From today's Washington Post:

"Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush was being stubborn with his American captors, and a series of intense beatings and creative interrogation tactics were not enough to break his will. On the morning of Nov. 26, 2003, a U.S. Army interrogator and a military guard grabbed a green sleeping bag, stuffed Mowhoush inside, wrapped him in an electrical cord, laid him on the floor and began to go to work. Again.

It was inside the sleeping bag that the 56-year-old detainee took his last breath through broken ribs, lying on the floor beneath a U.S. soldier in Interrogation Room 6 in the western Iraqi desert. "

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The details of the inventions of brute force and coercion which were brought to bear to force General Mowhoush to talk can be found here in the Post.

War is a desperate situation and it brings out the worst and most desperate in people.

There is no telling what anyone of us would do faced with mortal combat, and under the basic equations of war, General Mowhoush was an enemy, pure and simple.

He was, however, an enemy who had turned himself in, hoping that by doing so he could have his two sons freed from captivity.

I find this description of his death a source of great shame and disgust. An enemy who is disempowered and rendered incapable of harm is not the same thing as man facing you with a Kalashnikov. This particular man was a prisoner.

His treatment was brutal and savage.

His karma may have called for a brutal and savage end. Who knows what deaths he engineered?

But our karma should never be to deliver such endings to those in our power as prisoners. To do so makes us mindless and bestial and worse than the worst we accuse others of.

I lay this disgust at the feet of the warmongers more than the crazed and desperate hamburger-raised young men who essentially committed murder in our name. I doubt any one of them could possibly imagined what they would end up in. But anyone who has lived through war should know.

This is what Mister Bush has sent Americans into with his insane decisions.

A