For a period of time, the scandals about the US army's organized abuses of war prisoners in Iraq have been growing daily as exposed In the meanwhile, the investigation with regard to the problem of prisoner abuse likewise reveals to be a shocking ignominy. Joseph M. Darby, a sergeant first class who ever served in the US army in Iraq handed over photos showing the troops' abuses of the war prisoners there. Some of the soldiers were ruled guilty because of it. Therefore, it is by no means certain that to lay bare the inside stories out would do them any good. Now, the Darby family in Maryland is suffering from the death threat. Some of the dwellers there scold them as "zombie", menacing that "his skull has become a shooting target" and so on and so forth, forcing the whole family to stay in an environment under a "protective watch".

Darby has a brave wife. The other day when she was receiving an interview of Voice of America she expressed her support for what her husband had done while grumbled over the social environment in which justice and truth had been wantonly distorted. From the sufferings of Darby's family we can come to know that the investigation into the US army's war-prisoner abuse scandal has not only met with the hindrance from the US military high levels but also the pressures from the social public. Once the narrow-minded patriotism and nationalism come to a vicious swelling the significance of what is true and wrong becomes reverted, and justice and truth are no longer anything holy.

Actually, the US army's abuses of war prisoners are by no means limited to Iraq alone. Same thing can be found in Afghanistan, in the prison of Guantanamo naval base and some other places. In almost all processes of arrest, conveyance and lock-up and sentence they are suffering from maltreatment and persecution in different ways and degrees and those being maltreated are by no means limited to the Muslims but also include prisoners from western countries. As many critiques and analyses hold, what happened in the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq was only a corner of an iceberg with only a few unfortunate scapegoats caught so as to gloss over the decision-makers and other executors behind the scene.

For those organized war-prisoner abuse behavior carried out on a large scale it has to be thoroughly investigated and bravely recognized. Any explanation away or glossing over mistakes from high levels will only lead the society up the garden path and revert the right and wrong. The predicament of Darby's family can serve as a mirror, reflecting a horrible social existence of an extreme feeling whereas at the same time it also admonishes the American people to take a reasonable view of what their own country has done, been doing and is going to do.

By People's Daily Online