Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testified before congress yesterday amidst calls for him to resign over recently published photographs of widespread abuse of Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In his testimony he took responsibility for the abuse as leader of the military, but he is ignoring demands to resign that have been coming from citizens and some Democratic politicians. It is also worth noting that his testimony was disrupted by protestors.

While Rumsfeld has said that "a lot more pictures" exist, many of them have not been released to the news media and have been selectively published by the press in the United States. Rahul Mahajan's Empire Notes blog has published a number of the photos and the Independent Media Center has put out a video of US troops gunning down a wounded Iraqi -- a video that has aired around the world but not in the US. Moreover, as the media reports the abuse of prisoners as an "un-American" act, thereby making the abuse into a unique "scandal," they ignore how the military institutionalizes such behavior and how violence and torture have historically been used by the United States to obtain information. The corporate media has ignored historical cases of abuse--both My Lai and, more recently, Guantanamo Bay. There has also been no effort to show that this abuse is part of a systematic policy of colonization that has killed over 9,000 Iraqi civilians.