By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, June 14, 2004, at 1:46 PM PT
In a recent public debate, so I was told, an American officer referred to the Abu Ghraib scandal as a "moral Chernobyl." You might think that this was overstating matters, even if in one important sense—because Chernobyl was morally an accident, albeit in some ways a "systemic" one—it is actually understating them.
But get ready. It is going to get much worse. The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long. And, if you wonder why formerly gung-ho rightist congressmen like James Inhofe ("I'm outraged more by the outrage") have gone so quiet, it is because they have seen the stuff and you have not. There will probably be a slight difficulty about showing these scenes in prime time, but they will emerge, never fear. We may have to start using blunt words like murder and rape to describe what we see. And one linguistic reform is in any case already much overdue. The silly word "abuse" will have to be dropped. No law or treaty forbids "abuse," but many conventions and statutes, including our own and the ones we have urged other nations to sign, do punish torture—which is what we are talking about here at a bare minimum....
<http://slate.msn.com/id/2102373/>
Carl
_________________________________________________________________ Watch the online reality show Mixed Messages with a friend and enter to win a trip to NY http://www.msnmessenger-download.click-url.com/go/onm00200497ave/direct/01/