OK, here's one I can't swallow. News reports are quoting military spokesmen as saying that the soldiers who are facing charges after the revelation of horrible pictures of humiliation of Iraqi prisoners did not receive in-depth training on the Geneva Conventions, which govern treatment of prisoners of war.
Read the Associated Press story . . .
This is piffle. Unless Army basic training has degraded severely since my time, the basics of the Geneva Convention are drilled into every recruit. We treat them humanely, they treat us humanely . . . that's the idea, at least. The training is more detailed than that. Every POW is entitled to a checklist of rights, and this checklist is, or at least was, required knowledge to graduate from basic training. Add to that that the six currently facing charges (as well as their commanders) are trained military police officers . . . who in the process of achieving their MOS presumably receive special training in the handling of prisoners - POWs or rowdy grunts alike.
Forget Geneva Conventions, for a moment, since many of these military police will be walking the beat in your neighborhood one of these days. If photos turned up (and forgive me if they already have) of New Orleans police officers urinating on naked suspects, making human pyramids of their bodies, attaching wires to their genitals and balancing them on a block dressed in a black hood, and writing racial or religious slurs on their skin . . . if female police officers were free to humiliate nude male prisoners . . . I'm guessing no one would even raise the idea that the officers had not received "in-depth training."
Please read on . . .
We have to be better than that. It's unrealistic to think that there aren't some bad American soldiers in Iraq right now . . . just as it's unrealistic to think that there aren't some bad cops in New Orleans. And war does bring out the worst in people . . . which is why discipline is so important. The only thing to do about it is to root it out, from the bottom to as high as it needs to go, and give it no excuses.
A close friend, who was in command of a compound of Iraqi POWs during Desert Storm, confirmed that normal non-combat Army troops - military bandsmen in this case - were pressed to duty as guards, with no "in-depth" training necessary. Refresher orders, certainly . . . some of these guys had been belting out "Stars and Stripes Forever" for a couple of decades, and only picked up a weapon to qualify every year. But the basic rules of treating POWs were so fundamental that there was no need for further depth.
Postscript:
In basic training, one of the things our trainers put us through was Survival, Escape and Evasion, which included being hunted down in the wilds of Fort Polk, dragged to a mock Vietnamese POW camp, and then enduring hours of abuse, of exactly the kind that is pictured in these Iraqi photos. Part of the Prisoner of War rules that soldiers have drilled into them are the rules on how to BE a POW . . . this wasn't just sadism . . . the training was based on real-life experiences of treatment of American POWs in the Hanoi Hilton. What those guys went through shoudn't even be mentioned in the same breath as what the Iraqi prisoners have gone through. Not to excuse it, but it's a whole different leve. What we were taught to deal with was the humiliating and scary "softening up" that we might face, which might make us spill our guts to the enemy. Interestingly some of the U.S. soldiers involved in this scandal appeared to think they were part of a legitimate process of "softening up" the Iraqi prisoners for interrogation. It leads you to seriously consider what kind of a blind eye their commanders were turning so that the prisoners would be "softened up."
By the way, my experience in the Vietnamese POW camp in Fort Polk wasn't exactly personal. I was a country boy, and given five minutes' head start in the blackness of a Louisiana night, sporadically lit by parachute flares, I successfully demonstrated the Escape and Evasioni part of that exercise. Snuck up and peeked at the goings-on inside the compound, then hiked out and thumbed a ride with the "POWs" as they headed back to the barracks. Some of those tough boys were crying their eyes out.
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