posted on May 11, 2004 10:35:16 AM new
Yes that is correct, the leadership of america failed, was asleep at the wheel,professional negligence, it knew all along torture was the norm.....
AMERICA PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH.........so far preaching american values, has been lip service only, and the world sees the USA now, that loves to torture and murder....for corporate profit, and has created a dangerous situation for all North American citizens, and added a even more dangerous situation for the troops, who should not be there to begin with....america is not an invader, but a protector, that is all changed....
history will remember the USA as starting WORLD WAR 3.....some legacy to leave for the history books.....
Editorial: A failure of leadership at the highest levels
Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war.
Indeed, the damage done to the U.S. military and the nation as a whole by the horrifying photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at the notorious prison is incalculable.
But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons.
There is no excuse for the behavior displayed by soldiers in the now-infamous pictures and an even more damning report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. Every soldier involved should be ashamed.
But while responsibility begins with the six soldiers facing criminal charges, it extends all the way up the chain of command to the highest reaches of the military hierarchy and its civilian leadership.
The entire affair is a failure of leadership from start to finish. From the moment they are captured, prisoners are hooded, shackled and isolated. The message to the troops: Anything goes.
In addition to the scores of prisoners who were humiliated and demeaned, at least 14 have died in custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army has ruled at least two of those homicides. This is not the way a free people keeps its captives or wins the hearts and minds of a suspicious world.
How tragically ironic that the American military, which was welcomed to Baghdad by the euphoric Iraqi people a year ago as a liberating force that ended 30 years of tyranny, would today stand guilty of dehumanizing torture in the same Abu Ghraib prison used by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen.
One can only wonder why the prison wasn’t razed in the wake of the invasion as a symbolic stake through the heart of the Baathist regime.
Army commanders in Iraq bear responsibility for running a prison where there was no legal adviser to the commander, and no ultimate responsibility taken for the care and treatment of the prisoners.
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, also shares in the shame. Myers asked “60 Minutes II” to hold off reporting news of the scandal because it could put U.S. troops at risk. But when the report was aired, a week later, Myers still hadn’t read Taguba’s report, which had been completed in March. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also failed to read the report until after the scandal broke in the media.
By then, of course, it was too late.
Myers, Rumsfeld and their staffs failed to recognize the impact the scandal would have not only in the United States, but around the world.
If their staffs failed to alert Myers and Rumsfeld, shame on them. But shame, too, on the chairman and secretary, who failed to inform even President Bush.
He was left to learn of the explosive scandal from media reports instead of from his own military leaders.
On the battlefield, Myers’ and Rumsfeld’s errors would be called a lack of situational awareness — a failure that amounts to professional negligence.
To date, the Army has moved to court-martial the six soldiers suspected of abusing Iraqi detainees and has reprimanded six others.
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the MP brigade that ran Abu Ghraib, has received a letter of admonishment and also faces possible disciplinary action.
That’s good, but not good enough.
This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential — even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.
posted on May 11, 2004 12:07:08 PM new
As USUALyou only post what of the article you wish cast the worse light on the incident.
What you ommitted is:
General: No Policy, Order To 'Soften Up' Prisoners
Author Of Report On Iraqi Prisoner Abuse Cites 'Failure Of Leadership'
POSTED: 8:12 a.m. EDT May 11, 2004
UPDATED: 1:17 p.m. EDT May 11, 2004
The Army major general who released a scathing report in March on abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison told a Senate panel on Tuesday that there was "failure of leadership from the brigade commander on down and lack of discipline" at the Baghdad-area facility.
Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba (pictured, left), whose 53-page report found "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee there was "no training whatsoever and no supervision" for Americans guarding Iraqi prisoners at Iraq's most notorious prison.
The army officer also left open the possibility that members of the CIA as well as armed forces personnel and civilian contractors were culpable in the abusive treatment of prisoners.
"A few soldiers and civilians conspired to abuse and conduct egregious acts against detainees and other civilians outside the bounds of international laws and the Geneva Convention," he said.
Sen. Robert Byrd, D-S.C., asked Taguba whether there was a policy in place for American guards to "soften up" prisoners before interrogation.
Taguba said he found "no policy whatsoever or no direct order -- written or otherwise."
"I believe (the guards) did it of their own volition," Taguba said. "I believe that they did it in collaboration with lower-level MI (military intelligence) interrogators."
"The Secret Service has announced it is doubling its protection for John Kerry. You can understand why — with two positions on every issue, he has twice as many people mad at him." —Jay Leno
[ edited by Bear1949 on May 11, 2004 12:10 PM ]
As much as the low-level folks who did the humiliating and the 'softening up' should be held to account, you can certainly see why they and their families would be outraged beyond imagining that all of this was being blamed on them.
The president's stylized expressions of outrage and disgust are further revealed, I believe, as play-acting, like his feigned outrage over the outing of Valerie Plame by one of his top advisors and his pretended efforts to discover the culprits.
posted on May 11, 2004 12:22:22 PM new"I believe (the guards) did it of their own volition," Taguba said. "I believe that they did it in collaboration with lower-level MI (military intelligence) interrogators."
That's the old Nixon excuse-- I didn't know what my people were doing.
Well even if Bush didn't know, then it is still a failure of leadership.
posted on May 14, 2004 06:53:04 AM new
for all those who think i am this mor#n who calls himself " warmonger " think again, there's a looney running around here, in the name of the fascist right, so enjoy him her, because it seems this one reprecents the true feelings of what these war supporters are all about....intent on destruction and occupation of a sovriegn nation...bottom line...rape ,pillage and plunder, the new motto of America.....aside from that
and one said i have no sense of humor, you bet i don't when so many are been slaughtered for corporate profits....and putting a great country into a debt ridden country.....remember what happened to russia....that fate is waiting to happen here in north america...or should i say it has already started.....like the gas prices ????
more evidence that american military wants out....and thinks this leadership is gone wachy.....are we talking of a real military coup here.....maybe....would not surprise me at all.....just read this articale, read it and you will see the fustration in the military, which is coming out more and more....you will be seeing more and more of this in the media.....
America's military coup
Donald Rumsfeld has a new war on his hands - the US officer corps has turned on the government
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday May 13, 2004
Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, told George Bush in February about torture at Abu Ghraib prison. From the limited detail Rumsfeld recalled of that meeting, it can be deduced that Bush gave no orders, insisted on no responsibility, did not ask to see the already commissioned Taguba report. If there are exculpatory facts, Rumsfeld has failed to mention them.
For decades, Rumsfeld has had a reputation as a great white shark of the bureaucratic seas: sleek, fast-moving and voracious. As counsellor to Richard Nixon during the impeachment crisis, his deputy was the young Dick Cheney, and together they helped to right the ship of state under Gerald Ford.
Here they were given a misleading gloss as moderates; competence at handling power was confused with pragmatism. Cheney became the most hardline of congressmen, and Rumsfeld informed acquaintances that he was always more conservative than they imagined. One lesson they seem to have learned from the Nixon debacle was ruthlessness. His collapse confirmed in them a belief in the imperial presidency based on executive secrecy. One gets the impression that, unlike Nixon, they would have burned the White House tapes.
Under Bush, the team of Cheney and Rumsfeld spread across the top rungs of government, drawing staff from the neoconservative cabal and infusing their rightwing temperaments with ideological imperatives. The unvarnished will to power took on a veneer of ideas and idealism. Iraq was not a case of vengeance or power, but the cause of democracy and human rights.
The fate of the neoconservative project depends on Rumsfeld's job. If he were to go, so would his deputy, the neoconservative Robespierre, Paul Wolfowitz. Also threatened would be the cadres who stovepiped the disinformation that neoconservative darling Ahmed Chalabi used to manipulate public opinion before the war. In his Senate testimony last week, Rumsfeld explained that the government asking the press not to report Abu Ghraib "is not against our principles. It is not suppression of the news." War is peace.
Six National Guard soldiers from a West Virginia unit who treated Abu Ghraib as a playpen of pornographic torture have been designated as scapegoats. Will the show trials of these working-class antiheroes put an end to any inquiries about the chain of command? In an extraordinary editorial, the Army Times, which had not previously ventured into such controversy, declared that "the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons ... This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountabilty here is essential - even if that means relieving leaders from duty in a time of war."
William Odom, a retired general and former member of the National Security Council who is now at the Hudson Institute, a conservative thinktank, reflects a wide swath of opinion in the upper ranks of the military. "It was never in our interest to go into Iraq," he told me. It is a "diversion" from the war on terrorism; the rationale for the Iraq war (finding WMD) is "phoney"; the US army is overstretched and being driven "into the ground"; and the prospect of building a democracy is "zero". In Iraqi politics, he says, "legitimacy is going to be tied to expelling us. Wisdom in military affairs dictates withdrawal in this situation. We can't afford to fail, that's mindless. The issue is how we stop failing more. I am arguing a strategic decision
One high-level military strategist told me that Rumsfeld is "detested", and that "if there's a sentiment in the army it is: Support Our Troops, Impeach Rumsfeld".
The Council on Foreign Relations has been showing old movies with renewed relevance to its members. The Battle of Algiers, depicting the nature and costs of a struggle with terrorism, is the latest feature. The seething in the military against Bush and Rumsfeld might prompt a showing of Seven Days in May, about a coup staged by a rightwing general against a weak liberal president, an artefact of the conservative hatred directed at President Kennedy in the early 60s.
In 1992, General Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs, awarded the prize for his strategy essay competition at the National Defence University to Lieutenant Colonel Charles Dunlap for The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012. His cautionary tale imagined an incapable civilian government creating a vacuum that drew a competent military into a coup disastrous for democracy. The military, of course, is bound to uphold the constitution. But Dunlap wrote: "The catastrophe that occurred on our watch took place because we failed to speak out against policies we knew were wrong. It's too late for me to do any more. But it's not for you."
The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012 is today circulating among top US military strategists.
