US occupation in Iraq ,news comments & links
Jeremy Sivits was the first scapegoat sentenced by the courts martial: not one of the worst torturers, but the fellow who took the photos that let the world see what was going on. Gotta make an example
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"A military lawyer for a soldier charged in the Abu Ghraib abuse case stated that a captain at the prison said the highest-ranking U.S. military officer in Iraq was present during some "interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse," according to a recording of a military hearing obtained by The Washington Post.
The lawyer, Capt. Robert Shuck, said he was told that Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and other senior military officers were aware of what was taking place on Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib."
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If that's true, and the abuses are concentrated anomalies, then someone knowing about the daily routine wouldn't know about the abuses -- and at that high level, he would be dependent on a subordinate to address specific cases such as that.
If, however, the abuses are the routine, then that is obviously coming from the top, rather than from the bottom.
But anyone in charge of any kind of prison needs to know about the Stanford prison experiment, that guards have a tendency to become sadistic, and need to be controlled as closely as the prisoners. Any officer at the prison who didn't know that, was promoted beyond his competence.
In short, while it probably doesn't go as high as Rumsfeld, we can't just keep sending specialists and PFC's to jail.
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