All Whining Aside

If you discount the complete avoidance of responsibility, which considering how she is one of the few people to pay for these atrocities, there is more than a little something rotten in Denmark Washington.

Salon.com Books | Rummy's scapegoat: "Terrorism. In late August [2003] they started these very aggressive raids. The first operation, up in Mosul, resulted in 37 security detainees arriving in Abu Ghraib. Within about 30 hours, the military interrogation teams had interviewed each one of those 37 and determined that only two of them had value and needed to be held. The other 35 were eligible to be released. And that was a firestorm, because nobody was going to be released.

I was at a briefing over at [Lt. Gen. Ricardo] Sanchez's headquarters [as the head of coalition forces in Iraq] and the deputy commander, [Maj.] Gen. [Walter] Wodjakowski, turned around to me and said, 'You are not to release any one of them, Janis.' And I said, 'Sir, that information came from the military intelligence.' And he said, 'Get me somebody from the military intelligence.' So this captain comes over and is trying to explain that none of these 35 had any further value. They were in fact in the wrong place at the wrong time, [gathered] up with the target individuals. So, Gen. Wodjakowski now turns on this guy and tells him, 'You are not to release any of them. Do you understand me? Am I making myself perfectly clear? You are not to release any one of them.' And this captain tries valiantly to explain that we'll be holding innocent people, and Gen. Wodjakowski says he doesn't care.

Well, by the end of September they brought in just over 3,000 security detainees. And none of them were released. And the following month it was at least another 3,000 added to the already 3,000 that were not being released. So in two months' time, the population at Abu Ghraib was 10 times more than what we had been holding when it was just a regular detention operation.

That means that a huge percentage of people who were in the prison had no reason to be there.

That is unfortunately true. So, say, generally 90 percent of the security detainees being held at Abu Ghraib were just innocent, had no information at all.

In September, Secretary [of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld had sent [Guantánamo Bay commander] Gen. Geoffrey Miller to come and work with the interrogation teams to help them improve their techniques and get more actionable intelligence from their interrogation effort. I was invited to come and sit in his introductory briefing. After the briefing was over, I specifically went to the JAG [Judge Advocate General] officer and I said, "How are you releasing prisoners down at Guantánamo Bay?" She said, "Releasing them? We're not releasing anybody. These are detainees; these are terrorists; these are not prisoners. And every one of them will likely spend every last day of their lives at Guantánamo Bay.""

As with the Katrina debacle/fortuitous cleansing, only the people who aren't in the loop will pay.

This lack of respect for people as individuals, as people of worth because they didn't donate to the right campaign or don't have the right skin color or religion, is a pervasive cloud of evil that floats to the highest levels. From gouging the people who can least afford it on gas and heating oil to reducing the options for health care and retirement, restricting and doctoring scientific and economic studies to reflect an uninformed and uncaring world view and last but definitely not least, lying to the American people they have taken the "me" generation to a whole new level of narcissism.

Not pretty.

Pretty stupid.

And very shameful.