Ooops.

Well, I hate to judge before all the facts are in, but it's beginning to look like General Ripper exceeded his authority.

Air Force General Buck Turgidson

Like everyone else, I've been a bit more distracted by the blood-bauble on the Israel-Lebanon border than I ought to be given the currently-dessicating Leviathan in Iraq, the beast stripped bare by the mauraders in its own belly, with the United States holding a bloody harpoon, whistling innocently, looking the other way. Who? Me?

But what Israel has been doing for three weeks, we've been doing for three years in Iraq, with predictable (to all but the Washington clairvoyants, whose crystal balls show on endless loop footage of the liberating Americans marching down the Champs Elysées to the cheering adoration of Parisians) consequences. It occurs to me that many of the Soviet practices we currently employ in our "interrogations" weren't cribbed directly from the Soviets, but rather from Israel who cribbed them from the Soviets. That's only a hunch, but . . . In any case, the linked article above notes that the Human Rights First report indicates hundreds of accusations of abuse (read: torture) and at least 35 prisoner deaths in our camapagin against, get this, terror.