Rhetorical questions that are just too hard for the New York Times to answer

Today's NYT Sunday magazine has an interesting article about how the US occupying forces in Iraq are conducting counter-insurgency operations.  About midway through, it quotes "Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, [a] deputy chief of one of the largest Sunni tribes and a member of the American-appointed Governing Council":

''The United States is using excessive power,'' he said when I visited his residence in Baghdad. ''They round up people in a very humiliating way, by putting bags over their faces in front of their families. In our society, this is like rape. The Americans are using collective punishment by jailing relatives. What is the difference from Saddam? They are demolishing houses now. They say they want to teach a lesson to the people. But when Timothy McVeigh was convicted in the bombing in Oklahoma City, was his family's home destroyed?''

Al-Yawar continued: ''You cannot win the hearts and minds of the people by using force. What's the difference between dictatorship and what's happening now?''

Well, duh. 

Putting bags over the faces of detainees is not rape.  It's also not attaching the detainees' genitals to car batteries; it's not feeding them feet-first through tree-limb shredders; it's not dropping their children out of flying helicopters; it's not cutting out their tongues and leaving them to bleed to death while tied to a stake in a public street; and it's not shooting them in the backs of their heads, tumbling their corpses into mass graves, and then charging their families for the costs of the slugs. 

And yes indeed, we routinely prosecute accomplices of terrorists in the US, including family members and friends — ask Terry Nichols, currently serving a life sentence for the support and assistance he gave McVeigh, or lesser-known accomplice Michael Fortier.  If McVeigh's mom had done what they did, she'd be in prison too.  And assets used in furtherance are indeed subject to forfeiture.

So "what's the difference" between us and Saddam?  The NYT seems to think this is a serious, difficult question. 

Can this reporter be so out-of-touch with reality that he failed to laugh in the face of the nutcase who asked this question?  Are his editors equally delusional?  What kind of thought processes could they have used in publishing this crap?  "Well, let's see:  we have bags over faces to help prevent escape attempts during transportation — that's roughly the moral equivalent of dropping nerve gas from helicopters to wipe out thousands of women and children, isn't it?  Yeah, let's just leave that question hanging — let the readers decide!"