This is horrible news, but in reality it is not surprising:

Two US soldiers who went missing after an attack on their checkpoint have been found dead and were tortured before being killed, an Iraqi defence official says.

Iraqi Defence Ministry official Major General Abdul Aziz Mohammed told Reuters the bodies of Privates Thomas Lowell Tucker, 25, and Kristian Menchaca, 23, were found by a joint US-Iraqi force on Monday near an electricity plant in Yusufiya, the area in which they were abducted on Friday.

He said the bodies showed signs of “barbaric torture”.

The US military has confirmed two bodies were found in the vicinity of Yusufiya.

“Coalition forces have recovered what we believe are the remains of the soldiers,” Major General William Caldwell told a news conference.

He declined to comment on the statement that the two privates were tortured before they died. But they had been killed, Gen Caldwell said.

The corpses will be taken to the United States for DNA testing to confirm their identities and establish how the men died.

This story is from ABC News in Australia. The news here in the United States is not reporting the same details because the military has not yet confirmed it. I can understand that as they want to be sure the bodies are those of Tucker and Menchaca before they let the family truly know the outcome.

Now while this is horrible news, I can’t help but feel it was news that was expected. Since the United States has lowered the bar on the treatment of detainees and human rights, then barbaric treatment of our soldiers captured is to only be expected. Abu Gharib, Guantanamo, Haditha, they all are incidents which help inflame this kind of behavior and they are all incidents that our nation is at fault on.

I am sure there will be those out there that say “see – this is how they treat us so what we do isn’t so bad”. To those people I will argue that we are supposed to be the stronger nation, and we are supposed to be the beacon of human rights. We have ignored those principals and sunk to the level of these “barbaric killers” ourselves, and that is a cold harsh fact that leads to this brutality.

My thoughts do go out to the families of these soldiers. As sorry as I am for their loss I can’t help but feel rage towards the people who put them in that awful position and those people are sitting in nice offices in Washington D.C.