I didn't say it was excusable, or not criminal, and I didn't say it wasn't abuse. But labeling it "torture" is overkill, and apparently part of a deliberate attempt to narrow, for political reasons, the immense gap between these incidents and what took place in Iraq before we got there.

And on a similar note, please don't inject "systemic" in there without proof, or try to expand it by inserting the "things we don't know about." You see, we don't know about them, do we?

I'm still amazed at how closely this is following the old Vietnam script, when the objective was to magnify the flaws on our side--which Kerry made his career after he got back--and to utterly suppress the massive crimes of our communist opposition. In arguments back in school, you would get jeered down as a McCarthyite for simply pointing out that North Vietnam was a totalitarian communist regime.

Along the same lines, everything Saddam did in Iraq has been carefully swept under the rug. Mass graves? Unimportant. Real torture? Not relevant. We imprisoned those who were trying to kill us in Iraq, or who actually had killed. Who did Saddam put in prison?

I'm not defending the actions of those who abused prisoners. They should be punished.

I am angry about our entire military being lynched by the media and others, and resent having to constantly oppose overblown and fallacious attacks that go far beyond the reality.