It's the torture, stupid!

Sometimes you just want to scream, and that was the case when I read

Jeremy Scahill’s takedown of CNN on the subject of the Abu Ghraib photos. In a word, what’s in the photos was not the problem, but that the photos were taken and published.

Ahhhhhh. We’ve seen this with all the abuses of the Bush Administration. The problems wasn’t our secret prisons, it was that someone leaked that we have secret prisons and are kidnapping people to put in them.

The problem wasn’t that lawless wiretaps were conducted, but that they were leaked to the press.

Here’s Schhill on CNN’s coverage of the photos:

February 16, 2006
CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr should be given some kind of award for the most outrageously off-target reporting on the newly released photos and videos of U.S. torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In her numerous appearances during the morning news cycle on CNN after the images were first broadcast on Australia's SBS television, Starr described what she saw as the "root of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal" as such:

"Let's start by reminding everybody that under U.S. military law and practice, the only photographs that can be taken are official photographs for documentation purposes about the status of prisoners when they are in military detention. That's it. Anything else is not acceptable. And of course, that is what the Abu Ghraib prison scandal is all about."


"As we look at a couple of the photographs, let's remind people that why these are so inappropriate. Under U.S. military law and practice and procedure, you simply cannot take photographs – as we're going to show you some of them right now. You cannot take photographs of people in detention, in humiliating positions, positions that are abusive in any way, shape or form. The only pictures that are ever allowed of people in U.S. military detention would be pictures for documentation purposes. And, clearly, these pictures are not that. That is the whole issue that has been at the root of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, that it was abusive, the practices in which soldiers engaged in."

Forget the abuse, it’s those darn photos.