"It's like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500"

Oh dear. More scandalous images of prisoner abuse and the beating of defenceless Iraqi teenagers some of which, it says here, 'didn't have any shoes'. By soldiers, no less. British ones at that. We can expect it from those nasty 'friendly-firing' US GI's or whatever they're called, but the British! Crikey. It's just not cricket. Our boys are supposed to be doling out Gin and Tonics and Kendal mint cake, surely, not kicking at heads as if they're on a Saturday night out in Milton Keynes and doing the sorts of nasty things people trained to kill might do. It's really got up the nose of the 'News of The World'. They even drafted in author Chris Ryan to be appalled: "This appalling footage filled me with revulsion —and every professional British soldier would agree...seeing supposedly highly-trained troops beating defenceless teenagers to a pulp...made me sick to my stomach. Some of these teenagers didn't even have any shoes"

I would have thought that highly-trained troops could easily kick shoeless teenagers to a pulp. Nothing 'supposedly' about that.

Here's a short biography of Chris Ryan from the Random House Canada website:

'Chris Ryan was born in 1961. He joined the SAS in 1984. During his ten years he was involved in overt and covert operations and was also Sniper team commander of the anti-terrorist team and never once killed a man who wasn't wearing any shoes. During the Gulf War, Chris was the only member of an eight-man team to escape from Iraq, for which he was awarded the Military Medal'.

Chris writes 'hugely gripping' novels about killing terrorists and being heroic etc etc and offers 'riveting' insights into the awesome killing methods of the SAS drawing on a unique, insider's pool of knowledge, apparently. None of his books feature scenes where soldiers of the British army beat shoeless Iraqi teenagers senseless whilst laughing maniacally because that's 'appalling' and really not playing to the rules of war, which is usually about hurting people because they think differently about something or other that both sides find equally important.

Here's an extract from a 'News of the World' article of the future that I made up:

"...WAR HURTS PEOPLE, SOMETIMES INNOCENT, SCIENTISTS DISCOVER.

Scientists in California have this week published their findings after ten years of research into war. They claim that, whilst war itself is a smashing idea and totally neccesary it can, and has, caused people distress and pain and, in many cases, to actually die. Bob Quim, senior research scientist at the Christian-Andersen research centre in Berkeley said: 'Our research represents a water-tight argument for the case that war essentially involves fucking up people's lives for some sort of eventual material gain. Some of those fucked up aren't even terrorists or fundamentalists or other persons from the group we like to categorize as 'deserve to die'...This is really going to surprise a lot of people.'

The publication of their data is the culmination of a decade of intensive research made possible by a generous government endowment of shoes..."