Is everybody brutal?(on the right)(soldier brutality)

NEW YORK, MAY 21

THE television moments of the interrogation of the generals by the senators reminded one of the estoppel power of bureaucratic language. Doing a television program in Seoul some years ago I attempted to get from the commanding general the answer to a question I had thought pretty simple. After digging in for a dozen minutes I finally retreated, dazed by what had evolved into an innate incomprehensibility not only of the answer, but of the question.

And the interrogating senators had less time than I had in Seoul, limited as they were to ten minutes. Senator Byrd, who is as tenacious as an Internal Revenue examiner, attempted to find out just who had the authority to decree privations for recalcitrant prisoners. From the blur that ensued, one got the impression that the stimulants to cooperation were invoked ad hoc. Well, did that mean that the individual U.S. soldier applied this or that inducement based on generic okays? Without specific okays?

One gets the impression that the command structure was simply ineffective. This is a relief, in that we like to think that nobody actually authorized what we know took place. But there is the concomitant dismay--that a number of American soldiers were engaged in barbarous activity over a period of time, doing their best to persuade the world that it is unsafe to assume that Americans have an ingrown resistance to brutality.

A story published in the Baltimore Sun reveals that a few of the soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib attempted protests of sorts, but these went unheeded. Through all the past weeks' commotions there is the U.S. effort to speak to the Arab people. The idea is to communicate the mortification official America feels over what has happened, and to suggest that our critics spend some time evaluating our reaction to revealed torture, as compared with the resignation with which the Arab community greeted what went on routinely under the authority of the regime which we went to war to unseat.

Al Hurra, a satellite channel financed by the U.S., has broadcast records so graphic they would not be shown, under existing protocols, in America. Consider watching human hands being chopped off. That is one of the scenes displayed on Al Hurra. "We have even worse tapes but won't show them on television because they are so graphic."

Does ...