In the first part of this series I examined how the deliberate disregard for the law in the US was directly responsible for the abuse, humiliation, torture and murder of helpless prisoners in its  charge, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Guatanamo.

I had originally decided to extend this theme to consider events away from Iraq to see how decisions mad by both the Bush administration and earlier governements had further undermined the US claim to moral legitmacy and its standing in the eyes of the world.

That historical perspective has been put on ice, and will now be examined in a part III to the series following an astonishing turn of events since the first article was written.

In this article, I will instead focus on the response that has occured since the release of those seminal photograhs of US systematic abuse and the brutal death of the US citizen Nick Berg.

The two have become inter-related, woven together not just by their temporal proximity, but also by the way that people have sought to use the latter to justify the former.

Firstly let's look at the fallout following the damning revelations of prisoner abuse in Iraq.

Firstly there was the reaction of people like Rush Limbaugh, who invited listeners to identify with the frustration of the soldiers must have felt being shot at by the ungrateful Iraqi people; so naturally they felt the need to "blow some steam off" by "having a good time"  - Time magazine

Limbaugh saw nothing wrong with the good ol' homeboys having a little fun with ungrateful Iraqis that they had sought to free and had instead imprisoned in the same hell-hole that Saddam reserved for his helpless minions.

Nancy Gibbs, also writing in TIme magazine observes,

'Others noted that there was less outcry when Saddam was doing the torturing, or argued that "they would do the same to us if the had the chance". When Americans are reduced to insisting that their depravity isn't as bad as the other guy's, they have fallen deep into a pit or moral equivalence that reveals what they have lost'

It was not without considerable notice that the public the world over observed the reluctance of both Bush and Rumsfeld to apologise for the disgraceful incidents revealed in Al-Ghraib and now elsewhere.

Though they did eventually apologise, the cynicism of their apology has since been revealed for the crocodile tears that they were, shed only once they realised that they had no choice.

This cynicism was evidenced at a Senat inquiry into prisoner abuse.

On Tuesday morning in a hearing at the Senate, Major General Taguba, who ran the Army's major investigation into the Abu Grhaib, was summoned to give testimony concerning the abuse.

Rumsfeld sent his second in command, Stephen Cambone to undermine him.

Cambone said that Rumsfeld was deeply commited to the Geneva convention , that everyone knew it and that any deviation had to come from 'the command level'.

Having gone on record for accepting full responsibilty for the atrocities in Al-Ghraib, Rumsfeld was now trying to distance himself and ergo the President as far as possible from accepting responsibility  by foisting  the blame onto officers in the far flung fields of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Taguba had made it clear in his report, corroborated by a Red Cross report from Iraq, that abuse of prisoners by the US military and intelligence agencies was systematic and not random.

Cambone sought to discredit this notion in a display of incredible and sickening  chutzpah.

Cambone was backed up by blindly  loyal cohorts such as Sen Inhofe of Oklahoma, who offered the following, astounding comment,

(that he was more) 'outraged by the outrage' than by the treatment of the prisoners. After all, he said, they were probably guilty of something.

This hang 'em all and let God sort them out has become the new mantra that has replaced law and order under this administration.

A Red Cross report, published in the Wall Street journal, said that 70-90% of people incarcerated and rountinely abused and worse were entirely innocent of any wrong doing.

Such callous disregard for assuming guilt until proven otherwise was precisely the attitude of Saddam and other brutal dictators both today and throughout history.

These actions and subsequent weasel words have dealt another body blow to US moral credibility and standing in the eyes of the world.

A fact that is also little reported is that under US jurdistriction, American trained Iraqi police routinely and seemingly randomly arrest citizens, threatening to send those that do not or cannot pay bribes to prison camps, where they are rountinely beaten and burned before being turned over to the Americans for further interrogation.

Futher, Taguba reported that on at least four occasions, military commanders had permitted guards to use 'lethal force' on unruly prisoners.

Rumsfeld alleges that he had made it clear that people taken as prisoners in Iraq were to be accorded full rights under the Geneva conventions, rights denied prisoners taken in Afghanistan. The subtle distinction between one group of so called 'enemy combatants' and another that seems so reterospectively clear to Rumsfeld has clearly failed to be understood by his juniors, right down to the level of reservists plucked off the street and sent to serve with inadequate training in the symbol of Saddams brutal and murderous regime, Al Ghraib.

Elsewhere, the commentators are no less defiant.

William Safire writes,

'Those of us that believe the notion of exporting freedom cannot trivialise the scandal. But we Americans need not let our dismay at the predations of some self-photographing creeps overwhelm the morally sound purpose of our anti-terrorism campaign'

Safire uses the classic apologist get out, such as I'm not racist but...and then continues to try and claim the moral high ground by linking the muderous occupation in Iraq with anti-terrorism, when it has been shown time and again that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or Al'Qaeda.

He fails to grasp the nettle with which he is trying to beat those that have been sickened by the systematic abuse of innocent people arrested in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Does exporting freedom mean having your door kicked in in the small hours, taken away, abused, humiliated and even tortured and murdered without rights, recourse to legal advice and incarcerated indefinitely without charge?

He chillingly finishes an article with the following statement,

'Pessimism may be in the saddle today, but hope for Iraqi freedom is in the wings, wait and see.'

What Safire fails to see is that we were told to wait and see on the WMDs we would find, on the ability of Saddam to threaten the West with these weapons, all delusional fantasies that were subsequently discredited by every turn of events.

And now he assures us that this is just a cosmetic problem, that all will be well...he still hasn't learnt the folly of wishful thinking.

The apologists for war have always been short on facts for both the justification of the occupation and of the subsequent 'guarantee' that imposition of democracy would be painless and effortless.

As realists on the ground before and during this war have found to their common sense, logic and lessons learnt from history, these delusional fantasies are the product of a deep and alarming ignorance that the perpetrators are still failing to recognise.

While innocent GI Joes and Janes and many times that numbers of innocent Iraqi people are incarcerated, tortured and killed.

'Enthusiastic and vociferous officials that endorse Bush's plan to impose democracy by force upon the Iraqi people are now conceding privately that their optimism has been shattered. Once the insurgents had been captured or killed the US could somehow stumble through the next seven weeks...to create a Iraq that was to be the crowning symbol of how the US liberated a nation from tyranny. Now they accept that it's a 97% mess, a complete cock-up from day one ' David Sanger, NYT

Now let's turn to the dreadful murder of Nick Berg

Yesterday, an Arabic website showed the full and awful video of the execution of Nick Berg.

This was later taken up and shown continuously by Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya sattelite channels, but only up to the gruesome beheading.

As the news ricocheted around the world, people everywhere responded with horror and revulsion at such barbaric behaviour.

There was to be a subtle and sickening twist to the already depraved actions of the Al'Qaeda linked perpetrators however.

Political commentators and others seized on this awful event and sought to gain political capital from it, some claiming that this was sufficient evidence to justify US torture of prisoners in Al Ghraib.

Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer said,

There's no excuse for what those Americans have been doing in those prisons but there's no doubt that some of the people they are dealing with are barbaric'

People within Joeblog have sought to use this outrage to call the entire region barbarians, and the worst comentators of the lot are those that say

'where is the outrage against this brutal murder of an innocent young man?'

War proponents have attempted to seize this depraved act as typical of people in the 'region' even though this was carried out by Al'Qaeda and not Iraqi insurgents or freedom fighters.

Worse still are those that are now attempting to link Al'Qaeda to justify the illegal and immoral occupation of Iraq by muddying the clear waters with the implication that because Al'Qaeda is now apparently active in Iraq, that it was active in Iraq under Saddam and therefore a legitimate target for the subsequent horror that the US unleashed there.

Whereas Saddam had nothing whatever to do with 9/11 or Al'Qaeda.

That they are present there now has nothing to do with Saddam and everything with the anarchic, murderous chaos that the US has unleashed there and unwittingly fostered through gross incompetence and breathtaking ignorance.

Some incredibily ill-concieved comments have been issued,among them that of Scott McClellan,the Whitehouse spokesmen who issued the following statement:

'It shows the true nature of the enemies of freedom...they have no regard for the lives of innocent men, women and children'.

And Tom Delay, Republican leaer of the house of representatives:

'They're not soldiers. They're monsters, they're terrorists'

Why should these statements be regarded as untoward?

On the surface they would seem to be a reasonable reaction to a truly barbaric murder.

And indeed they are.

But they are missing an essential point.

I spoke to several people here in Bangkok and asked them what they thought of Bergs death.

They all expressed the same level of disgust at the actions of these monsters.

And they all added a rider, that these animals were just as bad as the US army.

They said that there was little difference between slitting the throat of the Al'qaeda prisoner and the torture and murder of prisoners held in US administered prisons.

They saw little difference between slitting the throat of one Al'Qaeda prisoner and the kicking to death of US prisoners.

What the clearly did see was an immoral equivalence.

They laughed at the statement by the Whitehouse spokesman, saying how many innocent men, women and children had the US killed in megaton bombs raining from the sky in the name of freedom?

And how many had been killed in the year since the supposed 'end of hostilities?'

They pointed out the (minimum) of 10,000 killed since the initial invasion, and the thousands since, the estimated 600 innocent casualties caught in the recent crossfire between the US and the insurgents in Fallujah.

'It is US armed forces policy to practice 'force protection'. This mandates the killing of civilians percieved as being in any way threatening to US forces. It requires US soldiers to treat all Iraqis as potential enemies, and their lives of being lesser worth than Ameicans' - William Pfaff, Paris

The US armed forces also have a policy of not recording or investigating civilian deaths in Iraq at its hands.

This was left at first to no authority whatsoever and subsequently to an authority with no ability to coordinate and record such deaths in the wake of US assaults.

A British officer recently complained to the Daily Telegraph, a pro-US paper, 'that Americans don't see the Iraqi people the way that we see them.' They view them as untermenschen, subhuman, a term applied by the Nazis to Jews and Gypsies.

'They are not concerned about the Iraqi way of life as we are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, its awful...'

The sickening allegations of torture in Al'Ghraib and elsewhere hadn't even been read by General Byers, and Rumsfeld complained on a talk show that as the document that eventually landed on his desk was some 3,000 pages long he hadn't had the time to read it all, even though he found the time to attend a party for a US press association while it languished on his desk.

But what has this got to do with Nicholas Berg?

It says to people outside of the US that there are two sorts of human beings. Those of the US and everybody else.

The reaction over the brutal murder of one US citizen and the deafening silence over civilian casualties that have arisen since the war began only serves to underline this imbalance, 'us and them'.

Iraqi lives are so beneath us that we cannot be bothered to even make a note on a piece of paper to record the numbers of their deaths let alone the cause, possibly because they would run out of paper.

Or read the reports on their abuse, humiliation, torture and murder.

The outrage at one Americans brutal murder should pale into insignificance to the outrage which should expressed over the countless deaths of innocent Iraqi civilians.

But it does not.

It serves to underscore the widely recieved wisdom in Iraq, that the life of a US person is worth many times more that than the life of an Iraqi.

And this is a freedom that they should be grateful for?

The further question arises, is it more brutal to have your throat ripped apart, to be kicked to death or to be butchered by an indiscriminate blast delivered from a bomb on high?

When you consider the daftness of the last paragraph, a self evident truth begins to distill out.

War is a brutal madness full stop.

The entire West is at war with Al'Qaeda.

Only a flimsy coalition is at war with the innocent people of Iraq.

yechydda,