corrente

The dirty rats. They went and destroyed American credibility throughout the Muslim world! Or in the words of one of the administration's poster boys for credibility, Scott McClellan:

"The image of the United States abroad has been damaged."

Heaven forfend! And we were doing so splendidly up to this point, too. Back in December 2004, the Washington Post reported on our work in Afghani prisons, via several Army and DoD reports:

"Many of the officials at Abu Ghraib had served in Afghanistan and honed their approach to handling prisoners there, according to two Defense Department reports issued in August. The reports said, for example, that the idea of using dogs to intimidate prisoners at Abu Ghraib migrated from Afghanistan, where U.S. soldiers noted that many citizens feared dogs; other methods transferred to Iraq included stripping prisoners, forcing them into stress positions, and depriving them of light, sleep or human contact.
Also, a report by investigators with the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, completed in May on the eve of Jacoby's visit and stamped "For Official Use Only," implicated more than two dozen military policemen in the deaths of two Afghan prisoners in Bagram, Afghanistan, in 2002.
That Army report, obtained by The Washington Post, also said that a senior officer of the 377th Military Police Company based in Cincinnati and eventually deployed to Iraq had admitted he knew his soldiers were striking detainees in Afghanistan, and it concluded that his dereliction of duty contributed to routine prisoner mistreatment.
The report listed a range of abuses committed by members of the 377th and a battalion of military intelligence officers from Fort Bragg, N.C., during their deployment in Afghanistan, including slamming prisoners into walls, twisting handcuffs to cause pain, kneeing prisoners, forcing a detainee to maintain "painful, contorted body positions," shackling the detainee's arms to the ceiling, and forcing water into the mouth of the detainee "until he could not breathe."

And before that, Human Rights Watch reported in March 2004 on the "systemic abuse" of Afghani prisoners, with John Sifton, Afghanistan researcher, stating,"Afghans have been telling us for well over a year about mistreatment in U.S. custody. We warned U.S. officials repeatedly about these problems in 2003 and 2004."

No question about it, we were doing so well up till now, and then Newsweek had to go and spoil it all, damn them. Comedian Richard Boucher, warming up for the State Department, remarked in a moment of exuberant dissociation from reality:

"We have made clear, I think, that there is the utmost respect for religion of the prisoners."

Oh, without a doubt--that business of rubbing breasts and fake menstrual blood on Gitmo captives had nothing whatever to do with their religious beliefs.

Once we get this whole worldwide Muslim uprising in hand by publicly stoning Isikoff and renditioning Whitaker's ass out to Egypt, I'm sure the MSM can safely go back to filing reports on runaway white girls and the child abduction/molestation/murder epidemic, and they will never trouble our sleep with inconvenient stories of American atrocities again.

Which is, after all, the whole point.