November 16, 2004
A quick point about the televised shooting in Fallujah: obviously this is a horrific thing to see, and I'm duly outraged. But I don't think it's at all like Abu Ghraib, as some have suggested. Abu Ghraib was a pattern and a policy, emblematic of this government's terror-induced, rights-defying hysteria. The soldiers who perpetrated it were wrong, but the greater outrage was that they acted within and because of an insidious new intelligence/interrogation calculus. This latest thing is different, because this kind of atrocity happens all the time in war. It ends up being more an indictment of war itself, of that unnatural discipline we expect of those who wield assault rifles in a "civilized" military.
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