Get me my Cluebat....

Because someone is in need of a major clue infusion.

United States soldiers at a prison outside Baghdad have been accused of forcing Iraqi prisoners into acts of sexual humiliation and other abuses.

The charges, first announced by the military in March, were documented by photographs taken by guards in the prison.

Some of the photographs, and descriptions of others, were broadcast in the US on Wednesday by a CBS television news program and were verified by military officials.

Of the six people reported in March to be facing preliminary charges, three have been recommended for courts martial.

OK, follow my logic here, if you will. First of all, let's look at this from the Geneva Convention, shall we? Hmmmmm.... Yep, torturing prisoners is ILLEGAL! What in G-d's name were they thinking? Oh, that's right, THEY WEREN'T! I can't think of a single time in my military experience when one person thought that torturing prisoners was OK. In fact, the Geneva Convention was drilled into our heads so damn often that I can still recite parts of it! And torturing prisoners is definitely not on the list of good ideas!

"The pictures show Americans, men and women, in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners," a transcript said.

"And in most of the pictures, the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing or giving the camera a thumbs-up."

The program's producers said the army also had photographs showing a detainee with wires attached to his genitals and another that showed a dog attacking a prisoner.

The photographs were taken inside Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad, where US forces have been holding hundreds of Iraqis.

Do a Google search on "Abu Ghraib". It's one of Saddam's most notorious prisons, where unspeakable acts occurred on Saddam's orders. This just gets worse and worse.

Gary Myers, the lawyer for one of the enlisted men who has been charged, said the military had treated the six enlisted soldiers as scapegoats and had failed to deal adequately with the responsibilities of senior commanders and intelligence personnel involved in the interrogations.

Officers at the prison, including a brigadier-general, faced administrative review, officials said.

Mr Myers said that the accused men, all from a reserve military police unit, were told to soften up the prisoners by more senior interrogators, some of whom they believe were intelligence officials and outside contractors.

"This case involves a monumental failure of leadership, where lower level enlisted people are being scapegoated," Mr Myers said. "The real story is not in these six young enlisted people. The real story is the manner in which the intelligence community forced them into this position."

Fuck you Mr. Myers, the enlisted men knew that what they were doing was wrong, and they did it anyway. And the pictures show them having a good fucking time. Lock their asses up and throw away the key, as far as I'm concerned. Those men and their entire chain of command need to spend the rest of their lives in Leavenworth.

Look, war is a nasty, brutish, horrible business, there's no doubt. But one thing that separates us... the one thing that we need in order to hold our heads up high when all is said and done is the fact that WE ARE BETTER THAN THE ENEMY. We don't torture prisoners, (at least, not the majority of us!). We don't cause needless pain and suffering. We have MORALS, even when we're at war. The acts of one small group endanger all of that. It also aids the enemy, both there and at home. I can hear the moonbat's hysterical shrieking from New York to Seattle. We're already facing an enemy who doesn't care about rules, they'll use anything they can in order to hurt us. Giving them ammo like this hurts EVERYBODY on our side. We're supposed to be the good guys, but it's going to be damn hard to convince people when they see pictures like this!

This isn't the heat of battle. This isn't something that happened accidentally. This was deliberate mishandling of prisoners under the US Army's care. Those soldiers need to be kicked out, their commanders need to be stripped of their commissions, and that entire unit needs to be brought home and shut down. And everything needs to be done in full view of the Iraqi's who might now be questioning just who the good guys are.

What they did is unacceptable, and cannot be tolerated in the slightest.

Found the link at Right Thinking.

CODA: If this turns out to be horribly mis-reported by the US media, that company should be barred from every setting foot in Iraq again.