PRIM AND PROPER

The Divine Miss S -- a friend's not altogether admiring nom de plume for Susan Sontag -- told us: "It is probable that the 'torture' word will continue to be banned" by the W. gang. Tim Rutten, the Los Angeles Times media columnist, writing a week before her piece appeared in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, told us:

The mainstream media's insistence on primly referring to what occurred in what was once Saddam Hussein's most infamous prison as "abuse" is part and parcel of their deep avoidance of this story's implications. Abuse is what happens when you fail to feed your parakeet or speak intemperately to a sensitive child. When you starve or drown or beat or sexually humiliate another human being, it is called torture. It's what occurred in Hitler's concentration camps, Stalin's Gulag, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Pinochet's Chile, Hussein's Iraq and -- now -- in the secret prison system the United States has constructed in defiance of its international obligations and our own laws and traditions.

That about covers that subject. But writers keep nibbling at the why's and wherefore's. Today Eliot A. Cohen does it in The Washington Post with a piece about "Our Soldiers and Us." He tells us:

If a society has no norm of chief executives accepting responsibility for their corporations' moral and financial failures, do not expect generals to line up to say: "It happened on my watch, and I therefore offer the secretary of defense my resignation." In some measure, societies get the militaries they deserve.

To which we say: "Yes sir!"

To the presidential speech last night at the U.S. War College, all we can say is: "Huh?" William Saletin refers to it as The Little Fucker's "Magical History Tour," an airbrushed version of reality: "Is Bush embarrassed that a year of occupation has failed to substantiate his claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to global terrorism? No. He hasn't even noticed."