Innocent of What?
Andrew Sullivan:
Up to 90 percent of the inmates at Abu Ghraib, who were by any definition protected by the Geneva Conventions, were innocent.
Many innocent men and boys were raped, brutally beaten, crucified for hours (a more accurate term than put in "stress positions"), left in their own excrement, sodomized, electrocuted, had chemicals from fluorescent lights poured on them, forced to lie down on burning metal till they were unrecognizable from burns - all this in Iraq alone, at several prisons as well as Abu Ghraib.
Let's agree that most of what Sullivan describes here, shouldn't be done even to
guilty prisoners. But as long as he raises the issue, what exactly does he mean by innocent? Were they innocent in the sense that they had never done anything to deserve imprisonment? Or were they innocent in the sense that they had not been tried by a jury of their peers and found guilty? The
Mudville Gazette says that the prisoners in the photos at Abu Ghraib were ordinary criminals who were transferred to that high security unit for fighting elsewhere. In fairness, Sullivan states that what he is talking about is not solely Abu Ghraib.
