The Iraqi government has given Abu Ghraib prison a floor-to-ceiling makeover that almost makes one forget that its floors were once covered with the blood of Saddam’s enemies and its ceilings supported the ropes that hung them, or that it acted as the setting for the most widely publicized instances of prisoner abuse by the US military during the Iraq war; its new plush carpets and colorful table dressings are so strikingly handsome that one can hardly be bothered to remember the reported 740,000 war widows in Iraq, many of whom live on the streets, a sixth of whom receive any state aid at all; and while we all know what types of nasty things happened to inmates at formerly unswank Ghraib, the CIA admitted yesterday that it destroyed 92 tapes containing record of harsh interrogations of “high-value” al-Qaeda suspects, and no one at the agency seems all that worried about it. -SS