Torture

I don't ever want to hear about we're mistreating our War on Terror prisons again. Making naked dogpiles? Flushing pages of the Koran? Not good things, to be sure...in fact, out-and-out abuse. Should there be administrative punishments to those responsible, absolutely. And the Gitmo suicides that the mainstream media is very fond of covering right now certainly aren't a good thing, but we're talking three successes out of 40 attempts, and 40 attempts out of about 460 prisoners. Is there that much of a difference between either the suicide attempt or success rates of Guantanamo and other prisons? (For once, that question isn't sarcastic--if any one of my six readers can find me those stats, I'd love to see them.)

None of this compares to the barbarism displayed by our enemies. We put ourselves at such a disadvantage by fighting this battle at our own level rather than stooping to theirs--we follow traditional rules of engagement, fighting soldiers and arresting terrorists; they target civilians with impunity and have no qualms about torturing their prisoners. By no means am I advocating that we should even approach that level--it'd just be nice if the left wing and the mainstream media wouldn't put us at a greater disadvantage by beating the minor abuses by our individual soldiers while more-or-less ignoring the blanket policy of true torture and decapitation used by the terrorists.