Trying to find prisoner abuse...

Here's a story by the Prensa Latina that states that "108 people have died, most of them violently as a result of abuse, under US military custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a government report provided to the Associated Press."

The very next sentence states, "roughly a quarter of those deaths have been investigated as possible abuse by U.S. personnel." So the first line tells us that out of all of the prisoners dying while under US custody, most are a result of abuse. Then right after that we find out that only a quarter of the 108 deaths are even being investigated by the military for possible abuse. One quarter is obviously not most.

The ACLU then comes out to say it is appalled that the high ranking military, and the Bush Administration continue to affirm that it is only a few rogue soldiers abusing prisoners. Well, let's do the math. The story states that 65,000 prisoners have been held. 108 have died under US custody, so that's 0.17% of the prisoners. One quarter of those that have died are possibly the result of abuse. So that puts the percentage of abuses resulting in death at a whopping 0.04% of the total number of prisoners. Does that look like a systemic problem?

What is even more outrageous is that if the higher ups were trying to hide all of this and cover themselves, why would they be doing all of this investigating? The U.S. is one of the few military organizations that will investigate itself, and admit when mistakes are made, and hold people accountable.