Terry: As to how we deal with the people who are attacking us? The same way one deals with any POW, with the proven techniques we've developed over the past 50 years.
I'm not really talking about the interrogation techniques, though. If they're wrong, then they are, and they ought to be ammended. I'm talking about the actual process of accidentally collecting the innocent along with the guilty. This is the problem of dealing with an enemy that does not wear a uniform, and one we've had very little experience in dealing with over the past 50 years. I daresay in Vietnam the question was addressed much more brutally than it has been addressed here, but the difference between then and now evidently is not good enough for some; we have to find a way of singling out the bad guy on the spot, so we don't trample the universal human rights of the others who happen to be standing around. I don't know of a way, personally, and I'm curious as to how others would suggest we proceed, if not in this "inefficient" way.
Whatever I've said, I really haven't said anything about the interrogation techniques themselves. You misconstrue me if you think I'm defending them.
Woops... posted three times. Mods remove, please?
NelC: First, you have no idea what I might respect or not respect. I'm still curious as to an answer for my question. You're dodging it, I sense, because all you have is criticism without any of the constructive. We can't change to meet the expectations of a public (whom we serve) without knowing what those expectations are. What should we do? How should we do it? We're open to suggestions, I believe, but this is as good as we've got.
Secondly, your scenario is childishly inflammatory and ridiculous. You're not addressing the question at hand, you're simply trying to rile my emotions by suggesting that my wife would be raped and my home invaded, maybe while I'm still here, which is flatly ridiculous and meant only to prey further on my emotions. The vile manipulation is not cute in anyone.
Likewise, your stereotyped perceptions are laughable; I don't, in fact, own a gun and have never really been interested in purchasing one. Further, your analogy is stretched to the breaking the point by the fact that it does not match up with the situation here in the slightest; the women and the children do not get detained along with the men, doors as a general rule do not get kicked in, and we certainly don't detain people for having one personal weapon in their homes. That is not a cache. A cache is many weapons of unmistakably military use, such as RPGs, machine guns, mortars and artillery shells.
Now, take your childish assumptions and your childish analogy, and ... do whatever seems best. The fact of the matter is, for all your criticism, you cannot come up with a viable alternative and thus you're seeking to muddy the waters. None of this is about what I would have a foreign military do; I'd have them leave me and my family alone, as I'm sure many Iraqis would like us to leave them alone. Ridiculous question deserving of a useless answer. If we could leave them alone, we would, but we can't, not when maybe them, maybe their neighbors are shooting at us. We have to do something or we wind up with a lot more flag-draped coffins in Dover.
In the military, we've institutionalized Monday morning quarterbacking, into something called the After Action Report. One of the AAR's salient features, though, is frank discussion of what could be done better, and how. This is why I characterize your attempt at it as, effectively, useless. If you think we're doing it wrong, you ought to have a way of suggesting how to do it better, or you're going to get ignored. The exact same would be true if I watched you over your shoulder at your place of employment and simply told you that you were being inefficient, and left it at that. Has nothing to do with me being in uniform and you not; has everything to do with basic courtesy.
NelC: First, you have no idea what I might respect or not respect. I'm still curious as to an answer for my question. You're dodging it, I sense, because all you have is criticism without any of the constructive. We can't change to meet the expectations of a public (whom we serve) without knowing what those expectations are. What should we do? How should we do it? We're open to suggestions, I believe, but this is as good as we've got.
Secondly, your scenario is childishly inflammatory and ridiculous. You're not addressing the question at hand, you're simply trying to rile my emotions by suggesting that my wife would be raped and my home invaded, maybe while I'm still here, which is flatly ridiculous and meant only to prey further on my emotions. The vile manipulation is not cute in anyone.
Likewise, your stereotyped perceptions are laughable; I don't, in fact, own a gun and have never really been interested in purchasing one. Further, your analogy is stretched to the breaking the point by the fact that it does not match up with the situation here in the slightest; the women and the children do not get detained along with the men, doors as a general rule do not get kicked in, and we certainly don't detain people for having one personal weapon in their homes. That is not a cache. A cache is many weapons of unmistakably military use, such as RPGs, machine guns, mortars and artillery shells.
Now, take your childish assumptions and your childish analogy, and ... do whatever seems best. The fact of the matter is, for all your criticism, you cannot come up with a viable alternative and thus you're seeking to muddy the waters. None of this is about what I would have a foreign military do; I'd have them leave me and my family alone, as I'm sure many Iraqis would like us to leave them alone. Ridiculous question deserving of a useless answer. If we could leave them alone, we would, but we can't, not when maybe them, maybe their neighbors are shooting at us. We have to do something or we wind up with a lot more flag-draped coffins in Dover.
In the military, we've institutionalized Monday morning quarterbacking, into something called the After Action Report. One of the AAR's salient features, though, is frank discussion of what could be done better, and how. This is why I characterize your attempt at it as, effectively, useless. If you think we're doing it wrong, you ought to have a way of suggesting how to do it better, or you're going to get ignored. The exact same would be true if I watched you over your shoulder at your place of employment and simply told you that you were being inefficient, and left it at that. Has nothing to do with me being in uniform and you not; has everything to do with basic courtesy.
NelC: First, you have no idea what I might respect or not respect. I'm still curious as to an answer for my question. You're dodging it, I sense, because all you have is criticism without any of the constructive. We can't change to meet the expectations of a public (whom we serve) without knowing what those expectations are. What should we do? How should we do it? We're open to suggestions, I believe, but this is as good as we've got.
Secondly, your scenario is childishly inflammatory and ridiculous. You're not addressing the question at hand, you're simply trying to rile my emotions by suggesting that my wife would be raped and my home invaded, maybe while I'm still here, which is flatly ridiculous and meant only to prey further on my emotions. The vile manipulation is not cute in anyone.
Likewise, your stereotyped perceptions are laughable; I don't, in fact, own a gun and have never really been interested in purchasing one. Further, your analogy is stretched to the breaking the point by the fact that it does not match up with the situation here in the slightest; the women and the children do not get detained along with the men, doors as a general rule do not get kicked in, and we certainly don't detain people for having one personal weapon in their homes. That is not a cache. A cache is many weapons of unmistakably military use, such as RPGs, machine guns, mortars and artillery shells.
Now, take your childish assumptions and your childish analogy, and ... do whatever seems best. The fact of the matter is, for all your criticism, you cannot come up with a viable alternative and thus you're seeking to muddy the waters. None of this is about what I would have a foreign military do; I'd have them leave me and my family alone, as I'm sure many Iraqis would like us to leave them alone. Ridiculous question deserving of a useless answer. If we could leave them alone, we would, but we can't, not when maybe them, maybe their neighbors are shooting at us. We have to do something or we wind up with a lot more flag-draped coffins in Dover.
In the military, we've institutionalized Monday morning quarterbacking, into something called the After Action Report. One of the AAR's salient features, though, is frank discussion of what could be done better, and how. This is why I characterize your attempt at it as, effectively, useless. If you think we're doing it wrong, you ought to have a way of suggesting how to do it better, or you're going to get ignored. The exact same would be true if I watched you over your shoulder at your place of employment and simply told you that you were being inefficient, and left it at that. Has nothing to do with me being in uniform and you not; has everything to do with basic courtesy.
NelC: I'm still curious as to how you would resolve the problem I posited in the post you responded to. How to handle the problem of a non-uniformed enemy among a population of like-speaking people? Better to detain small chunks of innocents to get at the bad guys than to kill small chunks of innocents, as had been de riguer in the bad ol' days. Better still to... what? I'm curious as to your answer.
Otherwise, you make an interesting leap from "a couple of releasd people have complained of abuse" to "everyone at Abu Ghraib must have been tortured." One does not follow from the other, especially given the nearly four thousand who have been released since January. And they are still claims. You're making a very, very terrible accusation against a much wider group of people than is currently formally accused based on what may be nothing more than opportunistic claims. (How many of them went on record claiming abuse prior to this month?) Not that they should not be investigated. But the innocent are still innocent until proven guilty. Try not to smear hundreds of MPs with complicity just because it's fashionable to question what goes on here.
If you can suggest a more efficient way of prosecuting a counter-insurgency campaign, I'm sure the Pentagon would be happy to have your feedback. But right now, this smacks of Monday morning quarterbacking. Nice of you to point out inefficiencies now.
CHip: The population of 1A and 1B is a near infinitessimal fraction of the overall prison population. The vast majority of the prisoners here don't live in cellblocks of any stripe.
Likewise, I think it's a bit presumptuous for you to assign "gross incompetence." There are troubles, yes, and to address rilkefan's point, I'm sure there are plenty of people in here who are more or less innocent of crimes against Coalition forces or the Iraqi people in general. Thing is, I'm damn near positive they aren't in 1A or 1B.
The issue of innocent detainees is, imho, a troublesome one. When fighting an insurgency in a country where you don't understand the language, sorting the wheat from the chaff on the spot can be difficult at best. In a typical scenario, a house is searched and a cache of weapons discovered. Say the cache is in a yard shared with three houses. Do you just take the owner of the house you searched initially? What if there's other adult males in that house? What if the guy's a patsy and one of those guys in the house is a ringleader? What if they're all patsies, and the ringleader lives in one of the other houses? All you know that you'll get is a lot of finger-pointing, going in all directions. So what do you do? Let terrorists go, when you know that one of them has to be in cahoots? Just pick the shiftiest looking one? Or snap them all up, and let the innocent ones go later, with an apology?
It's a war. Feces occur. Not that it's not bad, it certainly is. But so is war. Honest to Pete, the innocent get released as fast as they're cleared. The quoted 3800 number that someone has promised to cut in half soon would almost certainly be lower if it weren't for that business the first half of April. I watched detainees get released nearly every day leading up to that, and not in ones and twos, but in truck loads.
It's not like the stuff you guys are saying is news, particularly. You're just becoming aware of it. Corrective measures have been in place for months.
I'm not excusing any sort of rationale for abuse; none exists, as far as I'm concerned. I've said so quite a bit, and I'll continue to say so.
But the people in 1A and 1B are there for a reason, and I don't think unsubstantiatd allegations are enough to send them there. I think the original post was trying to say that it was, to allege, perhaps, that it was worse because these people had almost certainly done nothing. While the mistreatment of a combatant is bad, and inexcusable, I think you might agree that the mistreatment of an innocent tends to be worse, and thus the inference drawn is somewhat inflammatory, imho.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know exactly what the Senator was referring to when he referred to "cell blocks 1A and 1B"? I'm guessing you don't.
There's more to the prison than those two cellblocks and, believe it or not, the detainees are segregated by "those we're sure did something" and "those who might have done something" and "those whose crimes are strictly Iraqi and the military has little to do with them."
To wit, none of you know what you're talking about. The ICRC report says one thing about the type of people detained in the prison, and the Senator's remarks refer to a specific population within the prison. Check your facts, please, before you start calling people a disgrace to humanity.
Well, let's see. First, I'm pretty sure it's not 10,000, but we'll go with that number, that's fine.
Next, a significant portion of that number, let's say around 1/10th, actually belong to the ordinary class of criminals that this facility also houses. They're overseen by Iraqi nationals working as corrections officers, etc. Geneva doesn't apply to them, and soldiers don't work with them on a regular basis.
Now, let's say about 75% of the remainder are visible, directly visible, from my room and, alternately, the rooftop sensor suite that I maintain. At any given moment, I can look out over a solid 60-70% of the prison population and see what's up with them. On top of that, friends of mine work escort maintenance details within the entire prison population, minus those under Iraqi supervision. They see pretty much everything that goes on within those holding areas. And they're just as disgusted as I am over what happened, so I don't think they're likely to keep mum.
You don't have to be important to have your eyes open.
And I'm pretty sure 10,000 is capacity, not population.
I'm a Marine stationed at Abu Ghraib.
I get mail every other day, and I usually get it within three weeks of its departure from a Stateside Post Office.
Our internet access is actually handled by a subsubcontractor called Segovia and things are still flowing back and forth. KBR *may* have its own internet connection that soldiers and Marines are piggy-backing for connectivity outside of the established "internet cafes," but that doesn't affect the vast majority of us on-line.
Being at Abu Ghraib, I know plenty about what happened here, though it happened at least three months before I arrived in March. More importantly, I know that it isn't happening any more, and I know that all the relevant steps to keep it from happening were put into effect long before the public flap occurred. I understand the political impact, though I confess I feel the heralds of doom are over-stating the case a bit. My LiveJournal speaks to this issue, here and there.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 12 |
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