Re: Two face

5/11/2004; 5:34 PM by Jim Roepcke
5/11/2004; 5:34 PM by Jim Roepcke
Re: Two face (#6901)
Politics
249

Brian,

Your reply is nearly impossible to read via e-mail without ambiguity,
because the things you quoted are not put in quotation marks. I had to
go to the web page (http://jim.roepcke.com/6901) for the message to be
certain of what you wrote and what you were quoting. To avoid
confusion in the future, please clearly mark quotes as such in the text
(double quotes around the section is sufficient). Thanks!

(BTW, I often have the same problem trying to follow your site via
e-mail.)

Flip wrote:

>> I'm very surprised to see that people continue to believe what this
>> administration says! I mean, come on, don't you see you're
>> manipulated?

And I think what you've written here pretty much proves his point...

On May 11, 2004, at 1:58 PM, Brian Carnell wrote:

> "Haven't you heard of the confidential report by the International
> Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that said "the mistreatment of Iraqi
> prisoners in US custody is not limited to isolated cases, but forms
> part of a systematic pattern"?"
>
> I'm not sure what sort of distinction you're trying to make here. The
> Army's own internal report conducted by Gen. Taguba -- like the ICRC
> report -- found that the use of illegal interrogation methods was
> systemic.
>
> As the ICRC said earlier this week (emphasis added),
>
> "In certain cases, such as in Abu Ghraib military intelligence
> section, methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the
> interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures
> by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract
> information."
>
> So there were a small number of cases where groups of individuals made
> this SOP at places like Abu Ghraib and in many other cases there were
> individual acts of illegal actions that were not organized or
> systemic.

You're contradicting yourself. First you acknowledge the ICRC and
Taguba say the mistreatment was systemic, and now you say it is _not_
organized or systemic, but rather by groups of individuals... (groups
of individuals, a contradiction of terms in itself, but I know what you
mean). If it's systemic then it's not isolated to a unorganized
individuals.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=systemic

> As Gen. Taguba testified of his investigation of Abu Ghraib,
>
> "We did not find any evidence of a policy or a direct order given to
> these soldiers to conduct what they did. I believe that they did it on
> their own volition and I believe that they collaborated with several
> MI (military intelligence) interrogators at the lower level"
>
> What he did find, among other things, was gross negligence by those
> who were supposed to be supervising the prisons (and now want to claim
> that they are simply being scapegoated),

"I believe" and "The evidence proves" are different things.

You only quoted one side of the story. Here is another set of
"beliefs"...

>>> "In Tuesday's hearing, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, said the abuse
>>> allegations "reek of an organized effort and methodical preparation
>>> for interrogation."
>>>
>>> "The collars used on prisoners, the dogs and the cameras did not
>>> suddenly appear out of thin air," Levin said. "These acts of abuse
>>> were not the spontaneous actions of lower ranking enlisted personnel
>>> who lacked the proper supervision." "

Source:
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/11/politics.abuse.main/
index.html

Which makes a pretty strong point. I doubt those soldiers spent their
own money to acquire those materials.

> Take a group of young men and women in a war zone, tell them they need
> to help obtain intelligence from prisoners "at any cost" and then
> don't supervise them, and this is a rather predictable outcome.

That's an insult to the military. You're suggesting that it's
predictable that US soldiers would default to breaking international
law when left unsupervised, just because someone said "at any cost".
Those words do not give anyone permission or excuse to break the law
and violate human rights, and I doubt many soldiers would be so stupid
as to assume that. Soldiers act on orders. They have been educated
about the Geneva Conventions and it is well understood that the
prisoners fall under those conventions. So if they were told "at any
cost", someone had to do that, and that person would have needed
approval from someone to say that.

From the same CNN article linked above:

>>> Tugaba said the root of the problem was a "failure in leadership ...
>>> from the brigade commander on down."

So is he saying it was the brigade commander that ordered the soldiers
to obtain intelligence at any cost and that the brigade commander did
not have orders from his leaders authorizing that?

Jim

None.