The upheaval about the tortures in Abu Ghraib has now hit the level I thought it should have hit three or four days ago. These people in the photographs should ALL face a court-martial, as should ANYONE against whom there is evidence that he or she may have tortured prisoners. If found guilty, long prison sentences are indicated. Additionally, ALL officers in the direct chain of command over this prison should be cashiered, and if that means we have to purge a couple of hundred guys for negligence and incompetence, well, so be it. Dishonorably discharge the lot.

Here's what happened, as best as I can gather from looking at various sources. During mid-to-late 2003 the abuses depicted in the photos happened. The Army figured this out in about December and began a serious investigation in January. Court-martials started a month or so ago and that's when it hit the fan, since they can't keep that secret. If soldiers are going on trial, perhaps for their lives, that's the line they can't cross. That has to be done publicly and with the guarantees of due process, though I believe that military law and civilian law differ in several important ways. (Gil, I know you know something about this; can you fill us in? I know the accused get counsel from a professional Army lawyer.)

CBS got hold of the report from the internal investigation and the Pentagon asked them to keep it under their hats until they (the Pentagon) had determined what they were going to do, which CBS agreed to. Seymour Hersh got hold of the report, too, though, and it became known that he was going to run his story in the New Yorker no matter what, so CBS broke the story with what they knew at the time.

Some 25-50 Iraqis, at least, were psychologically tortured and/or publicly humiliated. At least several were physically tortured, one sodomized. Possibly at least two were murdered. Supposedly some 15-20 soldiers, most of whom are from the same military police unit, have been implicated. At least six are being court-martialed. So what this looks like is one unit gone bad and a couple more isolated incidents. The unit that went bad went very bad, though, and if they actually killed people, hang 'em. If people of whatever nationality, American or not, who murder Americans get the death penalty, as I think is justified, then Americans who murder people of other nationalities should get the very same thing. And no, serving in (or working for) the army and complying with legal orders is not murder.

Note that intentionally killing noncombatants or surrendered enemy is not a legal order, and doing so is a war crime for which we hanged Nazis (like SS General Peiper, the commandant at the Battle of the Bulge who had American prisoners shot down in masse, or Wehrmacht Generals Keitel and Jodl, hanged at Nuremberg for, among other things, ordering the killing of prisoners and hostages), or Japanese General Homma, the general in charge of the Bataan Death March.

An example of a soldier killing an innocent person while complying with a legal order might be, say, firing a shell into a house that enemy fire is coming from and later discovering that along with two bad guys with guns you had killed a couple of more people who were just accidentally there for whatever reason.

It's a terrible thing that those innocents were killed, and no matter how hard you try not to do so, innocents will be killed in war. But it's the soldier's job to kill the enemy, especially if the enemy is shooting at him. This is why you do not go to war unless you absolutely have to. I believe the threat to the United States, its allies, the world, and people in general, wherever they live, that Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and the rogue states pose, justify the occasional tragic death of innocents that war produces.

Perhaps the most important difference between this war, being fought on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the sphere of intelligence and police work around the world, and Vietnam, is that in Vietnam nobody attacked us. Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh boys were brutal Communist bastards, all right, but they didn't pose any real or direct threat to America--unlike Cuba, which I fully believe we would have been justified in invading back in '61 or '62 or so.

Well, we bloody well know that the Islamic terrorists and their rogue state supporters have attacked America and its allies and show every sign of wanting to do so as often as possible in the future (remember WTC I? The USS Cole? The African embassies? Then 9/11, Bali, and Madrid?). So if we have to use war to stop them, so be it. If they weren't trying to kill OUR innocents, none of THEIRS would be in any danger of being killed by us.

America's terms for peace are pretty generous. Stop killing other people with terrorist attacks, especially those people who live in America or allied countries. Stop invading your neighbors. Don't do something so horrendously hellish to your own people that it just has to be stopped. That's all we want. Run whatever tinhorn dictatorships or monarchies or whatever you want. You guys jack up the price of your oil all you want, we don't care. That's your business. We'll buy it off you if we think it's cheaper than spending our money to intensify American production, and we have literally hundreds of years of fossil fuels left--and that's only what we know about, if Bjorn Lomborg is right.

Oh, yeah, one thing. You need to stop trying to exterminate the Israelis. That's important. You recognize their right to exist and give 'em ten years of peace, and I mean NO terrorist attacks, and I bet you they'll respond with a withdrawal to the 1948 borders with Jerusalem as an open city. If I were the Israelis I'd take that deal. But based on past evidence, it's up to YOU to prove they can trust you, not vice versa.