... we need to take a deep breath and remember who we are

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Soldiers' 'Wish Lists' Of Detainee Tactics Cited.

... a la Sgt. Unkh: "Methinks, crush insurgents, scare insurgents, with big rock!" and Lt. Gromp replies "Noooh! Me better plan! Crush insurgents, scare insurgents, with TWO big rocks real good!"

Well, that unnamed interrogator shows the US *can* do better. Weird enough, why did it happen anyway?

 

Scary stuff.

 

I know it should not, but I still find these things very surprising. I don't think this 'war' will ever cease to amaze me.

 

Its what happens when a country once possessing good intentions goes mad with power. If prisoners in these camps keep being held indeffinatly and killed by 'accident'(toture...) , there's going to develope a lot of tying in to WWII.

 

I wouldn't even think that. It's not being mad with power but the blowback of groupthink driven policies aimed on a shortterm gain.

The short term gain here was to get 'good intel' real quick, most certainly because of pressure from the pentagon leadership who had and probably still have an end justifies the means menthality, aimed on a shortterm gain.

That's they way such pressure shows: Secdef holds a meeting and barks "We have bad intel, we need improvement, and we need it NOW - GOT THAT??! Besides, the gloves are off!" and the general sais "YESSIR!" (or he dissents and is trampled down) and then goes to do the same stuff to his juniors and the juniors pass the buck further down, right for the record in a documented e-mail (See? I did obey that order - but all that wasn't my idea frankly), and the result is such a wish-list.
It's a huge show of lack of integrity and an exercise in 'cover your ass'. All in all, it's a disgrace.

I remember we had mandatory ethics lessons when I was in the army, and it was basically a sit and doze exercise. Yes, we don't torture and we always treat POWs well *yaaaaawn*

However, faced with a real situation where fellow soldiers are endangered and maimed and killed you have a much harder time saying that.

It only gets worse and worse when there are messages like "now the gloves are off", "they are the worst of a very bad lot, they are killers", thirst for revenge for 911 (no no one come up and tell me that US troops are above that, they are certainly not - just think of the camp names in Iraq) and actual acts of resistance that blow up comrades to bits every day and in some cases certainly religious and racial prejudice - and there you are.
That is, as man is weak he is easily persuaded into finding torture pretty ok, if everyone around him reaffirms him of the necessity of such a thing.

That only increases the credit one has to give for those who stand out because they stand up to their conscience.

To prevent these now well known torture excesses the politicos from president over vice-president to Secretary of defense and others would have had to abandon their bellicose "now we get tough" rhetoric that they thought was needed to reassure the US public something was done. It was also necessary to reassure the US public that somehow 911 and Iraq were related. Shortterm gain again.

All in all, it's a huge leadership failure. That's because these statements were coming right from the top and weren't made by some common soldiers. So the 'few bad apple' theory stinks to heaven. Graner sure was an a**hole and deserves all the punishment he'll get, but it's a disgrace that it's only his head rolling.

As we say in German, the fish smells from the head.