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EDITORIAL By Maximillien de Lafayette, Esquire, Editor-in-Chief

The images of physical and sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib are totally unacceptable and un-American!!

No, this is not "Americana", it is just human nature.

Photo: Two soldiers pose behind a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

'The actions by U.S. military personnel in those photos do not in any way represent the values of our country or of the armed forces,'' said Mr Rumsfeld, and I do believe him. Dr Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, told the Arab television network Al Arabiya that Bush was ''determined to find out if there is any wider problem than just what happened at Abu Ghraib. And so he has told Secretary Rumsfeld that he expects an investigation, a full accounting.'', and I do believe her. On behalf of President Bush, Defence Secretary Rumsfeld said: "We're taking and will continue to take whatever steps are necessary to hold accountable those that may have violated the code of military conduct and betrayed the trust placed in them by the American people.", and I do believe him.

A group of bound Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, Iraq in this undated photo. (AP Photo/Courtesy of The New Yorker)

Photos of the treatment of Iraqi prisoners have shocked the world and the American people as well.

President George W Bush has denounced the mistreatment of Iraqi inmates by US soldiers as "abhorrent".

President Bush told the Al-Hurra network: "People in Iraq must understand that I view those practices as abhorrent. They must also understand that what took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know." Mr Bush said that, in democracies, mistakes were made but rejected comparisons of the US treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison to the practices under the Saddam Hussein regime during which time the jail became notorious for the torture carried out there. President Bush, who is also to be interviewed on the al-Arabiya satellite channel, said that the US was not seeking to impose double standards - criticising other countries for human rights abuses while its troops mistreated prisoners in military jails. "We will do to ourselves what we expect of others," he said. "There will be investigations, people will be brought to justice," he said. President Bush revealed that the first time he saw the photographs of the abuse was when they appeared on US television late last month.

Ten words in the "human vocabulary" of any language in the civilized world scare the hell out of me and make me question the "formula" the creator (s) used to create the human race: 1-indifference, 2-hunger, 3-poverty, 4-injustice, 5-slavery, 6-ingratitude, 7-greed, 8-hate, 9-punishment, 10-WAR. Many wise men and wise women like Blaise Pascal, Voltaire, de La Rochefoucauld, Tagore, Emma Lazarus, Mother Teresa, Schopenhauer, Victor Hugo, Aristotle, Hamurabi and avalanches of thinkers and theologians contemplated on those ten words (from the dawn of the humanity), and as we speak, many other thinkers and enlightened human beings will remain occupied with the thoughts and ideas about how to put an end to the human violence and atrocities caused by humans till the end of time. Ethicists, social theorists, futurists, moralists, philosophers and jurists would and could spend the rest of their lives contemplating on those ten words, and perhaps someone will script new "Ten Commandments" tablets.

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