Bill, Most enlisted are in ther early twenties. Most of us do not understand "moral imperative" until much later in life. In the service, you are taught from the very first day to follow orders. The judgement of the young, no matter what their upbringing, will follow orders 99 percent of the time. Additionally, I would submit that the experiments done at Stanford and Yale on "guards and prisoners" over-rides whatever argument you may have about committing atrocities. It all comes from the top.
I was reading a soldier's blog where he talked about refusing to obey an unlawful order. He said that if his commander ordered him to execute the prisoners under his control, not only would he not do so, but also his duty would be to arrest that commander.
hobitbob wrote:Your suggestion that this should be excused because "Saddma wuz worser" is idiotic.
You have reached an erroneous conclusion. I never suggested any such thing. The responsible parties should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
And hobitbob, I am getting very tired of your constant personal attacks against me. You're starting to get out of control with those. Calling me "idiotic" or a "stupid sheep" is in violation of the A2K Terms of Use. So please stop.
And, to reiterate, this was a reserve unit made up of folks who are prison guards and small town cops in real life. Its likely they were just continuing with the job as they had done it in the past.
Correct. But obviously there's been a breakdown in educating the soldiers. Perhaps it should now be:
No soldier left behind.
Tarantulas wrote:
And hobitbob, I am getting very tired of your constant personal attacks against me. You're starting to get out of control with those. Calling me "idiotic" or a "stupid sheep" is in violation of the A2K Terms of Use. So please stop.
If the ungulate fits, wear it!
Did behaving civilly get to be too much for you Bob?
hobitbob wrote:OCCOM BILL wrote: Does anyone believe that Edgar doesn't get the point without a constant barrage of pictures? (Sorry Edgar; your statements and the fact that you are so well liked here, make you a terrific example).
Whatever.
Too valid to counter?
hobitbob wrote:OCCOM BILL wrote: The hyper-partisan hyperbole is obscuring BBB's point to oblivion. It's no secret that Hobit and I agree on very little; but if a man with his undeniable principles couldn't prevent similar actions, who could?
Whose undeniable principles? Bush's? Don't make me laugh!
Actually, the undeniable principles I was referencing are yours.
hobitbob wrote:OCCOM BILL wrote: As with any criminal investigation; the wheels of justice shouldn't stop turning until the king-pins have been rolled over, but does anyone really believe there was complicity in the upper echelon of our government?
Yes. Reports are beginning to come in that expose just this sort of complicity.
Since I am not as eager to believe bad things about the administration as you, I'm going to go ahead and wait until such "reports" actually constitute proof.
hobitbob wrote:OCCOM BILL wrote:That is on par with blaming the postmaster every time a postal worker goes postal.
Strawman argument.
Until PROOF of upper echelon complicity it provided, this comparison is spot on.
As usual, I'll try to ignore your unnecessary insults.
I tried to ignore them too, until I realized that I don't have to put up with them.
The bush supporters and that whole crew, TO THIS DAY won't miss a chance to rub the Lewinsky incident in peoples faces.
Turn about is fair play.
We keep talking about the holocaust so it doesn't happen again. Same principle .
Lightwizard wrote:I believe the new US military code incorporates provisions for refusing an order.
This is regulated in ยง 5 of the German Military Criminal Code [WStG] from
1957, that is from the beginning of democratic forces in the Federal Republic.
Bill, I'm not "eager to believe bad things about the administration," but neither am I overly trusting of them. One of the responsibilities of being a citizen in a democracy is to exercise oversight of one's elected officials. The preponderence of evidence seems to suggest that there is little this group is unlikely to do or approve of in its pursuit of empire.
hobitbob wrote: One of the responsibilities of being a citizen in a democracy is to exercise oversight of one's elected officials.
In this you are completely correct.
hobitbob wrote:The preponderence of evidence seems to suggest that there is little this group is unlikely to do or approve of in its pursuit of empire.
I understand this is your opinion and see no profit in trying to dissuade you.
If anyone directly names a person and refers to him as an idiot or stupid sheep it's against the TOS. If it is a general statement about opinions expressed or a group, that's another story. That requires everyone stepping back leaving one person as a volunteer and a victim. Please click on the report button if you believe you've been violated (providing you're actually not enjoying it).
I said that I got the point without any pictures, but that the world needs more to fully digest the story. It is the nature of this or any other human tragedy to play out in full before it can be put in its perspective. It is human nature that every picture not destroyed will most likely see the light of day.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
(So type on, me-lovelys).
Policy
"A few bad apples. Isolated incidents."
No! This is policy throughout the prison gulag of the USA!
Jail Don
By G. Pascal Zachary, AlterNet
May 7, 2004
Quote:Dismissal is too good a fate for Donald Rumsfeld. George Bush realizes that Rumsfeld deserves better. Faced with demands that he dismiss his Secretary of Defense, Bush vows to keep Rumsfeld on the job.
Three cheers for the President's endorsement, which opens the way for a more delicious possibility: the appointment of a special prosecutor who will seek and obtain an indictment against Rumsfeld for a variety of crimes. Thank you, Mr. President.
You could have allowed Rumsfeld to go quietly in the night and begin a well-deserved retirement from government affairs. You could have allowed Rumsfeld to beat a hasty retreat into obscurity. But you know he deserves better.
Rumsfeld deserves to be sent to prison for his acts as Secretary of Defense. So the President is doing the right thing: he is keeping Rumsfeld in place in order to give the legal system time to do maximum damage against our country's arrogant, pompous and unrepentant war chief.
Surely, any legal case against Rumsfeld would be strong. Let's start with misappropriation of federal funds. As Bob Woodward details in his new book, "Plan of Attack," Rumsfeld directed funds appropriated for Afghanistan to be used for the preparation of the Iraq invasion. He blithely ignored a requirement that Congress approve any such spending.
That's against the law. Not a gray area. Not a maybe. It is a crime. Then there are Rumsfeld's lies to Congress. Weapons of mass destruction, anyone? Rumsfeld's mis-statements about Iraq's potential to harm the U.S. can no longer be dismissed as mere "failures of intelligence," as if the Defense Secretary might have decided differently on the matter had he received other advice. A special prosecutor will clearly document that Rumsfeld knew that Saddam Hussein had no WMDs and that he lied to Congress, repeatedly, in order to obtain the necessary legal mandate to go to war.
Lying to Congress is against the law. There are no legal-pyrotechnics required to make a case against Rumsfeld. His conviction would be a slam dunk.
Finally, of course, there are the cases of torture in U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The evidence is mounting that Rumsfeld knew about the shameful and destructive tactics used against Iraqis by the prison's guards and did nothing to stop them. His evasive answers on the scandal (he insists he still can't tell, for instance, whether the abuses were "an isolated instance" or not) suggests that an independent investigation may demonstrate that Rumsfeld created the conditions that led to the abuses of Iraqi prisoners. The Washington Post already has reached this very conclusion, opining on its editorial page that Rumsfeld "helped create a lawless regime in which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been humiliated, beaten, tortured and murdered..."
Once again, the Democrats are too timid. Kerry and fellow Senators Joe Biden and Tom Harkin are merely calling for Rumsfeld's firing. Put him in jail? Surely, the possibility is absurd. Yet a mere three months ago, the possibility that Rumsfeld might get fired was treated as an absurdity. Yet today his resignation would be seen as mild punishment for his crimes.
How much longer before Democrats begin calling for a special prosecutor to take Rumsfeld down? How long? Not long.
To be sure, with or without the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Rumsfeld's crimes, his place in history is now secure. As Robert McNamara is to Vietnam, Rumsfeld is to Iraq. McNamara, defense secretary to Lyndon Johnson, ran the Vietnam war in its period of greatest escalation. He lived to regret his decisions and remains haunted by his Vietnam experience. Just as McNamara spent the rest of his life confronting Vietnam, Rumsfeld will be forced to do the same with respect to Iraq.
Hobitbob, I admire your passion and interest in this topic, but maybe you should slow down a bit... let others have an opinion every now and then. There are a LOT of good points made in this thread... I'm really enjoying reading it, well, most of it.
i have been following this thread, and i have to admit that i thought , well, this can't happen in canada. i believe someone posted a link to something like "atrocities of the world", listing the murderous history of the world (can't find the link anymore). anyway, while i was working in the garden this afternoon, i just could not get the article out of my mind. and then i remembered : "residential schools". if you are not a canadian, you may have never heard about it. i think it can rightly be called "canada's shameful history". residential schools were set up in the 1800's by the canadian government to teach aboriginal children (indians and eskimos) the three R's and to become good citizens. well you might think, what's wrong with that ?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
the actual administration of these schools was handed over by the government to various churches (mainly the catholic church, anglican church and the united church of canada) . the children of the aboriginal families were removed from their families and settlements and transferred to the residental schools (usually in northern areas of canada). even after we arrived in canada in the mid-50's, residential schools were often said to be wonderful instruments for teaching these under-privileged children. little did we know, that the sexual and physicial abuse of the children(at the hands of christians !) was unbelievable. no government intervened, no red cross ever investigated. eventually the lid blew off. commissins were set up to investigate, teachers went to jail, churches were taken to court and made to pay damages(some, of course, had no money). one has to ask : how could this go on for such a long period of time without anyone in authority noticing ? it was noticed, of course; but it was thought that the good surely outweighed the bad ... so on it went. i believe the last residential schools were not disbanded until 1969(and i believe the courts are still dealing with some of the lawsuits brought forward). the harm that was done to the individuals and to the native population as a whole cannot even be imagined. when today we hear of natives committing suicide at much higher rates than the other population, when we hear of communities simply falling apart, when we hear of drunkenness and murder, when we hear of high rates of incarceration, we fail to see the real cause for all these problems. there is no doubt in my mind, that the longtime neglect of aboriginal needs is a prime cause for the problems experienced by the native population now, and i believe it will take many generations to make good the damage done (if it can be made good at all).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
perhaps you might wonder what this has to do with the abuse of iraqui prisoners. i feel that no nation and no people are immune from becoming abusive and disregarding the rights of others (in the case of the residential schools it is even worse, i think; these are children and canadian citizens !). just as a final comment : if you were to ask the canadian in the street nowadays and mention the words "residental schools", you would likely get a shrug of the shoulders or, at best, a "well, wasn't that too bad". perhaps we all need to look into a mirror on occasion.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
don't get me wrong. what happened in the iraqui war cannot be tolerated; but i would also ask, what lead to it ? was it the leadership that failed, was there insufficient oversight ? just punishing the soldiers that committed these crimes is an easy way out. it may look good, but will not expose the root of the problem, in my opinion. hbg
hbg, It is my opinion that the fault lies at the top of the pyramid. But this "management" will not accept the responsibility, and will continue to blame "everybody else" but themselves. That half the American People continues to support this criminal element is beyond logic or humanity; most do not understand how the military works. All "command" comes from the top. Military personnel are trained to follow orders. Not very many will challenge what they are told to do.
The proof that the problem doesn't come from "the top of the pyramid" is that there are several other prison facilities in Iraq run by the US military that do not have these problems. It's easy to see that these were isolated events affecting only one prison facility and not a general policy approved by top management and common to all military prisons. That is, unless you have an anti-administration agenda to maintain, in which case everyone, whether guilty or innocent, must share the guilt.
