Barbaric Acts Against GI's Have No Equivalent !

The following is today's editorial from the Arizona Republic:

Enough with Abu Ghraib. Enough with the self-loathing hand-wringing over the killers harbored in comfort at Guantanamo Bay. Enough with the still-unproved condemnations of U.S. Marines at Haditha.

Two U.S. Army soldiers, Pfc. Kristian Menchaca of Houston and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker of Madras, Ore., have been found dead at the hands of the still-potent terrorist insurgency in Iraq.

Not just dead, but tortured, we are told. Their unrecognizable bodies dumped at a roadside that had been wired with bombs. According to an Iraqi military spokesman, the soldiers "were killed in a barbaric way."

The two young soldiers - both had been in Iraq but a few months - had been captured at a checkpoint on June 16 in an attack that killed a third comrade, Spc. David J. Babineau of Springfield, Mass.

If we are to properly understand - and fairly condemn - the revolting moral equivalencies that have sprung up regarding "violence begetting violence" in Iraq, the shocking deaths of Pfcs. Menchaca and Tucker would seem a proper place to start.

It is not the policy of the U.S. military to torture enemy combatants, certainly not to the point that DNA tests become necessary to determine which disfigured corpse is which. It is not the policy of the U.S. military to behead captured enemies. Water-boarding and sleep deprivation strike us as bad and likely unproductive policies. Disfiguring torture and beheading strike us as the acts of barbarians and monsters. There is equivalence in this?

Whatever one's judgment about the legal rights of enemy combatants held at Guantanamo, drawing parallels between isolated American excesses in a cruel war and such joyously celebrated "policies" of terrorists is just beyond the pale.

Two days before the abduction of the two GIs, the "right hand man" of al-Qaida's deceased beheader-in-chief, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a U.S. airstrike. Known as al-Qaida's "religious emir," Mansour al-Mashhadani also played a key role in the terrorists' "media operations," according to USA Today.

Media operations . . .

The sort of "media operations" conducted by the late emir involved promoting the activities of an insurgency umbrella group known as the Mujahideen Shura Council, which includes al-Qaida in Iraq.

That "council" has noted on its Web site that the two U.S. soldiers had been "slaughtered" by the apparent successor to Zarqawi. "With God Almighty's blessing, (Zarqawi successor) Abu Hamza al-Muhajer carried out the verdict of the Islamic court," which called for the soldiers to be murdered.

In the twisted logic of terrorists, in short, the brutal murder of two soldiers is not something merely to be celebrated, but an act that should be spun to the media.

It is an affront to the dignity of Iraqis to absolve such horrific, self-celebrated barbarism by suggesting or even implying that such acts are simply retaliation against the American "Crusader."

The murders of Pfcs. Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker weren't retribution. They weren't "equivalent" to anything.

They are disgusting acts of barbarism.