IGNORING ABU GHRAIB:
Film-maker Don North has produced two films about some of the most despicable abuses to take place at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But PBS and other MSM (mainstream media) outlets refuse to air them.

Why? Perhaps because the abuses he has focused on -- the amputations of the right hands of Iraqi merchants -- were carried out while Saddam Hussein was still in power. Such barbarity evidently fills the MSM with ennui.

Want to bet that if Don had made films about abuses at Abu Ghraib while U.S. forces were running the place -- even such lesser abuses as scaring prisoners with barking dogs -- there'd be plenty of film at 11? Christopher Hitchens makes a similar point: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad," he writes. "Before March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and day." The rest of Christopher's insightful piece -- entitled "A War to Be Proud Of" -- is here.