U.S.: Abu Ghraib mistreatment in perspective

No reasonable person will say that what occurred at Abu Ghraib was anything but bad, but bad as it was it never reached anything resembling the depravity in Saddam's prisons. As Mr. Inhofe pointed out (to the obvious dismay of Sen. John McCain and most Armed Services Committee Democrats), the Abu Ghraib detainees would have fared far worse in Saddam's prisons. Saddam's torturers, Mr. Inhofe noted, "would take electric drills and drill holes through hands; they would cut their tongues out; they would cut their ears off. We've seen accounts of lowering their bodies into vats of acid. All of those things were taking place."

Mr. Inhofe observed that, of the 300,000 soldiers who have rotated through Iraq, seven are accused of mistreating Iraqi prisoners. (This works out to .00002 percent.) If photographs of detainee abuse are authorized for public dissemination, he said, "for every picture of abuse or alleged abuse of prisoners, we have pictures of mass graves, pictures of children being executed, pictures of the four Americans ... that were burned and their bodies were mutilated and dismembered in public. Let's get the whole picture."

An important part of that picture is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who claims "credit" for the on-camera murder of Mr. Berg. A Palestinian-Jordanian, Zarqawi's activities in support of al Qaeda have spanned the globe. Well over 100 members of his terror network have been arrested in Europe and Saudi Arabia. He has ties with a wide array of terrorist groups, ranging from Hezbollah to the Iraqi Kurdish terrorist organization Ansar al-Islam, and since 2001 has operated from terrorist havens such as Saddam's Iraq, Iran, Syria and Afghanistan under the Taliban. His terrorist "credits" include numerous suicide bombings and other attacks against coalition forces over the past year, and the 2002 murder in Jordan of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley.

Much of the abuse that occurred at Abu Ghraib occurred in an effort to pry information about future attacks from terrorists affiliated with Zarqawi and like-minded groups. Like many of those detainees who sit in Abu Ghraib, the people who murdered Nicholas Berg would not hesitate to slit the throats of American GIs if given the chance.

Context is everything.