What is an organization called "Food for Bombs" doing with a organization like the RNC Welcoming Committee which advocates violence on their website? The RNC WC is not for free speech, they are stifling it. These guys are simply thugs coming to our city with the intention of violent disruption. Why defend them?

Nobody is going to cover the groups that ARE going to protest. Those who did the hard, tedious work of going through proper channels. Those who might/likely will be arrested and harassed from the fall out from groups like the RNC Welcoming Committee.

kimber, St. Paul, MN

One doesn't have to look far to see how techniques in exercises like those that take place at Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escapre (SERE) school can become a default compendium when there is conflicting or little guidance from leadership.

Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshoffer who was convicted of suffocating Iraqi Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush during and interrogation is an excellent example of how what one "learns" at SERE school (or perhaps in this case a SERE-like exercise) creeps into interrogation practices.

In an interview on 60 Minutes, Mr. Welshoffer relayed that he...

"… Remembered that Years before in an approved training exercise, he help stuff American soldiers into oil drums to induce claustrophobia and panic. The idea was to teach our soldiers what could happen to them, if they were captured. In Iraq, Welshoffer did much the same thing, only this time, with a sleeping bag."

What he learned while role-playing in those exercises was supposed to be what the bad guys do to us NOT what we do to them. Somehow that distinction got confused. During his trial and in other news articles, Mr. Welshoffer described a lack of interrogation guidance from above in the first months in Iraq accept to say that commanders "high up" said "The gloves were off."

Reckless words “like the gloves are off” uttered in the air-conditioned environment inside the beltway filter down to fester in a hole like Abu Gharyb. It becomes a knife in the back of every service man and woman serving in this Global War on Terrorism.

I and others from my reserve unit were cross-leveled into another military intelligence unit and deployed to Baghdad. I remained at Camp Victory. Some of my friends were farmed out to Abu Ghraib during parts of the period in which these abuses occurred. My friends had absolutely nothing to do with these abuses. They told me so. I believe them, because I know them. They were as surprised and shocked as I was to hear about and see these pictures.

Having said that I would also like to say that I in no way believe that these "few bad apples" , decidedly lower enlisted bad apples, were the originators of this abuse. No officers at Abu Ghraib have gone under court marshall proceedings. (Busting the female reserve MP general down to colonel doesn't count.) Upper echelon areas are rank heavy. Colonels and Generals are common place. You could not go to the bathroom with out an officer's permission. Where were the officers in this case? We General Karpinsky wasn't there enough. What about OGA (CIA)? Where are the contractors working in our name? Where are the other people in these pictures? Why are they not being prosecuted?

What about Col. Papas, the 205th Brigade commander? One friend of mine said he over heard the colonel and his XO discussing hiding a prisoner from the Red Cross. He even stated so on the local public radio station. That is against Geneva Convention. That is against UCMJ(Uniform Code of Military Justice). I have no reason to believe my friend is lying. I'll bet the good Colonel was hiding a prisoner under his own accord.

My point?

Publishing these pictures brings this sorry subject once again into the forefront. Perhaps pressure will be brought to bare. Perhaps this will remind us that these abuses did not occur in one night or in one week, but over several weeks. Maybe we will get a more satisfactory answer as to how, in the fall of 2003, the United States had a torture problem.