Per aspera

This was an accidental post (stupid Ecto), but it was up long enough to be commented upon before I noticed it. So I can’t exactly delete it, since it’s now part of the conversation. I’ve put it behind the jump. I’ll put up more of what the monetization guys call “content” when I can get my brain working again.

The original text:

Via patrick at Shake’s Sis:

David Ignatius: A Prison We Need To Escape

When I hear U.S. officials describe the suicides of three Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay last Saturday as “asymmetric warfare” and “a good PR move,” I know it’s time to close that camp — not just because of what it’s doing to the prisoners but because of how it is dehumanizing the American captors.

The American officials spoke of the dead prisoners as if they inhabited a different moral universe. That’s what war does: People stop seeing their enemies as human beings and consign them to a different category. It was discomfiting to see this indifference stated so bluntly, and subsequent U.S. statements tactfully disavowed the initial ones.

The Bush Administration chooses expedience over morals, ethics, or laws every single time. They expect those under them to do the same, which is a huge problem in all cases, certainly, but especially when it comes to the military.

We, as a society, ask the men and women who join the military to kill people for us. It’s a necessary job, but a horrible one, and war takes a toll on service members even when a military is at its institutional best.

And then:

Miller traveled to Iraq in September 2003 to assist in Abu Ghraib’s startup, and he later sent in “Tiger Teams” of Guantanamo Bay interrogators and analysts as advisers and trainers. Within weeks of his departure from Abu Ghraib, military working dogs were being used in interrogations, and naked detainees were humiliated and abused by military police soldiers working the night shift.

And then: