(Warning: Graphic Content)
“Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers reopened under new management – U.S. management. Every day brings new photos, new horrors from the same prison and the same torture rooms that Saddam used to commit crimes against humanity.” Ted Kennedy
“What has happened [at Abu Ghraib] is not just something that a few, you know, privates and corporals or sergeants engaged in. This is something that comes out of an attitude about the rights of prisoners of war. It’s an attitude that comes out of how we went there in the first place, an attitude that comes out of America’s overall arrogance as policy.” –John Kerry
One day prior to the murder of Nick Berg, Senator James Inhofe took Kennedy and Kerry to the task for their political rhetoric, reminding them that humiliating terrorists is hardly comparable to prisoner treatment by Saddam Hussein, the “Butcher of Baghdad.” “I would guess that these prisoners wake up every morning thanking Allah that Saddam Hussein is not in charge,” said Sen. Inhofe. “When he was in charge they would take electric drills and drill holes through hands, they would cut their tongues out, they would cut their ears off. We’ve seen accounts of lowering their bodies into vats of acid… lining up 312 little kids under 12 years old and executing them [not to mention] what they do to Americans, too. I’m outraged by the press and the politicians and the political agendas that are being served by this, and I say political agendas because that’s actually what is happening….”
The Day after Berg’s murder, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Duncan Hunter offered this rebuke of the Left: “All the people who had a hand in publishing those pictures should think long and hard about what their responsibility was for the beheading of this American.”
Though Kennedy and Kerry may have inflicted some injury upon the Bush administration with their Abu Ghraib rhetoric, it was not as severe as the injury they inflicted upon Nicholas Berg.
