The New Line

Tim Grieve over at Salon has another ditty about Rumsfeld's new line of defense for the treatment of prisoners in the War on Terror- Bad, obsessive reporting:

The Bush administration has finally gotten to the bottom of those allegations about the abuse of detainees from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay. It's apparently no longer the work of a few bad apples in the military. It's the media's fault.

...
Rumsfeld knows a thing or two about erroneous assertions. Before the Iraq war began, the secretary of defense repeatedly insisted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Once it started, he insisted that the United States knew where those weapons were. We'd submit that both of those statements fall pretty squarely -- you might even say "charitably" -- in the category of "erroneous assertions."

But that's dwelling in the past, isn't it, Mr. Secretary? It's time to move on, and Rumsfeld tells us just where we should be heading. He says newspaper editorial writers have written "precious little" about the "beheading of innocent civilians by terrorists, the thousands of bodies found in mass graves in Iraq, the allegations of rape of women and girls by U.N. workers in the Congo."

Rumsfeld may be right about that, but we wonder about his point. Does the secretary of defense mean to suggest that atrocities by, say, U.N. aid workers in the Congo justify U.S. troops' abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib? Or does he merely mean that the human rights record of the United States -- the country that "promotes freedom around the world" -- is no worse than that of a lot of terrorists and dictators?
...