I started this new book
I started this new book and haven’t had much time to spend with it, so I decided to take the METRO this morning and catch up. On the way from my house to the commuter lot, I was thinking about the recent news stories surrounding the alleged torturing of prisoners in Iraq by American soldiers. I'm really puzzled by this, so I'm writing instead of reading this morning. I was in the military for eight years. I spent most of those years away from home. I've done two overseas deployments and although never had enemy bullets zinging past my head directly, I've been in combat zones during the NATO operation in Kosovo and several times in various parts of the Middle East via the Persian Gulf. I guess my whole point is not to defend the actions of those poor souls if they really did do those atrocities, but to convey that I understand how the military works. The military at the people level is not an individual or an autonomous unit... it's a team. Where I'm going with this is that either these allegations are fictional and the photos are fabricated in a similar fashion to the quite convincing one of Kerry and Fonda floating around the net or that we will be mortified to find out that this is happening on a larger scale. I'm not saying that certain things can't happen in the military as an independent action by a small group of individuals however, it's unlikely that the torture of prisoners in the fashion depicted went unseen by at least someone that would have prevented it. Maybe it's just that I don't want to believe that it happened. It's too unsettling to think that American soldiers would act like immoral criminals in this day and age. It's no different than an infantryman in the jungle of Viet Nam raping a native girl just because he can. We're better than that... aren't we? I wasn't too put off by the description of the prisoners being naked or verbally demeaned. It war, right? They could have weapons stashed in clothes, right? Sticks and stones, right? When it got to urinating in their faces or the reports of things like sodomy... well, I'm speechless. It goes beyond my comfort level. This is a issue of basic morality. This is an example of right and wrong and situational interpretation that is completely misguided. So, if the photos are legit, I pray that this is a single isolated incident (however improbably it may be in a tight nit military) that doesn't go unchecked. This should serve as a wake up call to the structure and protocol by which our men and women in uniform live. Look around. I pray that this (however probable it definitely is) doesn't further ruin the already damaged image Americans have in the world. Of course, I find anyone that takes the actions of the few (or the one), the perceptions conveyed by Hollywood, or the media and paints the 290 million of the rest of us with the same brush to be a little bent. I hope open-mindedness prevails and the world hears the unequivocal truth in our voice when we say that this type of thing is crossing the line and wrong in it's truest sense. The soldiers that did these acts should face justice. I just don't want to believe it's true. I don't see the logistics in how it could happen. Was there not a Christian in the lot? (or any religion for that matter that embraces morality) Where there no senior ranking officers or NCO's that knew the implications regardless or their personal beliefs? WTF? It just makes no sense. I tend to lean more toward the conspiracy theorists camp in that the photos were altered and this is a big scandal. Maybe it's just because I don't want it to be true.
Further troubling, a poll at Aljazeera's English site shows 62% believe that this type of torture is routine practice.
