoodlums on the night shift in one prison. We do know that it followed a clear directive from the president that in this war, the enemy has the protection of the Geneva Conventions solely at his personal discretion, and that the "enemy" can include thousands of people rounded up in the middle of the night who are and were guilty of absolutely nothing. We also know that this president only rewards loyalty, not competence. We do know that the pattern of abuse affects the Special Forces, the Military Police, the Army, the Navy SEALs, reservists, and the Marine corps. We also know that no one in the higher commands has been found guilty of anything. And check this out: the marines who used electric shock torture against an inmate were found guilty. Their sentence? One got one year in confinement. The other eight months. The lesson? No big deal. They're still in the uniform.