The shame of Abu Ghraib

This New Yorker piece by Sy Hersh on the Pentagon’s indifference to the investigation into the Ahu Graib torture scandal makes for depressing reading, although the general in charge of it does come out as a honourable man. Donald Rumsfeld’s total contempt for reality still has the capacity to shock despite all that we already know about his arrogance and incompetence.

One also wonders how we’ve ended up, and I say this as someone who thinks that the motivations behind the Iraq War were essentially noble, in a situation where we’re reading sentences like this, “[Major General] Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.”