Friday, November 03, 2006

Back in the saddle again

Our fine leadership is sending Sgt. Santos Cardona back to Iraq. You may not know his name but you've likely seen pictures of him, mixed it with the other spine-chilling photos from Abu Ghraib. Cardona was the dog handler who was convicted for his role in prisoner abuse. Apparently that conviction amounted to some hard labor at our very own Ft. Bragg and a demotion. Not that going back to Iraq is any sort of cushy assignment.

With Bush's clear support of "aggressive interrogation," I have no doubt that the abuses by Cardona and the rest of the Abu Ghraib crew were sanctioned from the top, however subtly. Which leaves me wondering which is worse: that they would use these people as patsies for crimes they encouraged or that they wouldn't subject their patsies to the full extent of the law.

Now Cordona gets another chance to die in a pointless war, becoming a statistic that most of us will gloss over in our morning paper, much like the more than 100 Americans dead in October alone.

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