The <i>Times</i> lets one slip through

Satan must be lacing up his ice skates, because the New York Times has run a story about torture in Iraq — by insurgents, not by U.S. troops:

Marines on an operation to eliminate insurgents that began Friday broke through the outside wall of a building in this small rural village to find a torture center equipped with electric wires, a noose, handcuffs, a 574-page jihad manual — and four beaten and shackled Iraqis.

...The men said they told the marines, from Company K, Third Marines, Second Division, that they had been tortured with shocks and flogged with a strip of rubber for more than two weeks, unseen behind the windows of black glass. One of them, Ahmed Isa Fathil, 19, a former member of the new Iraqi Army, said he had been held and tortured there for 22 days. All the while, he said, his face was almost entirely taped over and his hands were cuffed.

..."They kill somebody every day," said Mr. Fathil, whose hands were so swollen he could not open a can of Coke offered to him by a marine. "They've killed a lot of people."

I suppose this story represents an attempt to balance out the Times's coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal, which appeared on the front page for 34 days in a row.