The New York Times is reveling in the Abu Ghraib prison story; here’s a headline that flatly labels the incident with the ridiculously overblown, utterly wrong word “torture:” Revulsion Over the Torture Provokes Scorn for the US.

To the New York Times, the faux outrage of the Arab world is to be taken at face value, with no attempt whatsoever at context or proportion, and passed along to their readers as if it were reasonable opinion from reasonable people:

“The United States already had very little credibility in the Middle East, and it is now approaching zero,” said Abdelmonem Said, the director of Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. [And the Al Ahram Center is credible? —ed.]

“What remains of the American logic for being in Iraq?” he asked. “If we start with the issue of weapons of mass destruction, there are no weapons of mass destruction.

”There was talk about fighting terrorism, and they brought terrorism with them. Finally, the issue of democracy and respect for human rights: Saddam was a butcher who tortured people; now the United States is torturing people.“

Even conduits for the Egyptian government’s views, normally somewhat circumspect in taking direct potshots at the American administration except as regards its support for Israel, said the abuses confirmed that Washington had been lying when it said toppling Mr. Hussein was in the best interest of the Iraqis.

”The fact is that the behavior of these soldiers is totally in line with the mission for which they came to Iraq to begin with,“ the semiofficial daily Al Ahram editorialized, charging that Washington’s real goals were ”to invade this major Arab country, destroy its economic and military capabilities, tear up its state as a service to Israeli interests, control its enormous oil wealth and eliminate anything that might hinder these aims, whether coming from the army, the people or the armed national resistance.”

And this sentence:

…conduits for the Egyptian government’s views, normally somewhat circumspect in taking direct potshots at the American administration…

… is nothing short of an outright lie. We have documented the insane hatred of America that finds open expression in the Egyptian press many times at LGF.