Several times over the years, most recently in an Eddie Tews article from Nov. 2003, we've had occasion in these pages to praise the writing and reporting of Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker magazine's writer on national security affairs. Back in the day, Hersh won a Pulitzer for breaking the My Lai story. For breaking the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, he may well be bagging another one. And in his latest of three outstanding articles, in the 5-24 issue of the magazine, he adds on to Mstis Tomchick's outline in this issue with key evidebce that Donald Rumsfeld and other key Bush Administration officisls not only knew about the prison torture techniques in Guantanamo, Afghanista, and Iraq, but approved of them and urged them onward.

It's time to stop talking about this scandal in terms of its impact on foreign relations, and time to start talking about how it ought to bring down this government. --Geov Parrish

Mind you, this is all of a piece. Torture has, according to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other monitoring groups, been endemic to the US federal and state prison systems for years: many of Abu Ghraib's interrogation methods are straight out of your state's "control unit."

What's different about Abu Ghraib is the sexualization of its degradations. Where have we seen this stuff before? I'll tell you where: in pornography. Bad pornography, the kind of stuff they produce with bad furniture and worse dialogue in rented San Fernando Valley warehouses when nobody's looking. The seamy underside of our society's notion of "if it feels good, do it" sexual liberation and its fetid, human-hating objectification. Wherever such outrages occur, whatever the conditions, one common element is perpetrators who are unable or unwilling to put themselves in their victim's shoes, to recognize a fellow human being as someone with many of the same hopes and dreams and nerve endings they have, and to care.

Ever wonder why "they" in other, non-Western cultures might be loving human beings but still hate "our" freedom? Our lost empathy - on display in Abu Ghraib as pure sadism, complete with thumbs upturned and souvenir photos taken as part of the process of degradation--is one of the biggest parts of our Western notion of individual "freedom" that any sensible culture should want no part of. --G.P.

One last thought: Hospital workers and other witnesses, in Fallujah and countless other Iraqi cities, have reported that the vast majority of the intentionally attacked Iraqi victims aren't resistance fighters at all; they're civilians, mostly women and children.

So which is the bigger scandal--innocent people systematically being put through sheer hell, or innocent people being systematically wounded and killed? You decide. --G.P.

The Seattle City Council is, piece-by-piece, reviewing and approving the Monorail route. The Council recently voted on and approved the Monorail route through the Seattle Center grounds in a 5-4 vote. Among the dissenters on the Council was Peter Steinbreuck who compared running the Monorail through the Center to tearing down the Pike Place Market or building a freeway through the Arboretum. Wait a second. Building the Monorail through the Seattle Center is, by no leap of imagination, comparable to either the Market or the Arboretum. For one thing, the Seattle Center is not the vast green space that the Arboretum is.

I work in the lower Queen Anne neighborhood and use the Seattle Center on a regular basis. As anyone who visits it regularly knows, the Seattle Center is not an "open space." It's an amusement park and convention center. It's also noisier than any park in Seattle, including the half-block, bricked-over Westlake shopping plaza. The only time the Seattle Center is devoid of screaming kids or blaring rock music and rushing water (from the fountain) is at about 6-7 AM in the morning. And then you have to dodge maintenance vehicles zipping around to fix various things and set up the next major convention or mass public event which will draw, yes, busloads of screaming kids and carloads of raucous adult party-goers. Or waves of yoga festival attendees or Cinco de Mayo fans (just to name a couple of recent events). And the amusement-park rides run about 12 hours a day. Wouldn't it be nice to have a ride in the Seattle Center that actually goes somewhere?

As for the other Monorail route options, the one that would have taken it north along 5th Avenue and west along Mercer Street would have been much more expensive and involved the removal of many, many more trees. Visit the neighborhood, folks. Yes, there are a LOT MORE mature trees on Mercer Street than there are inside the north end of the Seattle Center. As for the Thomas Street alternative that Councilmember David Della and the city's Monorail Advisory Board recommended, again I ask folks to visit the neighborhood. A Thomas Street station would bypass the core of the neighborhood; it would serve the Seattle Center, sure, but forget about those of us who live and work in lower Queen Anne. It would just duplicate the current Monorail set-up: Welcome, tourists! Fuck off, you commuters!--Maria Tomchick

There are much more important issues surrounding the Monorail that should be getting press and public attention. For example, the lack of funding has led the current Monorail board to propose running a single-rail line, instead of the original double-rail proposal. This would add running time to the route, potentially jeopardizing the number of riders, who might opt to take a faster express bus instead. It could also set up the system for maintenance problems, since a single rail line would involve more switches and complicated routing equipment.

And then there's the question of the city's DBOM agreement. DBOM stands for "Design, Build, Operate & Maintain." This agreement would allow the group of private companies that would design and build the Monorail to also operate and perform maintenance on the line for five years. Britain has been through an agonizing experiment in privatizing its public railway system and the London Underground. The experiment has been an outright disaster, with massive increases in the cost of operating the system, ever-increasing delays in train times, terrible rail disasters that have killed commuters and maintenance workers, and vicious attempts to break the British railway workers' union. The British government is currently taking steps to re-nationalize its rail system. We should be taking a close and careful look at that whole fiasco and asking ourselves if we want to duplicate it here in Seattle. If I had a vote, it would be a firm "No."--M.T.