Dragonlich

The point, as you obviously know, isn't that the US should torture more people. The point is that when the US abuses prisoners (torture is a bit of a stretch here), it's in the news for weeks on end, and the pictures keep coming up over and over again. People then assume that this is common practice in US-run prisons. It gets to the point where Dutch people don't see it as hypocritical when countries like Cuba, Iran and North-Korea use those abuse pictures to blast the USA for being evil... Things are pulled out of context, it's assumed *only* the US does these things, and everyone jumps on the bandwagon to condemn them.

Another example: that unarmed, wounded Iraqi guy shot dead in Fallujah, during the US assault. Everyone condemned it, everyone said it was a war crime, and that this was just a small example of what US troops do. Yet, a few days later, a British soldier says they are trained to do exactly the same, just like other NATO soldiers. But nobody reported that; nobody explains the context of the incident, with insurgents playing dead to ambush US soldiers... Nobody cares; All they care about is that a US soldier shot an unarmed enemy soldier, supposedly in violation of the Geneva convention, and *thus* the US as a whole is to blame, and is in fact evil.

Just to show the hypocrisy here: a Dutch soldier was accused of shooting an unarmed "looting" Iraqi civilian a while ago. The Dutch department of justice decided to pull him out of Iraq and put him on trial for murder. Most Dutch people were appalled that the DOJ would do that to someone who had the balls to do "what was right". If a US soldier would do the same, and he wouldn't be put on trial, those same people would be crying about human rights and a cover-up.