It Gets Worse

But first the good news: The AP is reporting that American hostage and Halliburton employee Thomas Hamill, kidnapped three weeks ago in an insurgent attack on his convoy, was found by U.S. forces Sunday south of Tikrit after he apparently escaped from his captors. Pure old pluck and luck. Make this guy a general! His family & friends in Macon, Mississippi, are jumping up and down with joy.

Now, the bad: ace investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who broke the My Lai massacre story back in the Vietnam heyday, has gotten his hands on a secret Army report which documents in sickening detail that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, especially at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison where the now famous photos were made of American G.I.s making party favors out of Iraqi prisoners, was much more widespread than the recent photos suggest, and winked at -- i.e., encouraged -- by certain "intelligence officers" who might have learned their techniques from Saddam's own brutal secret police.

You can read Hersh's lengthy New Yorker article about all of this here.