Posted on 05/06/2005 3:11:48 PM PDT by crazyhorse691
This stain on America's honor warranted accountability much higher on the Pentagon's chain of command
L ooking tired, puffy and somewhat bewildered, Pfc. Lynndie England took center stage this week as the face of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
If only she really were. The true face of this national disgrace has found refuge in much higher places, safely beyond the spotlight's glare.
Thus the role goes to 22-year-old England, the star of so many of those putrid pictures that began flooding the world one year ago. We all saw the grinning England, posing with hooded prisoners in a pyramid, and the dumb-looking England, holding a naked POW on a leash, and the cigarette-smoking England, pointing gleefully at an Iraqi man's genitals. All smiles. Thumbs up. Bringing shame to the United States and its men and women in uniform.
That shame is not reduced by the churn of U.S. military justice. A one-star general, formerly in charge of Iraqi prisons, has been demoted, but so far that's about it. An Army inspector general's report recently cleared other senior Army officers of any culpability in the abuses at Abu Ghraib and other facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That leaves just England and seven other Army reservists being held accountable. And her fate is now in question because a military judge tossed out her guilty plea this week and declared a mistrial. He did so after the convicted ringleader, Pvt. Charles Graner Jr., her former lover and father of her baby, testified that England was acting at the prison on his orders. Graner, serving 10 years in prison, maintains that he and the other Abu Ghraib guards were following orders from higher-ranking interrogators.
It might be easy to believe that the Abu Ghraib debacle was an isolated incident if it weren't for well-documented reports of mistreatment of detainees at U.S. military installations elsewhere in Iraq, in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The problem is clearly systemic -- a result of poor planning for postwar Iraq, vague guidelines for interrogations and a politically driven corrosion of military discipline enforced by accountability throughout the chain of command.
The Abu Ghraib abuse caused incalculable damage to the U.S. mission in the Middle East. Lynndie England and the other bad apples deserve to go to prison for it. But top-level Army officers and the Pentagon's civilian bosses should have faced heat for it, too. Above all, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should have resigned over it.
Instead, the Bush administration's defensive reaction to the scandal encouraged a good many Americans to embrace a casual response themselves.
Many say the story was not newsworthy -- just a blip in the war, an isolated bit of horseplay by a handful of rogue soldiers.
"It wasn't really torture."
"It was justified."
"It wasn't anything like the other side's beheadings."
"It's being overblown by opponents of Bush's re-election campaign."
America -- a nation desensitized to torture? Unthinkable, but that's where this country is being led.
One year after the surfacing of those awful images, the face of Abu Ghraib has been successfully contained to that of a poorly trained, learning-disabled young soldier who never had any business handling prisoners of war.
The issue of culpability will never be addressed until we get to the people who put her there.
I bet 30 years from now Liberals will still be whining about this, adding it to their laundry list of why the US is bad.
"The problem is clearly systemic -- a result of poor planning for postwar Iraq, vague guidelines for interrogations and a politically driven corrosion of military discipline enforced by accountability throughout the chain of command."
OK, the US Army has been around for 230 years. Only a true stupid would believe that ways to treat/interogate prisoners haven't been developed. I think that this guy is suggesting that after Clinton everyone was clueless about how to proceed and we need to return to the Clinton era.
It's not hard to remember that these types are your neighbors. They really seriously believe these "failures" of America and still seriously believe we are the wrong ones. The Islamo-Facists have their hearts and minds and they truly are our enemy within.
When good news does come from this eradication process in the Middle East, lets remember the job we have in front of us with our next door neighbors.
This is the definition of 'torture'. I suggest the Orgeonian editorial board consult a dictionary for basic, rudimentary understanding of the subject matter before they publish their next editorial.
Never mind the several majors, about 10 captains, and a few odd LT's that have either already been disciplined, or have charges pending against them.
The key factor is whether the person, officer or NCO, knew what was going on and neither reported it or stopped it, or just didn't know even though they should have know. The former is a crime, the latter is poor job performance. The former can get you sent to jail, the latter may only ruin your career.
I have been seeing a message on the scrawl on the bottom of Fox News all day today, saying that the Senate Armed Services Committee is going to start an investigation into the higher-ups in the Defense Dept., to see who might be to blame for Abu Ghraib---has anyone seen anything about this?
I thought there had already been investigations into this and all of them had been absolved of guilt---why would the REPS allow this to keep going on? and why now?
So, uh, the MSM ran a slew of articles on prison abuse every time a guard, or group of prison guards, abused their charges under Clinton and blamed the Slickmeister for the miscreants, and somehow I just missed it...right?
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