In the late 1960s, one of my university professors was drafted into the U.S. Army and then made an M.P. at a U.S. military prison. He found the treatment of prisoners (U.S. soldiers) to be appalling. What disgusted him most was how they mixed psychotic violent criminals with very mild men (conscripts who couldn't cope with military life and then deserted). The torments inflicted upon these mild men by violent prisoners was probably worse than the humiliation inflicted upon the Iraqi prisoners. Physical abuse and humiliation have long been a part of American military prisons. However unlike U.S. soldiers being guarded by U.S soldiers, Iraqi prisoners are protected by the Geneva Convention and monitored by the Red Cross (there's a higher legal standard). The photographs of American soldiers behaving like SS men was very damaging to America's reputation. There must have been some extreme misconduct on the part of the prison officers to have allowed their lower ranking M.P.s to go around photographing abuse of Iraqi prisoners. I suspect this misconduct was due to an initially appropriate interrogation process of dangerous Iraqi prisoners being improperly extended to lower ranking M.P.s who were both idiots and sadists. Again, the higher ranking officiers should have detected this misbehavior and immediately taken corrective action. A bunch of people are going to get court martialed for this and rightly so.

I can understand why higher ranking officers and politicians were slow to respond to Red Cross complaints about abuse (they probably thought the prison abuse was simly business as usual). That there was any action taken at all was probably due to the existance of the photographs along with the growing realization that this would become a political problem. One must ask the questions: "How did the photographs come into the possession of 60 minutes and why did 60 minutes chose to make these images public during the Fallujia and al-Sadr uprisings?' Was publication of the photographs timed to cause maximum political damage? There's a story within a story here.

Gary