PRESS CONFERENCE ON THE MUTINOUS PLATOON
Cori Dauber
CNN covers the least of it, then MS, Fox cuts away last, but Brigadier General Chambers does answer two critical questions: First, he says it is absolutely false that the fuel was contaminated (although it seemed to me that he ducked the question of whether the particular shipment of fuel had been rejected by another unit previously), second, he says that all convoys automatically get armed escort.
He does agree that the trucks do not come with armor; his mechanics are gradually adding the armor from steel sheeting, but how far they've gotten with that project I can't tell you -- that's the point in his answer where Fox cuts away.
Two points: first, aren't soldiers responsible for the maintenance of their equipment? If the trucks were too poorly maintained to go out on the road, aren't these particular soldiers in some way indicting themselves? We'd need to get Jason to answer that question, I guess. Second, the reporters were quite eager to get the General to speak to the way these 18 soldiers represented in some way the tip of some invisible ice berg. They wanted to know if this incident reflected something about reservists generally, their attitude about the war, or about the length of their deployment, or their mission.
He just wasn't taking the bait. 250 convoys on the road a day, 75,000 since February, this particular unit hadn't suffered any casualties, and other reserve units (he singled out a unit from Illinois in particular) are particularly committed to the mission and to seeing it through.
It will be interesting to see what these investigations (there are two) will find and, depending on what they find, how much play they'll get. |
