More thoughts about the soldiers who mistreated prisoners...

[johnpalmer]

One of the things that's been said is that a lack of training doesn't excuse the types of mistreatment we've seen, and I agree. You don't need to be told that the Geneva conventions prohibit stacking up naked men in order to realize it's a nasty, humiliating thing to people you have a gun pointed at (whether it's your gun, or someone else's).

But, I did think about it more, and I do think that a lack of training *could* be a partial defense *if* there really were people, who could ordinarly be expected to be giving lawful orders, pushing the guards to do this to break prisoners down for interrogation.



"I was following orders!" is no defense if the orders were not lawful. But, while I'd expect an MP to demand written orders, just so they could be folded until they were all sharp corners, "and, with all due respect, sir", shoved up... well. You get the point.

Anyway: I'd expect an MP trained in the handling of prisoners (I assume, and desperately hope, that's redundant) to know exactly what's lawful and what's not, and what's skirting the edge. But one of the people being charged is a vehicle mechanic.

Could I believe that a mechanic, who was told "no, this is okay, really", would follow orders? Yeah. I can believe that. Especially if an explanation akin to "Soldier, you are not causing permanant, or even temporary, physical damage to the prisoner. That means it's not torture. These techniques have been reviewed and approved by the Pentagon. Now, you have your orders; carry them out."

At this point, the defense claims that they are being scapegoated ring true for me.

I'm going to try to avoid being a conspiracy theorist here, but I want to add another conditional, one that I truly hope is not true.

If someone in the military hierarchy made a decision to place untrained (in the sense of "no training in prisoner handling") soldiers in charge of the prisons *because* they were less likely to do the "written orders" bit described above, there sure as hell *is* scapegoating going on, and I hope that this person is found and metaphorically torn to pieces by the attack dogs. More specifically, I'd want such a person to serve consecutive sentences equal to the sentence given to every single person implicated in this, since, ultimately, they are the ones who set it in motion, and tried to insulate the military from responsibility for actions that it was carrying out.

Comments

[edschweppe.livejournal.com]

Dunno if this is what Janet's talking about, but the following is from Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article Chain of Command:

The same deliberate indifference to bad news was evident in the past year, the Pentagon official said, when the Army conducted a series of elaborate war games. Planners would present best-case, moderate-case, and worst-case scenarios, in an effort to assess where the Iraq war was headed and to estimate future troop needs. In every case, the number of troops actually required exceeded the worst-case analysis. Nevertheless, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and civilian officials in the Pentagon continued to insist that future planning be based on the most optimistic scenario. "The optimistic estimate was that at this point in time" - mid-2004 - "the U.S. Army would need only a handful of combat brigades in Iraq," the Pentagon official said. "There are nearly twenty now, with the international coalition drying up. They were wildly off the mark." The official added, "From the beginning, the Army community was saying that the projections and estimates were unrealistic." Now, he said, "we're struggling to maintain a hundred and thirty-five thousand troops while allowing soldiers enough time back home."

Another way of looking at this - and the way that I'm personally looking at it - is that the political types were pushing for lowball estimates, and for whatever reason were making them stick. It's one of the downsides to civilian control of the military - sometimes the civilians don't listen to reality. (Mind, I still prefer civilian control of the military to the alternatives; I just know that it's got its own set of problems.)

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

That's the one. Thanks.