Political Football

Along with the images, which you’ll find on the following pages, soldiers seized various torture implements, like meat cleavers, whips, and wire cutters. Photos of those items can be seen here. The images, which were just declassified by the Department of Defense, also include a picture of a ramshackle Baghdad safe house described as an “al-Qaeda torture chamber.” It was there, during an April 24 raid, that soldiers found a man suspended from the ceiling by a chain. According to the military, he had been abducted from his job and was being beaten daily by his captors. In a raid earlier this week, Coalition Forces freed five Iraqis who were found in a padlocked room in Karmah. The group, which included a boy, were reportedly beaten with chains, cables, and hoses. Photos showing injuries sustained by those captives can be found here.

Blogger Don Surber of the Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail examines big-media coverage of the documents:

Where did USA Today play the torture book story?

Not on Page One.

Where did the New York Times play it?

Not on Page One.

Where did the Washington Post play it?

Not on Page One. And yet such false stories as the “flushed Koran” got widespread play in the newspapers and on television.

We are hearing those awful “Sounds of Silence” that Simon and Garfunkel warned us about.

Whether intentional or not, the message is clear: The United States must be above even false reports of torture, while the enemy is allowed to promote eye removal, blowtorching skin and horrors I won’t go into.

We also checked the blogs of Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald, among the most hysterical accusers of America in the “torture” debate, and here is what they have had to say about the al Qaeda documents: .

“Silence is complicity, you know,” notes Glenn Reynolds.

Indeed.

Joe Klein Is Very Silly
Time magazine’s Joe Klein has been coming under attack from the pro-defeat left for reporting on U.S. military successes in Iraq’s Anbar province. But he deserves a dart from the pro-American side, too, for this statement:

It’s not impossible that the Iraqis will eventually remove the al-Qaeda cancer from the Sunni insurgency–which would put a serious crimp in President George W. Bush’s current rationale for the war, that we’re there to fight al-Qaeda.

We beat the Nazis in World War II. Did that “put a serious crimp” in FDR’s claim that we were in Europe to fight the Nazis?

The ‘Crime’ of Being Christian
“Saudi officials have arrested a man in Mecca for being a Christian, saying that the city, which Muslims consider to be holy, is off-limits to non-Muslims,” the Jerusalem Post reports:

Nirosh Kamanda, a Sri Lankan Christian, was detained by the Saudi Expatriates Monitoring Committee last week after he started to sell goods outside Mecca’s Great Mosque.

After running his fingerprints through a new security system, Saudi police discovered that he was a Christian who had arrived in the country six months earlier to take a job as a truck driver in the city of Dammam. Kamanda had subsequently left his place of work and moved to Mecca.

“The Grand Mosque and the holy city are forbidden to non-Muslims,” Col. Suhail Matrafi, head of the department of Expatriates Affairs in Mecca, told the Saudi daily Arab News. “The new fingerprints system is very helpful and will help us a lot to discover the identity of a lot of criminals,” he said.

Last week we noted that the Organization of the Islamic Conference was complaining about “Islamophobia.” But we don’t know of any city in the West that is off-limits to Muslims. When Christians, Jews and atheists are free to visit Mecca and Medina, we’ll take “Islamophobia” seriously.