Outraged By The Outrageous

GoingRoundAndRoundAndRound
InTheCircleGameVille

By the time the dog days of last summer rolled around Donald Rumsfeld had pretty much made Kool-Aid of the original batch of Abu-Ghraib pictures.

And remember how the Rumskullian One managed to play up the fact that nobody could have foreseen this crazy thing called digital imaging that had wormed its way into the hearts and minds of the torturers..... errrr.... interrogators and minders of the privatized American prisons in Iraq.

It was a ploy that worked so well that the mop-up right-sided attack dogs easily got the great majority of the petrified punditocracy swallow their disgusting codswallop with little effort.

Take, for example, the much publicized statements of Senator James Inofe (R-The Wishbone Offense):

"....as I watch this outrage -- this outrage everyone seems to have about the treatment of these prisoners -- I have to say, and I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment."

So if that is the case, why are the generals that went to the mat with Mr. Rumsfeld last year now scared crapless about releasing the latest batch of pictures?

Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has warned that the release of new photos and videos of detainee abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison would lead to violence against U.S. armed forces worldwide and endanger the lives of Iraqi and Afghan civilians."

Hmmmm......could it be that those images are so vile that they will lead to true outrage both at home and, worse now that the waterheads know it matters, at AQ and AQ wannabe recruitment centers the world over?

Well.

Apparently the answer is yes; here's more from the good General:

"Even if the images were redacted to obscure identifying information, he (Myers) says, the release of the videos and photos would "aid the recruitment efforts and other activities of insurgent elements, weaken the new democratic governments of Iraq and Afghanistan . . . and increase the likelihood of violence against United States interests, personnel, and citizens worldwide."

All of which has us wondering, Tom Waits style:

"What are they (really) doing in there?"

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Update: From the 'More Of The Circle Game' dep't or, perhaps more to the point, the 'Reaping of the Whirlwind'...Myers et al. have been trying to argue that releasing the latest batch of images, which some have predicted are very, very bad indeed, would be an infringement of the prisoners' rights under the very same Geneva Conventions that the Cheney Administration has already worked so hard to nullify for these very same prisoners. Have these people no shame or is the entire thing is just an endless cycle of the 'Variations of the Mules'?

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