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The apple orchard is rotten.  If you can stand to read it, the November 3 issue of the New York Times Review of Books puts a spotlight on the September 2005 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) entitled Leadership Failure: Firsthand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division. Forget the "rotten apples" defense:

There's more in the HRW report—much more. And it ain't pretty, and it stinks, and everyone forgets that the terms "prisoner" and "detainee" refer here to people held for questioning. Our government has said that it's okay to beat, torture, rape, maim, and kill people held for questioning in Iraq. Anyone not working fervently to convince our representative government to withdraw our troops from the Middle East is a collaborator in this American cabal of evil.

Coming soon to a sovereign Iraq near you.  The New York Times today reported on the conviction of Ali Mohaqiq Nasab, editor of a Afghan monthly magazine for women, who was sentenced yesterday to two years in prison by Kabul's primary court. His crime: disrespecting Islamic law by publishing in his Women's Rights two articles contending that while apostasy was taboo, it was not a crime under Islam. Nasab is an Islamic scholar with degrees from the Islamic universities in Afghanistan and he also availed himself of a new media law, created by President Hamid Karzai, that permitted the new Media Commission for Investigating Media-Related Offenses to "review cases in which the media are accused of wrongdoing and to make a recommendation to the court."¹ After its review, the commission determined that there was no blasphemy in the articles at all, although its recommendations are not binding on the court. In this case the court went right past the commission entirely, in the process reminding everyone that the law in post-Taliban Afghanistan is still Islamic Shariah law.

1.  "Journalist Convicted of Blasphemy in Afghanistan," New York Times, October 23, 2005.