Read this New Yorker story. See this:

Official Standard Operating Procedure website here.

As a relatively intelligent nonAmerican, of course I can separate the America represented by my insanely clever, funny, charitable, hard-working and beautiful-in-so-many-ways friends and colleagues (and the many millions like them) from the America represented by the greedy criminals who’ve damaged that country’s reputation in this world (and the many millions who either support them or who somehow rationalize the evil).

Whether America’s reputation is irreparably damaged will depend entirely on how America chooses to prosecute the criminals at the top. Or if they do it at all. That there’s any dispute over how extensive the damage… well, that’s pretty fucking horrifying, right there.

From The New Yorker piece:

The low-ranking reservist soldiers who took and appeared in the infamous images were singled out for opprobrium and punishment; they were represented, in government reports, in the press, and before courts-martial, as rogues who acted out of depravity. Yet the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was de facto United States policy. The authorization of torture and the decriminalization of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of captives in wartime have been among the defining legacies of the current Administration; and the rules of interrogation that produced the abuses documented on the M.I. block in the fall of 2003 were the direct expression of the hostility toward international law and military doctrine that was found in the White House, the Vice-President’s office, and at the highest levels of the Justice and Defense Departments.