Originally posted by capt. apathy
the abuse of Iraqi prisoners is more newsworthy than the mass graves. at least to American audiences.
Saddam is no longer in power, he's not an American, and his victims where not Americans, so while it's a horrible thing and by no means should it be forgotten or ignored, it simply isn't as news worthy, or as important of a topic to American viewers as is actions by our fellow Americans
also with an election coming up it's critically important that this is handled as thoroughly, quickly, and as publicly as possible. that they take the investigation as far up the chain of command as the evidence warrants, with out regard to who may or may not be "off limits".
our elected officials represent us to the world, they set policy's for our armed forces behavior over-seas. if elected officials or their appointees, encouraged, knew-about, or even suspected these things where going on, the American voters have a right to that information, for consideration, before the time comes to decide if you want these people representing you an further.
How can you conceivably convince yourself that what happened in those prisons is even remotely comparable to Saddam's attempted genocide? How can you possibly believe that the situation would have been any different had Kerry, Clinton, Carter, Johnson, or even JFK been in office? What do you suppose happened to prisoners that we took in Viet Nam? War is a nasty, brutal affair, and GC or no GC, this sort of thing is always going to happen, whether its us, the Brits, or the French that are running the camp. You may not like it, I may not like it, but that's really beside the point.
(On a semi-related note, it seems to me bizarre (in an it's-ok-to-kill-unborn-children-but-not-dolphins kind of way) that many people (like the too-PC-for-Berkeley Euro-accented commentators on NPR) who are up in arms about the "humiliation" of the Iraqi prisoners seem not too upset by our wetwork in Gitmo, because the Iraqi prisoners are covered by the GC but those in Gitmo are not! Come on! It's either acceptable to extract information by pain, humiliation, or other unpleasant means, or it's not.)
I'll grant you that the (unwarranted) publicity that this has received will make it a bit harder for the US to take the moral high ground, but I don't think anyone was buying that act anyhow.
I'm no big fan of "W", and I'll agree that there are lots of things that are "critically important" to informing the American public's view of the candidates in the upcoming election. But this is not one of them.