Soldiers' warnings ignored (blame goes far beyond the military police)

[displacedtexan]

Soldiers' warnings ignored
Failures: The blame for what happened at Abu Ghraib goes far beyond the military police, intelligence soldiers say.


By Todd Richissin
Sun Foreign Staff

Originally published May 9, 2004

WIESBADEN, Germany - The two military intelligence soldiers, assigned interrogation duties at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, were young, relatively new to the Army and had only one day of training on how to pry information from high-value prisoners. But almost immediately on their arrival in Iraq, say the two members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, they recognized that what was happening around them was wrong, morally and legally.

They said in interviews Friday and yesterday that the abuses were not caused by a handful of rogue soldiers poorly supervised and lacking morals but resulted from failures that went beyond the low-ranking military police charged with abuse.

snip

"I was told, 'Don't worry about it - they probably deserved it,'" one of the soldiers said in an interview, referring to complaints he made while trying to persuade the Army to investigate. "I was appalled."

snip

The soldiers were interviewed together Friday in person and then separately yesterday by telephone. They said they had alerted superiors at Abu Ghraib and the Army's Criminal Investigations Division by November or early December of prisoners being beaten, stripped naked and paraded in front of other inmates.

more (sorry, but tinyurl.com isn't responding)...
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/iraq/bal-te.guard09may09,0,2180279.story?coll=bal-home-headlines

[Veggie Meathead]

1. I am proud we have men like this in our Armed Forces. They

are the only ones who have to preserve what little dignity we have left.

[displacedtexan]

3. Some take the Code of Conduct seriously.

These two are mature beyond their years.

[enough]

2. A chicken with its head cut off

snip>

Their description of the prison and of the circumstances that helped it get that way indicate that troops stationed at Abu Ghraib were severely undertrained and were pressed into highly sensitive duties for which they had never prepared. Contributing to the problems at the prison, in their view, was the lack of soldiers to keep order and manage prisoners.

"We would see prisoners who had been sitting for months without being interrogated," one of the soldiers said. "We just didn't have anybody who could get to them, to get them out of there."

"There was like a big disconnect at every level," said the other. "Guys were given jobs they had never done, contractors are in there acting like they're in the movies. The whole operation was like a chicken with its head cut off."

snip>


You could say that about this whole bloody mess in Iraq.