[mburbank]

Chimp beat me to the point. Hazing, as ugly as it can be, is geared toward making someone a member of a group, embracing them. It's twsited, but that's the goal.

The goal here was revenge, humilation, sadism for it's own sake, degredation and 'softening' for interrogation.

A person who's hazed in a frat or the army is part of the process. It's concensual. There's also the expectation of a frat pledge that they won't die or be maimed, something the prisoners didn't enjoy. People joining skull and bones make a choice to be spanked and possibly sodomized so that later they can control the world.

I think hazing is repulsive and sick, and I can't imagine wanting any part of an organization that would use it to forge bonds of belonging. Hazing sometimes goes wrong, but I don't think the intent of hazing is ever to kill or maim, and when rape bcomes a part of it, I think we're outside the realm of hazing and in the realm of crime. A frat pledge is supposed to have the chance to quit.

I get that you think it's all part of a continuum. Hazing bad, torture even badder, just further down the same slippery slope. I disagree strongly. I dislike Liver, it makes me puke. Arsenic on the other hand is not food. I think your equation between what went on in Iraq and Hazing, no matter how brutal and out of control, is seriously offensive. I think you're hugely wrong. I think it belittles torture. I think it is a dangerous equation, even if what you mean is that hazing is a really bad thing. I think a person who insists on making that equation is fundamentally missing the point . Unless you think the guy who got beheaded got to wear a terrorist letter jacket afterward and behead a few plebes himself the next year.