CULTURE OF ABUSE: Do we really believe that these common practices are the result of completely spontaneous imagination by soldiers ?

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: "Thursday, December 16, 2004

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.
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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. ...