Andrew Sullivan comments on the case of American citizen Gulet Mohamed who has allegedly been abused while in the custody of Kuwaiti security officials:
If this were being done to a white kid by Castro or the Chinese or the Iranians, Americans would be up in arms and demanding answers. But a kid named Mohammed arrested by an ally in the War on Terror? Suddenly everyone defers to authority.
This is true. And yet it shouldn't require popular outrage for a government to intervene on behalf of its own citizens or avoid handing them over to countries where they will be tortured. Yet we can hardly expect one -- for all the misguided fuss about who believes in a jingoistic right-wing view of "American Exceptionalism," the reality is that leaders in both parties largely adhere to George Orwell's description of nationalism, which reflects an inability to see "resemblances between similar sets of facts."
Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our' side."
Under this standard, moral transgressions by one's own against an "other" are impossible -- in this case clearly even when the "other" is actually one of our own.
