I have a real soft spot in my heart for Lying Media Bastards. I started blogging after reading a particularly well annotated entry on LMB. So I find myself cribbing several links from LMB for this post.

Now that we've had tales of abuse of adult prisoners, here come tales of juveniles as young as 11 years old being held prisoner at Abu Ghraib by Americans. But I doubt they were abused; Americans would never abuse children. However they could be used for leverage against the parents:

In one case, witness statements among the released documents allege that four drunken Americans took a 17-year-old female prisoner from her cell and forced her to expose her breasts and kissed her.

In another documented incident, troops are alleged to have smeared mud on the detained 17-year-old son of an Iraqi general and forced his father to watch him shiver in the cold.

Since justice and the American Way is at stake, a few trifling mistakes might be made. Not to worry, at least we're winning the war:

In her interview, she said Maj Gen Walter Wodjakowski, then the second most senior army general in Iraq, told her in the summer of 2003 not to release more prisoners, even if they were innocent.

"I don't care if we're holding 15,000 innocent civilians," she said Maj Gen Wodjakowski told her. "We're winning the war."

Of course, the ACLU is giving comfort to America's enemies by revealing our tactics of soft persuasion:

The documents the ACLU released today, posted online at www.aclu.org/torturefoia, describe substantiated incidents of torture and abuse by U.S. Marines, including:

• holding a pistol to the back of a detainee’s head while another Marine took a picture (Karbala, May 2003)
• ordering four Iraqi juveniles to kneel while a pistol was "discharged to conduct a mock execution" (Adiwaniyah, June 2003)
• severely burning a detainee’s hands by covering them in alcohol and igniting them (Al Mumudiyah, August 2003), and
• shocking a detainee with an electric transformer, causing the detainee to "dance" as he was shocked (Al Mumudiyah, April 2004).

OK, sarcasm doesn't seem to be working for me any more. Mock executions of juveniles? Electric shock? I can barely believe this crap. Is this what the American military is reduced to? Are Americans so inured to these horrid events that nothing will shock us? Won't anyone speak up, shout, demonstrate over these vicious tactics?