Appearing as a guest on the August 25 edition of FOX News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, Oliver North, nationally syndicated columnist and host of the weekly FOX News Channel series War Stories with Oliver North, said that Senator John Kerry (D-MA) “is not qualified to be a prison guard at Abu Ghraib.”

According to a report issued by Major General Antonio M. Taguba, military police at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad engaged in “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses.” These acts included "[b]reaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees"; "[s]odomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick"; "[f]orcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing"; "[p]ositioning a naked detainee on a MRE [Meals, Ready to Eat] Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture"; and "[a] male MP guard having sex with a female detainee."

Nonetheless, Hannity & Colmes co-host Sean Hannity concurred with North's assessment: “When he [Kerry] says, and this is a quote, that he committed atrocities, you know, went on search and destroy missions and burned villages, based on that admission, if you burned down villages, you're admitting to committing atrocities. Doesn't that disqualify him from even being a prison guard at Abu Ghraib?”

On the April 18, 1971, edition of NBC's Meet the Press, Kerry did admit to committing what he deemed “atrocities,” such as “shootings in free fire zones”; “harassment and interdiction fire”; and participation in “search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages.” But as he explained during that interview, he took part in those acts only as “thousands of other soldiers” did -- because “all of this is ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down.”

As Media Matters for America has documented, North has dismissed the severity of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal before, describing it as “the kind of thing that you might find on any college campus nowadays.”