Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2004/05/30
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 12:53 PM 5/25/04 -0400, B. D. Colen wrote: >Say WHAT Marc? >The U.S. military is doing its damndest to limit the investigation, and >prosecutions, to the poor reservists from the hills who would no more >have thought to engage in this kind of activity on their own than they >would have thought to start speaking Arabic. Yes, the investigation - or >at least investigations - will probably move up the food chain, but not >because that's what the military wants to have happen. And none of this >would have been more than little inside stories in newspapers, whining >by the Red Cross, Amnesty, and other "leftist pinko" groups, were it not >for the photographs getting out. ================================= BD The US Army began its investigation long before the pictures hit the media. There are currentl;y six separate investigations being conducted, two by Congress, one by the Justice Department, and the rest by the Department of Defense and its subordinate agencies. The only Reservists being harmed are those who directly knew about the abuses or who participated in them or, such as BG Karpinski, who should have known about them -- she was the direct commander of the facility, after all. Above this point, it is exceedingly difficult to assign blame so long as appropriate command emphasis was placed on the proper treatment of prisoners. In the end, no one was physically harmed or injured at the prison. This is quite a different tale from My Lai, where there was an official cover-up which was only broken because Creighton Abrams, then the US Commander in Viet-Nam, brought it out and reported the situation to Washington. At My Lai, dozens if not hundreds died, and hundreds were wounded. In this incident, prisoners were subjected to humiliating conditions but the abuse did not go beyond this. (And this is why the issue, while a Big One with the media, is a non-starter with the US electorate, who seem to view this as a case of "no harm, no foul" or the like.) Note that the Tagabu (sp?) report praised a number of units which refused to co?operate with the abuse; one of these units was the 229th MP Company, which I used to support when I commanded a Virginia National Guard Maintenance Company. And, if there is a central lesson to this, it is that the CIA should be abolished immediately (a call I have made repeatedly for almost 40 years) and all Federal law enforcement placed under the Department of the Interior, where it properly belongs -- note, for instance, that Scotland Yard reports to the Home Secretary and not to the Lord Chancellor, and such is the case in almost all foreign nations, even Russia. Marc msmall@infionline.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!