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Regurgitating the most current news with commentary is not a Monk specialty, although I do appreciate it in others, when it is done well. What has struck me so, that I can't keep from typing out? News of the humiliations inflicted by U.S. and British troops on prisoners taken in Iraq, as captured by the tormentors themselves on film.

Memory Hole has the pictures.

If the torturers sneered, grimaced, or conveyed a fear of getting caught, these pictures would not move me as much. That would mean they knew how wrong it is, and flout orders and the common practices of prisoner detention - an exception to the rule.

But the ignorant audacity in the expressions of those captors suggests that at the time the pictures were taken, no one raised any objection. Nobody talked consequences. This event is not merely bad P.R., and it is not merely bad spelling. It is a sign of an institutional defect.

And now many more will die for their stupid cruelty.