More pictures--good grief

I am curious to know where other people stand on the pictures that just seem to keep on coming of alleged mistreatment of prisoners.

A few competing thoughts come to my mind: of course we are not supposed to abuse prisoners--we're bound by the Geneva Convention, and we pride ourselves on taking a higher moral road than our enemies. This kind of behavior is undisciplined, stupid, and wrong.

On the other hand, a friend who was a military pilot during the Viet Nam War told me about the training he had to go through before his tour of duty. Part of that training was the simulation of being a prisoner-of-war, from which he emerged with more physical damage than what many of these prisoner-abuse stories report. And this was from his own side!

We've also heard tales of dogs terrorizing detainees--snarling, lunging, and in one case, biting a man's arm. Okay, that's terrible. But it wasn't too many years ago that similar dogs were being set on African-Americans who were peacefully marching in the South. If dogs were loosed on our own citizens who were not not breaking the law, can we be shocked that they'd be used to scare prisoners?

I guess it is hard for me, as a civilian, to sort out what is really going on. Are we talking about embarassing people, or beating them to a pulp? Making a prisoner uncomfortable, or killing someone who is being detained for questioning? Enforcing sleep deprivation as an interrogation tool, or taking nudie pictures for sport? The reports seem to blur things so that I can't get a handle on whether we're doing terrible things or not.

And I know that American prisoners-of-war have at times been treated heineously, but I don't want to frame a discussion of our behavior around abuses that have happened to us.

What do you all make of this?