Mistreatment of Iraqi Detainees

As Josh Marshall points out today, the excuse being offered - that troops were insufficiently trained in rules of the Geneva Convention - over the documented mistreatment of Iraqi detainees is really quite lame.

Humans should know to treat other living things better than that. And before you tell me, "well, what about the Iraqis?", let me add that we supposedly haven't been living under a brutal dictatorship (except, of course, that we hear about this kind of thing being done here to prisoners).

Like Josh, I feel that this is largely a matter of putting a lot of young men (and presumably women) in a situation like this, getting them juiced up on the concept of enemy and then requiring them to get information from these prisoners (and let's be honest, a lot of detainees have no information to give but perhaps we don't feel we can verify that until we've tortured them - yeesh) at any costs is likely a big factor in this. Nor was this limited to American troops. While British papers have profiled more than once the statements of Brit soldiers rather appalled at the way the Americans treated civilians, at least one case here involves a British soldier purportedly urinating on an Iraqi.

Put these young people with little experience in the world in highly alien and dangerous conditions, hype them on the concept that each prisoner is like a glaring symbol of Osama and Saddam, praise the troops only if they get results, and you end up with a lot of detainees mistreated.