Slate has an interesting Chatterbox article about who (or what) is to blame for the military debacle at Abu Ghrarib. I’d like to respond to a couple of the people who were quoted in the article:

Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission: Can I ask that you take another good look at your Bible? There was this minor event we Christians like to call “The Fall” that occurred, which screwed things up for a very, very long time. Moral pundits always like to point out that society in their day and age is going downhill. NEWSFLASH: it’s been going downhill since the dawn of humanity, and it’s not getting better without divine intervention. Torture, rape, and humiliation are not 21st century inventions. Society, Mr Land, has been broken for a long time.

Diana West: Blame the media? This is same sort of thing Donald Rumsfeld hinted at during his testimony before the Senate — “things wouldn’t be so bad if those photos didn’t get out to the public.” Ahhh, yes, the “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it” argument.

Posted on 13 May 2004