RESPONSE: Great American Heroine

To make any comparison between the Holocaust and what happened to the Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib is ignorant and an insult to the millions who died in places like Auschwitz and Triblinka.  Are you really that ignorant of the atrocities committed by the Gestapo?  A better comparison would be the Gestapo's concentration camps and the gulags of the KGB.

And how odd that an inferior fighting force such as the US was able to accomplish in two months - capturing Afganistan - what the Russians were unable to do in a decade.  The US is held to an unreasonable standard of conduct in war (as demonstrated by you tallying "civilian" deaths in Iraq) yet still manages to accomplish it's military objectives in an unimaginably
short time.

I wonder how the Chechen situation would be perceived if it received the same amount of media scrutiny as US actions against terrorism.  Surely Russia's conduct has been utterly without atrocities, humiliation, torture, and rape?  Russian soldiers have conducted themselves solely as ambassadors of good will, I'm sure...

What she did was stupid and wrong, but hardly equivalent to concentration camps, gulags, or the other prisons in the Middle East.  The difference is that such behavior is not tolerated by US leaders.  Can the same be said of a nation like Russia who gasses it's own women and children when combating terrorists?

Charles Z.