When you review the way Jonathan Klein has treated Tucker Carlson, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Klein is a first-class shit. I loathed Crossfire, but Carlson is a rare, intellectually independent conservative, whose talents were greatly abused, in my opinion, by CNN. Mickey explains it all better.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: “My brother was a reservist near Fallujah (who thankfully came home just this past year, although he is still technically under contract until December), who reports that coercion was encouraged, and abuse (not the same as coercion) was greeted with a blind eye. Now, he and I don’t see eye-to-eye on Iraq, because I pay attention to Chrenkoff’s reporting in addition to what I hear from my brother and from the MSM. Thanks to Chrenkoff, I know that there are large areas in Iraq where things are going right. Thanks to my brother, I also don’t automatically discount everything that MSM says (even a stopped clock is right twice a day).
According to my brother, the reservists have the lowest morale (because they have lives outside the military), and the enlisted men, particularly certain types, are more prone to carrying out the abuse… I believe that the vast majority of American service personnel are good people, as are most of their officers. But all it takes is one bad apple to ruin the bushel, and I don’t mean this in the sense that they ruin our image. Much more than that, Andrew. What I mean is, if they are seen as getting away with inhumane treatment of prisoners, what’s to stop another group of soldiers who were already leaning that way from giving into the temptation of sadism?
So while Gonzales may be correct on a technical level, it remains to be seen whether or not this sort of behavior is what we want the world to see. I don’t doubt that most other great powers would be harder pressed to be better than us. But as my brother takes pains to remind me, we are America, we can be better than everyone else, and so we should be.” It is important, I think, to emphasize that the incidents number in the low hundreds, while there were thousands of people in U.S. custody. It’s also important to note that no abuse was found in regular internment facilities in Iraq. This was not very deep but extremely geographically dispersed. And it was torture designed to get intelligence.
The Dish 