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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (199101)	8/31/2004 1:04:20 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575357

"Abu Ghraib is one of those anomalies of war that happens." You can believe whatever you want to. But an Abu Ghraib doesn't occur in a vacuum. Nor does a My Lai. My father talks about an event during his tour in Korea. They were put under mortar attack every day. He was a sergeant in the motor pool. When the mortars started to fall, there was a scramble to put everything under cover. As he tried to move a truck into the shelter, he ran over a piece of steel rebarb and a rear tire went flat. Considering that there were a total of 4 tires at the rear, he decided that one less tire wasn't as big of a problem as the immediate threat. However, before he got far, a lieutenant came out of a shelter and told him to change the tire. He started to protest, but then he was ordered to change the tire. Given that it was framed as an order, he started to comply. But about then, a mortar dropped between him and the Lt. He then through the tools into the back and proceeded to shelter. He never saw the Lt. again... The important point is not that my father violated an order. It is that there was an order by someone who should have known better. In Vietnam, those type of officers would often wake up with a live grenade in their sleeping bag. In principle, by Iraq(I or II) we should have had an officer corp. that knew a hell of a lot better than to have an Abu Ghraib happen. They didn't. Abu Ghraib could not have happened with out the entire chain of command up to the highest levels being complicit in some respects. It did. Draw any conclusions you want, but the military has a major realignment to suffer through. Larger than post-Vietnam. With less excuses.