I got the following email from my dad yesterday, and I think more people should be aware of the points he raised. With his permission I'm posting it here:
Here's the link to Seymour Hersh's current article on the Abu Ghraib prison. It's very enlightening and, after listening to the Senate hearings on this issue, is even more disturbing for its implications and the damage done."TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the responsibility go?"
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_factThe article raises some very strong points, primarily about the breakdown in command and is another example of the many ways we were unprepared for handling post-war Iraq.
The whole situation at this prison emphasizes something I've objected to from the very beginning: We should not be sending reservists into the combat zone.
Reservists (which includes both the regular reserve and the National Guard) are by their very definition not professional soldiers in the way the enlistees are. They are older, hold full-time civilian jobs not necessarily related to their military roles, are less trained, and, in general, did not volunteer for what turned out to be combat service. The reserves are really meant to fill in the domestic gaps when we ship our regular military overseas. In the case of WWII and Korea, the reserves were used as cannon fodder (with disastrous casualties) until the time a regular army could be drafted, trained, and sent overseas.
I was in the National Guard for six years. My service overlapped the time of the riots in Newark, Detroit, etc. during the mid-sixties. I went through the farce of what was called riot-control training. If we had been called out for riot duty I would have had pity for us, the rioters, and any civilians who looked to us like rioters.
We were frightened, ignorant, poorly disciplined, and inadequately trained. Our officers were a joke who lacked capability, leadership ability, and respect. Few had seen active service and most had been through, at best, National Guard officers training (4 weeks total). They were comic book soldiers. In fact we all were. If we were called out and issued live ammo we would have had needless casualties on both sides. I'm fortunate that I wasn't put into that sitiuation.
Reservists still train a weekend a month and two weeks during the summer. That's the total. MP units in my reserve division did traffic control for the most part. To send folks like that over to guard jails in a very complex political-social and dangerous situation without a lot of special training is asking for trouble and victimizes the soldiers who in turn end up victimizing their charges.
Poor discipline, lack of clarity of one's duties and responsibilities, plus being in a situation in which one feels unprepared is a bad mix. Add to that what seems like an organizational breakdown based on a nudge, a wink, and contradictory authority, and what happened could have been expected.
I don't condone the behavior of the guards, but nailing them alone is like picking up the dope pushers on the street corner and claiming to have broken the narcotics trade. What they did wasn't done in a vacuum. The buck stops a lot higher up.