Prior to the revelations, [Brigadier General Janice] Karpinski assured the US media that Abu Ghraib was run according to “international standards”.

——“The Pictures That Lost The War”, Sunday Herald, via Kathryn Cramer

Nice choice of words, General. Would those be the formal international standards laid out by, say, the Geneva Convention and the UN Declaration on Human Rights? Or would they be the de facto standards established by some of the market leaders on Jim Henley’s list, below?

Tacitus writes “Let’s be honest and declare that what happened at Abu Ghraib, while awful, was a mere fraction of the horrors that go on in Saudi, Egyptian, Syrian, and yes, old Iraqi prisons.” Absolutely, let’s. And prisons in non-muslim nations too: Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Thailand, Israel, China, even the Philippines — all countries that have been credibly accused or admitted using torture in interrogation or punishment.

If we want to live up, or rather down, to those international standards, we have some distance yet to sink. But as Mr. Henley goes on to point out, the question

is not “Are we as bad as Saddam's Iraq?” but “Are we getting more like it or less like it?” We might never get as bad as Saddam’s Iraq or even squalid old Egypt, second-largest recipient of US aid in the world before Iraqi reconstruction began. But we can be much better than those countries and yet a disgrace to ourselves.