The Truth? You can't handle the truth!

Jack Nicholson's character said it when on the witness stand in A Few Good Men, after Tom Cruise asked for the truth ... and then, I thought, "No Colonel YOU can't handle the truth -- you're a passed- over colonel never gonna get a star, a tin soldier failed-career Marine guarding a fence around some land stolen from the little island you're on, and jerking yourself off daily by telling yourself you're defending America from the gigantic horrible Godzilla threat of Cuba. You're not in danger, not protecting anyone, just a washed-up officer washed up in a Caribbean tidepool and YOU can't handle the truth."

But well, Rob Reiner and Kevin Pollack and Kevin Bacon and Tom Cruise -- they all had mortgages and pool cleaners to pay...

And of course, now, we find -- in a perversely different way -- WE CAN'T handle the truth -- that these brig guards have systematically tortured and killed ...

My point?

Ask anyone who has ever been in the Army Navy Marines Coast Guard -- hell, even the bible-thumping Air Force -- ask them what they think of MPs, SP's, etc... what they think of the people who run the brigs and the stockades. Most of the people I have ever talked to think that the Ernest Borgnine character in "From Here to Eternity" was a pretty good generalization -- a vicious, sadistic, hateful, angry thug -- except not usually quite so out of shape, and they pray no one will meet these people and assume that's what everyone in that particular service is like.

Get it?

Abu Ghraib ... Gitmo ... none of the horror stories had anything to do with lack of training or lack of supervision ... they were the result of POLICY -- THAT'S WHAT BRIG GUARDS DO -- THAT'S POLICY, THAT'S TRADITION -- that's the calling card of their trade, i.e., being the Internal Affairs Punishment Corp that gets to inflict harm on the real soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen.

Or as a Gunny Sergeant once said to me whan I asked about it -- "Well, private, that was when you were sent to the brig FOR punishment instead of AS punishment."

Or when - God help you, when they're convinced you've done whatever you're supposed to have done and will inflict pain and humiliation on you until it's easier to say ok and ask them what it is they want you to confess and to please just be kind finish them off quickly -- behead them. But we don't do that -- "This ain't the desert, Mohammed -- we don't got a lot of sand here and no one wants to clean up your blood."

And those redneck pissants in the executive branch have the temerity to suggest that psychotic Muslims are in some way more crazy than our home-grown variety.

Hey -- there are people who are vicious, monstrous and dehumanized EVERYWHERE. And we have a whole lot of them at Gitmo -- on OUR side of the wire.

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