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If the Abu Ghraib saga isn't worth weeping over, then surely we must tear our clothes over an equally exasperating outrage.  The Washington Post reported today that 7 in 10 Americans want Donald Rumsfeld to keep his job! This is according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll. Quick, call Seinfeld and get Elaine Benes on the phone! We need her to say again: "What's wrong with all you people? Have you gone mad?!"

While the "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib continue to burn away what remaining credibility the US had in the Arab world, this behavior shrouds a more profound issue in the American penal system. President Bush says that these were the acts of a few persons engaged in abhorrent, appalling, un-American behavior which does not reflect our high values. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who also subscribes to this "few bad apples" theory of villainy, is trying hard, but failing, to slink away from Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba's fifty-three-page report, completed in February, on the horrible failure of the Army prison system at Abu Ghraib. The International Committee of the Red Cross had warned the US administration about the abuses over a year ago. There are no excuses—rotten apples or not.

What remains unsaid is that the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib may well be inherited from the American prison system itself, a system that continues under the watch of the American Friends Service Committee, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other vigilant organizations seeking to prevent human rights violations within our own country's penal system. And this is not an inheritance only of the domestic prison sector, but one that extends its evil tendrils into our official defense policies. Let's not cover our eyes to the very purpose of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas, at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Sadly, what's still in doubt is who are the real un-Americans in all of this—or, more important, why American Christians are still whispering among themselves.

The new issue of Christian Reflection is in the mail.  I know because mine came today. This issue, "Inklings of Glory," studies the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and his writer-friends C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers. You too can have a free subscription to the series simply by contacting Baylor University's Center for Christian Ethics or by using the online form at www.ChristianEthics.ws.

"The system works. The system works."  That is Donald Rumsfeld's new mantra as the scandal over Iraqi prisoner abuses continue to unfold. So 25 Iraqis have died in US custody and the list of prisoners who were abused, humiliated, and tortured while on America's watch is just being rolled out—and this has apparently been part of a pattern that reaches back at least a full year. Is this another failure of intelligence? Is anyone in charge?

I'm finally getting The Man Who Rowed Lake Pontchartrain ready for its print publication.  I will have a sale link on newquaker.com when ready.