K Street, Baghdad: It's Not Torture If You've Still Got Your Head! 
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN)-- Iraq's interior minister has defended a government facility found to be holding dozens of prisoners, including some showing signs of torture, saying it held "the most criminal terrorists."...
"Nobody was beheaded or killed," a defiant Bayan Jabr told a news conference Thursday, saying the "cellar" was used to house "the most criminal terrorists."
I'm not saying Americans brought torture techniques to Iraq; God knows, Saddam had performed to perfection the native art of inflicting misery long before we ever set foot on ancient Mesopotamian sands. And it wasn't just Saddam, either. The Fertile Crescent, the cradle of "civilization," has produced some of the most ingenious torture techniques known to humankind and has been practicing them for thousands upon thousands of years.
But our newly installed puppets now sound like they've attended a speed-reading version of an MLA conference - they don't yet quite have our finesse, but they're getting the hang of it.
Read that last paragraph again in the blockquote: "Nobody was beheaded or killed," a defiant Bayan Jabr told a news conference Thursday, saying the "cellar" was used to house "the most criminal terrorists."
I love that: Hey! They still have their heads, so they weren't tortured! And besides, they were really, really bad guys! (And you know this, dear Iraqi lackeys, how precisely? Did we miss the public trials, the evidence, the witnesses, the process of due process? Oh ... I see, you're following our stellar example of simply holding people without charges and making them suffer, just in case they've ever had a bad thought in their unbeheaded heads.)
Really, how small the jump turned out to be from arguing that if there's no organ failure, there's no torture, to ... sheesh, lighten up, guys ... nobody's headless, for Pete's sake. Get a grip. (The brain, encased in the head, is clearly an organ, after all, and as long as the skull's not severed from the neck, well ... no harm, no foul.)
Even those of us who stridently opposed the invasion in the first place and shouted our objections to the skies still held onto a little flicker of hope once the inevitable occupation began that some good might come of our presence there in the end, some small spark of freedom might be ignited. Sure, it was clear the bad would outweigh the good, but some good would get sprinkled by accident hither and thither? Right?
Well, evidently not.
The only American export that seems to have survived the arduous trip is spin spin spin. After all the Iraqi suffering - first at the hands of Saddam, then at our hands - perhaps one of the greatest sins is that not only did we NOT bring freedom, we brought its stealth facsimile, which is undermining our own democracy daily here at home.
In short, we exported K Street to downtown Baghdad. God help us all.
KEYWORDS: Iraq, Torture, Propaganda
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