Prison scandal

In Tim Rutten’s article on the Iraqi prison scandal (“ ‘Abuse’ May Not Be Accurate,” May 15), he makes many valid points. It is a scandal and it is a shame on our country. But when he compares it to the Soviet gulag and Pol Pot’s regime, he goes into hyperbole overdrive.

To remind Rutten, Stalin and Pol Pot instituted prison systems that tortured, mutilated and killed millions, let me repeat that, millions of innocent people. It was a top-to-bottom statewide system of repression that lasted for decades and ended only with the collapse of those two evil regimes. The Abu Ghraib system lasted months and was ended as soon as the Army found out about it, and there will be people in jail by the end of the year.

Kevin J. Peters

Fullerton

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Tim RUTTEN was right on target when he pointed to the media’s complicity in using acceptable euphemisms, such as “abuse,” for what many would call torture. Failure to call a horse a horse can only aid and abet ignorance. But the issue goes beyond the use of torture. It goes directly to the application of a system of justice in wartime or peacetime that represents America.

Is the suppression of human rights really OK as long as it is carried out offshore? Or as long as it is done to suspected terrorists? Since when did our Bill of Rights become conditional? Is Guantanamo Bay OK because it is not on U.S. soil? Is this the America that we fight for?

Mark Warmbrand

San Diego

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Tim RUTTEN confirms my worst fears in his insightful piece: secret detention facilities where prisoners are denied access to any judicial process, systematic torture -- sometimes to the point of death -- which is approved by our highest officials. And a media, laughingly labeled as “liberal,” which continues to make excuses for the monsters directing this horror, going so far as to take polls asking if these things are OK. The saddest measure of our nation’s degradation is that so many of my fellow Americans think this immoral conduct is justified or, worse, deserved.

Daniel Koenig

Placentia