Unfinished Business at Abu Ghraib
By It's MY blog too!
Here at Ft Hood, we have watched closely the recently concluded trial of SPC Graner. Last week, he was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to 10 years in prison. More trials are to follow. Eventually, all the identified characters will be tried or will plead out and receive their punishments. Then, I hope, we will start the real trials for the people ultimately responsible for this mess.
They need to start with the NCOs who failed their responsibilities for the day-to-day managing of their people. Then, we need to move on to the officers who failed to require their NCOs to do their jobs and who, then, failed to be responsible themselves. All the way up to the BG brigade commander, this was a classic case of the abdication of responsibility and refusal to use authority. Those in the leadership who claim that they didn't know are thereby convicted out of their own mouths of that abdication. The stupidly, foolishly damaging incidents at Abu Ghraib represent behaviour that cannot be tolerated, not least because it was so stupid and foolish. Graner and the rest deserve jail time just for having those pictures taken and posted to their buddies back home. How could they have thought that they would not make it onto the wider web for everyone to see?
Perhaps the worst outcome of this is the crimp it has put into interrogation of prisoners. By there actions, Graner and crew have shafted every interrogator and thus placed further in harms way every troop in the field. We have now all heard how fectless interrogations have become, how useless they now are, now that the interrogators have to get Washington's approval just to ask for name, rank, and serial number! I have absolutely no sympathy for Graner and the others: their little game may well kill people, perhaps even some of their friends and neighbors. Was it worth it?
In fact, I couldn't care less how much the "insurgents" were intimidated, harassed, or embarrassed. Standing a man up on a stool and attaching wires to him and telling him he will get shocked for every lie sounds like fair treatment to me for someone who has been setting IEDs. I really don't care how intimidated they may feel. If saving lives is the priority it should be, then intimidating prisoners should also be a priority.
But making sport of them, to no good purpose, merely hardens their resistance, especially when it is done amongst a group, because then they can lean on each other for support and to build resistance to an actual interrogation. I hope they are satisfied with what they have done. I also hope that their leadership is held to full account as well; otherwise, these people might as well have walked and we might as well forget discipline and leadership.
JayTex |
