Fisk shtick

With no recent beating at the hands of locals to write about, Robert Fisk recycles the Americans-are-torturers stories for the umpteenth time:

A vast quantity of evidence has now been built up on the system which the Americans have created for mistreating and torturing prisoners. I have interviewed a Palestinian who gave me compelling evidence of anal rape with wooden poles at Bagram - by Americans, not by Afghans.

Many of the stories now coming out of Guantanamo - the sexual humiliation of Muslim prisoners, their shackling to seats in which they defecate and urinate, the use of pornography to make Muslim prisoners feel impure, the female interrogators who wear little clothing (or, in one case, pretended to smear menstrual blood on a prisoner’s face) - are increasingly proved true. Iraqis whom I have questioned at great length over many hours, speak with candour of terrifying beatings from military and civilian interrogators, not just in Abu Ghraib but in US bases elsewhere in Iraq.

At the American camp outside Fallujah, prisoners are beaten with full plastic water bottles which break, cutting the skin. At Abu Ghraib, prison dogs have been used to frighten and to bite prisoners.

A Palestinian claims... Scantily clad interrogators... Menstrual blood, fake or real... Little green men... Such is the stuff of urban legends.

Okay look, I'm not all for ripping out fingernails or beating someone to a pulp but most of this stuff, while harsh, isn't torture. That said, from my nice comfy chair, in my nice comfy house, it's hard to know or even picture what's really going in some of the nastier corners of the world where life is very cheap. Maybe I'm naive but I'm willing to trust that most Americans aren't nasty, evil bastards and are only doing what they think needs to be done.