“Supporting the troops” is such very hard work. Between FOIA requests from the ACLU and the rare nosy reporter like Sy Hersh, a president hardly has time to take a month’s vacation to clear brush.

“Supporting the troops” means covering up the fact that tactics like this were ordered from the top (”Welcome to the Hague, Mr. Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Gonzales. We hope you enjoy your stay”) but making sure the money that’s supposed to feed, clothe and armor them goes instead into the pockets of the war profiteers like Halliburton.

And years from now, when some Iraq war vet runs for office, he’ll be smeared by the right for “attacking the troops” by talking about this:

Signaling the worst revelations are yet to come, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the additional photos show “acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman.”

“There are a lot more photographs and videos that exist,” Rumsfeld testified before Congress.

“If these are released to the public, obviously it’s going to make matters worse. That’s just a fact.”

The unreleased images show American soldiers beating one prisoner almost to death, apparently raping a female prisoner, acting inappropriately with a dead body, and taping Iraqi guards raping young boys, according to NBC News.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the scandal is “going to get worse” and warned that the most “disturbing” revelations haven’t yet been made public.

“The American public needs to understand, we’re talking about rape and murder here,” he said. “We’re not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience; we’re talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges.”

Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin will probably write a book smearing Sy Hersh for talking about it:

The women were passing messages saying “Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened”. Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking.

It’s not new. The coverup isn’t new, either:

What else do you do with them? You can’t patch them up. You’re not allowed to use any medicine on them. They can’t be evacuated to a hospital. They are laying there suffering and dying, so what do you do? Do you go ahead and shoot them or not? Those kind of moral questions come up in war and there is no right answer. There is no good decision. There is only bad and bad. I just wish I could make every American look at it.

This Is Rumor Control: What conditions were at play that allowed the Tiger Force war crimes to happen?

Dennis Stout: It became policy to get body counts and that led to shooting civilians. We got a new “bird� colonel usually every thirty days, sometimes every forty-five days and we got a general every thirty days so they only had thirty days to get their numbers right for their next promotion. So there was a lot of pressure to get the body count up. But it was not just Tiger Force. All three companies of our battalion were involved and when I reported them the first time was in late June of 1967 after I got there.

The guys I was with, this time in “C” company had captured a girl that was about seventeen I guess and [they] raped her for two nights and beat her and then took her outside and told her to run and she wouldn’t run so they threw a grenade at her feet. She just covered her eyes and put the other arm across her chest and the grenade blew one leg off and shredded the other one but she wasn’t dead yet so two guys shot her to finish her off. I took off walking to the American base that wasn’t very far away to report these crimes the first time.

This Is Rumor Control: What happened?

Dennis Stout: First I went to the sergeant major and he told me to keep quiet about it. Then I went to the captain and he told me to keep quiet or I would get a lot of good people in trouble. So then I went to the chaplain and I asked him to get word out to the CID [criminal investigation command] and instead of doing that he turned me in to the sergeant major. He told me “Stout if you didn’t have such a good combat record you would be dead already. If you say another word about this you won’t come back alive from the next operation.” I kept quiet the rest of my time in Vietnam.

This Is Rumor Control: What did you do when you got out of Vietnam?

Dennis Stout: Later when I got out of the Army in 1969, I first went to a National Guard officer who was on campus and he told me that American soldiers don’t do that sort of thing. So I tried calling the Army CID and I didn’t get a return call so then I went to the press and said I’d witnessed war crimes.

Then the CID came to visit me and I had an attorney and we met with the CID and I reported officially eight war crimes – the eight that I could most closely document. In two cases I had the ID cards of the people who were killed and in two of the cases I had the location on the ground, within a hundred meters and the names and evidence.

When I contacted them later they said there was nothing that could be done because these areas were behind enemy lines. When the war ended I asked for an investigation and they said nothing could be done but I found out they had done one in 1969 when I first reported it.

This Is Rumor Control: Why wasn’t anyone charged? :

Dennis Stout: I don’t know. The investigation, I’m told when right up to Donald Rumsfeld’s desk. When Ford came in Rumsfeld became Defense Secretary and in the same month he became Secretary, the investigation was killed.