How many isolated incidents make a pattern?

I can't even bring myself to quote from Friday's New York Times story about the torture of prisoners in Bagram, Afghanistan. By now, many of you have probably already read it, but what can I say, I'm behind on life so I'm posting about it now.

The story focuses on the deaths of two prisoners who were beaten, hung by chains from the ceiling, and otherwise brutally abused. One seems to have been detained merely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time--he drove by a military base that had been the target of an attack that day.

It's deeply depressing. And of course, it underscores the madness of the administration's complaints against Newsweek. The past couple of weeks in the news has felt, in this way, to me like some sick amalgam of 1984 and Lord of the Flies where we get both the savagery of naked imperialism and the totalitarian news organ to explain our world to us. If I were a Christian, I would title this post "my god, why hast thou forsaken me"; as it is, I can only try to cherish the part of me that is continually appalled and sickened by America's actions in the name of freedom and liberty. May I never become inured to our grotesque hypocrisy.

Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever. . . . The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands -- all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. . . . Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible -- and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.'
1984