The Urban Grind

Strong statement, huh?

I don't think so.

For example, the Red Cross is now complaining that the detention and treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay Cuba amounts to torture.

Red Cross inspectors who visited the site in June said interrogators used "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions" to break the will of prisoners, according to the article on the Times Web site.

These people have a lot of nerve. Why is it ok for their "Red Crescent" ambulances to smuggle suicide bombers into Israel but not ok for Americans to detain battlefield combatants in the war on terror?

I don't remember these people ever making a fuss over Saddam Hussein's torture of his own people and his gassing the Kurds. Or how about the massacre of Bosnian Serbs by the Albanian Muslims? Not a peep.

On another note, an American group wants Germany to investigate Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officers for war crimes in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

BERLIN (Reuters) - A U.S. human rights group urged German prosecutors Tuesday to investigate accusations that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and senior U.S. officers are guilty of war crimes over the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.
In an unusual legal move, the U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) has filed a criminal complaint with Germany's Federal Prosecutors along with four Iraqis who say they were tortured and humiliated alongside other prisoners by U.S. soldiers at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.
CCR is taking advantage of a 2002 German law allowing prosecutions for human rights and war crimes regardless of where the acts took place or the nationalities of the perpetrators.

Now call me coldhearted, but I have no sympathy for these Iraqi terrorists (I'm not afraid of using the word, unlike "Al Reuters.") These people were incarcerated for either killing, attempting to kill, or helping kill American soldiers, NOT FOR TRAFFIC VIOLATIONS!! And the CCR, through their action, is saying that America is WORSE than those who cheer when the dismembered corpses of Americans are dragged through the streets and hung off the bridges of Falluja.

Closer to home, consummate wind bag talk show host Bill O'Reilly is actually defending Dan Rather. From O'Reilly's warped perspective, any challenge to the liberal media elite, even if it's simply pointing out that documents are forgeries, is tantamount to "character assassination" and "sliming"

Dan Rather is guilty of not being skeptical enough about a story that was politically loaded. I believe Rather, along with Andy Rooney, Walter Cronkite and other guardsmen of the old CBS News, is liberal in his thinking. That is certainly a legitimate debate - how for years CBS News has taken a rather progressive outlook. But holding a political point of view is the right of every American, and it does not entitle people to practice character assassination or

deny the presumption of innocence. Dan Rather was slimed. It was disgraceful