If you’ve watched the nightly news within the past week, and you sat through the segments about the FCC trying to completely cover Howard Stern with those black “censored” bars, the farewell addresses of the cast of “Friends” and the breaking news that maybe tasers are more painful than they need to be, then you probably have heard about the shocking and alleged abuse, nay, torture, of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers.

According to official documents acquired by CBS (pictures the idiot soldiers took themselves), Iraqi prisoners were forced to strip naked, publicly masturbate, form human pyramids and, in two cases, die. The soldiers then got in front of the prisoners, stuck their thumbs up and smiled as someone took pictures, thus ensuring they would always remember their special trip to Iraq when they covered an Iraqi with electrical wires and shocked him whenever he stepped off of a box.

Obviously, everybody responsible for this is being court martialed and will be standing trial for such charges as “conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty toward prisoners, maltreatment, assault and indecent acts.” I mean, even though it is a prison, and it isn’t supposed to be pleasant and nice, nobody wants people who possibly did something to deserve incarceration to be forced to endure the humiliation of having a psychotic hardware store manager from Hialeah, Fla., who hasn’t found an adequate means of unleashing his bottled-up rage since he graduated from high school and found that it was no longer legal or socially acceptable for him to wrestle strangers any more, or whatever, point an assault rifle at you and tell you “you’ll get a chance to meet Allah in person if you don’t make pretend like you’re giving Abdullah here a hummer.”

So what could these insane soldiers possibly say to defend themselves? Well, I hope you’re sitting down, and I hope you aren’t holding a basket of babies in your lap because if you are, then they’re about to be crushed by your falling jaw.

The soldiers who ran the prison and took pictures of each other posing in front of piles of naked Iraqis piled like firewood are saying that their ridiculous maltreatment of the prisoners isn’t their fault because they were placed in their guardian positions without any explanation, supervision, rules or guidelines; and specifically, they weren’t explicitly given a copy of the Geneva Convention.

Here, let me repeat that for you, since I’m sure you didn’t fully appreciate that concept, as you’re probably still wondering how anybody could think having a bunch of unwashed prisoners get naked for the purpose of posing for pictures is a good idea on any level. These guards are defending themselves with ignorance; they claim that they shouldn’t be held responsible for all the sick crap they did because nobody explicitly told them that all that sick crap wasn’t the correct and proper way to follow procedure.

Here, let me re-word that for you in case your brain hasn’t yet been overloaded to the point of leaking goo by this stellar logic: imagine that you just got caught torturing and humiliating prisoners while you were busy preventing them from escaping.

Could you possibly imagine any scenario where you would respond to such allegations by saying “It’s not my fault that I did all those wrong things because at the time I didn’t know they were wrong?”

Don’t get me wrong; these are arguably the stupidest people in the world, and they still would be even if they didn’t defend what they did with “I didn’t know that was wrong.”

But I hope they get completely off the hook. I hope their defense proves to be rock solid, because if “I didn’t know it was wrong” turns into an actual defense for wrongdoing, then I’ll be able to get away with murder unless the Vatican sends me a copy of the Ten Commandments, and the government sends me a copy of wherever it says “don’t kill people” in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence or whatever.

If you want to learn more about this issue, go to any Internet search engine and type in “court martial” and “human pyramid,” and, because I guarantee this is the only time those phrases will ever be juxtaposed thusly, the very first thing you find will explain it pretty well.