Lindie was sentenced to 3 years and a dishonorable discharge and I don’t know what else. She also has a small baby. Should she have gotten this sentenice?
Yes, I feel she deserves some prison time for what she’s done. What really frosts me though, is that no officer has suffered any real punishment for not having sufficiently trained or supervised these individuals. I thought that officers were treated more harshly than enlisted because they’re held to a higher standard. What gives?
I will never believe this girl thought this up all by herself. If she had refused to do as she was told, what would her punishment have been?
I don’t see what the baby has to do with it. Would you say that if it was a man that had a small baby?
Of course she should have gotten this sentence, along with everyone else involved right up to the top.
Wouldn’t insubordination mean a trip to the stockade?
No.
Servicemembers not only aren’t required to obey an unlawful order, they are obligated not to follow it.
And piling naked prisoners into a pyramid isn’t a lawful order.
Precisely.
I’m of the opinion that yes, her superiors should have been raked over the coals too, but that she was monumentally stupid and has been sentenced accordingly. Regardless of whether she has a child or not, she willingly obeyed a clearly unlawful order. She’s as culpable for her actions as her CO or peers are, if not more so.
How is a PFC supposed to know what is or what isn’t a lawful order? I’m not saying she shouldn’t be punished, but I really have a lot of difficulty believing a few low-ranking NCO’s thought this up all by themselves.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it’s common sense to know that abusing prisoners is unlawful. Surely when you’re being told to “Stand and point at the pile of naked, unwashed middle-eastern men while we take photographs”, something must go off in your head that says “Well, this isn’t exactly kosher now, is it?”
Also, not to excuse the higher-ups, but you’d be surprised what NCOs can come up with on their own.
Take a few people with a certain amount of loose morality, put them in a poorely supervised environment, add a little power rush, relative lack of intellect, stupid frat mentality and this is the result. You just need one person dumb enough to follow a half cooked order as if it’s legitimate.
I have no difficulty believing this at all, given the individuals involved.
I noted before that Charles Graner, the ringleader of this sad circus, beat prisoners, doused them with pepper spray, and probably put a razor blade in a prisoner’s food. He also threatened a woman with death, threw that same woman down the stairs, and laced a fellow guard’s coffee with Mace.
He did all of this on his own initiative, and his military superiors can hardly be blamed. After all, all of this took place long before he ever got to Iraq. These crime were committed against inmates when he was a prison guard in Pennsylvania, and against his own wife.
Now, given all of this, do you still have trouble believing that he, and they, could have dreamed all of this up themselves?
I don’t have a problem believing the guards got creative on their own, and I seriously doubt that anyone ordered them specifically to “pile naked prisoners in a pyramid”, or “point at a prisoners genitals and take a picture”. However, it seem very likely that they were ordered (or at the very least encouraged) in a general way to abuse the prisoners, and the evidence is pretty good that this policy goes all the way to the top. Yeah, I think England should be punished, but if there were REAL justice, her superiors should get a bigger sentence, and Rumsfeld should get the biggest sentence of all. And what the hell, Bush can be his cellmate.
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- It is true that one prisoner did die in custody, and that is a far serious matter… but I don’t think that England or any of the others should have been punished beyond a cursory reprimand, and the highest-ranking person who had direct knowledge should be punished the most, because they were the “most responsible”. As I remember at the time this was going on, the rest of the world was occasionally watching videos of masked Al-Quieda members beheading foreigners. Kinda puts things into perspective, doesn’t it? Being forced to strip and pose for stupid frat-boy style photos is pansy-ass, it’s bullshit. It is quite simply nothing significant in terms of abuse. On the vast scale of the history of war crimes, it doesn’t even rate. It is laughable at best that the Iraqis would even complain of it, and it is tragic that the US soldiers got punished as they did.
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- When I think of the term “war crimes”, somehow I tend to imagine bulldozer pits of skeletons of civilians, not nude embarrasing photos of a few healthy, well-fed prisoners.
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So you’re saying that as long as terrorists are killing people out there, it’s a-OK if US soldiers wire up a man’s genitals, make him hold wires, and then force him to stand for hours on a small box, telling him that he’ll be shocked if he falls off? It’s fine to make Iraqi women bare their breasts, make prisoners engage in sexual acts with each other, threaten them with venomous snakes, sic dogs on them, beat them, piss on them? I thought we were supposed to be the good guys.
I have no disagreement with what you wrote about Graner, I accept what you’ve said.
What I fail to understand however, is how when the reported indignities were being carried out their superior officers were apparently unaware of them. This is so unlikely it beggars belief. It is their responsibility to know what is going on under their command.
By the way I have served for 12 years myself so I know from first hand experience that there was very little that the commanding officers didn’t know about.
Under what conditions would “make a naked prisoner pyramid, and then pose beside it while I take a picture” ever be a lawful order?
there was a systematic failure of discipline in that prison, a make your own rules ethos coupled with a “by any means necessary” mandate to extract information, it lead to a completely fubar situation.
Everyone, from the PFC’s right up to those who developed the detention and interrogation rules needs to be investigated.
That’s about the most ignorant thing I’ve ever read.
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How does saying “I saw an al Qaeda member do something worse” excuse anything? That’s preposterous.
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“Healthy, well-fed prisoners?” Among the atrocities:
“punched a detainee in the chest so hard that the detainee almost went into cardiac arrest”
“sexual abuse of a 16-year-old girl by two interrogators”
“16-year-old son of an Iraqi general who was driven through the cold after he had been showered and who was then besmeared with mud in order to get his father to talk”
“attack dogs snarling at cowing prisoners, Iraqi women forced to expose their breasts, and naked prisoners forced to have sex with each other”
“American soldiers sodomizing Iraqi boys”
“Urinating on detainees”
“Jumping on detainee’s leg (a limb already wounded by gunfire) with such force that it could not thereafter heal properly”
“Continuing by pounding detainee’s wounded leg with collapsible metal baton”
“Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet”
“A male MP guard raping a female detainee”
“Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees”
“Beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair”
“Sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick”
“Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting and severely injuring a detainee”
The pictures we saw on the news are the tip of the iceberg. There are many more pictures that we haven’t seen.
- What you call “frat-style” photos were actually a shrewdly calculated way to humiliate the prisoners in the most effective way possible. The higher-ups KNEW that to an Iraqi man, doing things like forcing him to pose naked in simulated sex acts with each other, was one of the worst things they could do. Many prisoners said that they would rather die than have that happen to them.
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- Firstly, Wikipedia is not a credible source.
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Secondly, I’ll take “humiliation” over “having my head cut off” any day of the week. Presented the choice I bet you would too. Most of the allegations on the WIkipedia page are simply that; it is very-much in the prisoners’ interest to make exaggerated claims of abuse, any prison guard anywhere will tell you as much. And as I said, in the history of war crimes, most of it is really pretty minor stuff anyway. You will always have such guard behavior in wartime situations, simply due to the adversarial nature of the two groups.
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Additionally the highest-ranking person in charge who had direct knowlege of these events occurring should be the only one getting grilled for it, “chain of command” being what it is, from the top, down. The rules say a soldier doesn’t have to follow illegal orders and it sounds like a wonderful concept in principal, but friends who have been in the military say that it’s simply not how things work, except in the most blatant cases. Normally a soldier will follow whatever orders they are given, and simply assume that if the order was illegal, that whoever issued it to them will be held responsible for it.
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Sure it is. Read the article; it’s meticulously cited. You can go to the original sources if you want.
You’re just repeating the same fallacy you presented earlier.
Actually, I purposely LEFT OUT the prisoner’s claims for exactly that reason. If you’d care to look, I did not quote any part of the section of the article that listed prisoner allegations. The ones I listed are either from AMERICAN eye-witnesses, from credible news sources, or from the U.S’s OWN investigation.
How does that excuse it? What are you trying to say; anything less than the Holocaust is acceptable? I can’t understand why you keep comparing this to OTHER war atrocities. Are you saying that you don’t expect the United States to be able to do any better than the worst villains in history?
Preposterous. One could use the same reasoning to justify what al Qaeda has done. Surely you don’t want to do THAT, do you?
I don’t disagree with you there. I definitely think the higher-ups should be getting proportionately MORE punishment, not less. And I agree that the way the military is structured, those at the bottom do NOT have the choice to disobey orders. What’s not clear is exactly how much they were doing on their own, and how much they were ordered to do. I suspect that blaming it 100% on “rogue” soldiers is a cop-out, though.
Well, yeah, sure, If you compare with genocide then torture and humiliation is minor. But then, three years in prison is a pretty minor punishment compared to traditional punishments for major war crimes. It isn’t as if England has been taken out and shot. (I admit, when I read those reports from US-led prison camps in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have to remind myself why the death penalty is a bad thing.)