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(As for the rest of you ... OK, OK, just kidding about that.)
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rbos pointed me at this truthout.org interview by Marjorie Cohn, a professor at the Thomas Jeffertson School of Law, with former Brigadier General Janis Karpinski (Ret.), regarding the state of affairs in Iraq in general and Abu Ghraib specifically. She makes some telling points, such as that the three "civilian contractors" hired by the US Justice Department and sent to Abu Ghraib to manage and oversee prisoner interrogations had all, between 30 and 60 days before, been fired by the Justice Department from positions in the Utah Correctional Facility for prisoner abuse. She also describes how General Shinseki was fired for telling Rumsfeld that a successful invasion of Iraq could not be done with less than 300,000 men, and replaced with General Schoomaker, who saw the writing on the wall and was willing to tell Rumsfeld "Sure, we can do that with 125,000 men, no problem."
Sure, you can say that this is all sour grapes because Karpinski took the blame for Abu Ghraib. You can also say that she was made the scapegoat, and is telling it like it is, and that the investigation was made to stop with her because if followed, the trail led directly to the Secretary of Defense and possibly to the Vice-President. I leave that call to you. But look at what she's saying ... there's a consistent pattern. The officers involved in organizing and executing the Abu Ghraib abuses have been promoted and rewarded; those who blew the whistle, who cooperated with the investigation, who said it was wrong, have been punished. General Shinseki was fired for saying the Iraq invasion could not be done with the available forces; General Cody was promoted from three-star to four-star for cutting costs by denying requests for armored vehicles and bulletproof vests for the troops deployed in Iraq.
"Anybody who confronts this Administration or Rumsfeld or the Pentagon with a true assessment, they find themselves either out of a job, out of their positions, fired, relieved or chastised. Their career comes to an end."
...
And why are the American people turning a deaf ear to this? l We had 17 Marines killed over the course of the last three days, less than 72 hours. And there's still people in Washington that get on, especially Sunday mornings, and they get on these news or these debate programs and they say, "Well it's only 1800 lives so far" - Only! Only! You know, how dare you say that!
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I'm not sure of the logic, but perhaps that's part of what is going on. You say "we were lied to", they say "carter was a bad president". You say "1800 dead for enron profit!" and they reply "a lot more people died in the War of Northern Aggression". (well, my family says that)
Bush does this, too. You ask him about literacy rates and he replies "I will press my war on terrah." You ask him about unemployment and he replies "We must secure our skies against terrahists!"
They just aren't listening to what anyone says. I don't mean disagreeing, I mean, NOT HEARING. It's weird.
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-Ogre
Leadership failures
BG Karpinski was a walking leadership failure. By all appearances, including reading what she has said about herself, she was promoted during the Clinton years for her political correctness (and yes, all general promotions are highly political, lower level officers the Senate doesn't look that closely at promotions unless a Senator has a gripe with a particular officer, at General level, they usually need to kiss ass well). Her unit, prior to deployment, had ceased rendering basic military courtesies because people 'felt bad' about having to salute 'their friends'. Cry me a frigging river. Suspending such courtesies because you're in a combat zone and salutes draw fire is one thing, doing so because people's feelings are hurt is a leadership failure. Because if they won't follow THAT discipline, they won't adhere to other discipline. Including senior NCO's sleeping with junior enlisted members and recruiting them for private pictures of naked prisoners.
As for Shinseki, good riddance. He fits right in the same mold with Karpinski, in his case, he decided the way to make soldiers feel 'special' was to take the black beret, which was a hard-earned honor awarded to trained members of the 75th Ranger Regiment, and give it to everybody, at great expense. To wear a beret correctly requires properly shaping it AND maintaining tighter-than-normal grooming standards. Needless to say, a lot of troops are walking around with shapeless pizza hats on (and my beret, from when I was the cadet ranger company commander, is STILL properly broken in, a decade later). The Marines did it right, they made Boot Camp tougher, so graduates would have a reason to be proud of having made it through. Shinseki presided over weakening basic training standards to the point that recruits had 'time out' cards they could wave at their drill sergeants when they felt stressed out, and the combat arms branches basically instituted their own basic training schools where they could maintain reasonable standards (they call it One Station Unit Training, where Basic and AIT are combined into one long course - and since women aren't in combat arms, the overall standards weren't weakened to meet the lower physical fitness requirements for women).
An example? The convoy Jessica Lynch was in. The company (and battalion) commander violated EVERY troop leading procedure in the book. Stuff they never should have gotten out of precommissioning training without knowing. No briefback to make sure everyone understood the plan. No routine weapons maintenance. No detailed map recon to understand what they should and should not see. Trying to double-back on the same trail they took into hostile territory. As 'support' troops, they had the attitude that they were always in the rear, so weapons and tactics were unimportant. They learned their lesson, in blood. The M-2 heavy machinegun has been in continuous military service since World War ONE because of it's reliability. Theirs jammed. Which tells me that basic maintenance wasn't being done.
Don't even get me started on Shinseki's wonderful brainchild known as the Stryker, which can't even meet the basic selection criteria for which it was supposedly chosen (namely, transport in C-130 aircraft).
Re: Leadership failures
Armor for the troops and vehicles? Guess what, many of the elite units use LESS armor because they want more mobility, and trust to their mobility and alertness to avoid attacks. Lessons learned from units that have returned confirm that. If your unit hunkers down behind it's armor and doesn't pay attention to surroundings, it's more likely to be hit than if they are up, alert, and covering 360 degrees. Which is why the combat arms units are seeing proportionally lower losses, they've got the discipline to maintain that level of alertness when outside the wire. As for the Marines, it goes to prove that armor isn't a panacea. Most of those casualties were in ONE ARMORED VEHICLE that was hit. When you've got an explosive charge that throws an armored vehicle on it's back, it doesn't matter how much kevlar you mount on a Humvee, it ain't gonna survive. And it isn't DESIGNED to survive. The Humvee basically replaced three, unarmored vehicles - the M151 Jeep, the 1/4 ton pickup truck, and the Chevy Blazer/CUTVEE (the ambulance was basically the 1/4 ton pickup with a big shell). As for personal body armor, guess what? This was the first war in which we issued anything more than shrapnel protection. The old 'flak vest' was not rated to stop handgun or rifle ammunition, as several idiots have discovered while playing around. The new stuff is good, but expensive, and not easy to manufacture. Folks whine about what is issued now, but I would have given my left nut to have most of it back in 1990... Camelbaks, Under Armour wicking underwear, body armor, load bearing vests, reddot and optical sights on rifles and machineguns, etc... They basically threw the old procurement system AWAY, folks. Instead of having to wait for something new to be evaluated for military use, entered into the National Stock Number system, and then ordered under government contract, unit commanders were given a checkbook and told "buy what you think you need, within this budget". THEN the Army procurement folks looked at what they were buying, asked for feedback on what worked and what didn't, and started working on contracts to buy the stuff that worked.
Go read what the MAJORITY of the troops on the ground are saying. Look at the RECORD reenlistment numbers. The troops feel they're doing an important job, and despite the risks, are reenlisting at rates that GREATLY exceed the Army's quotas.
Quit listening to the jackasses in the media. They've been caught lying repeatedly, they've been caught twisting what military spokespeople say, and they flat-out IGNORE anything that contradicts their antiwar position.
The treatment of Cindy Sheehan is typical. She's a frigging nutcase, who opposed her son joining the military to begin with, and who is ENJOYING the media attention. Julie called her narcissistic, I'd call her a media whore. She's changed her story about her first meeting with President Bush, she's removed the picture of him kissing her on the cheek from the family website, and she's made NUMEROUS anti-American statements, but the media mostly ignores those. Just like they're mostly ignoring the scumbags who are harassing wounded vets at Walter Reed. She has stated that America isn't worth defending, her son obviously disagreed because he served one full enlistment and then reenlisted knowing that he'd be going back over there. And he volunteered for the mission on which he was killed, going to the rescue of fellow soldiers who were under fire and wounded. HE is to be respected, SHE is a dipshit who didn't even have the common courtesy to tell her former inlaws that their grandson was dead.
Re: Leadership failures
Uhhh.... I was not aware of that. It's not without precedent; everyone in the British SAS knows each other on a first-name basis, and operates that way -- it's not "Good morning, sir," it's "Morning, Bill." However, a military police unit is not the SAS.
That was Shinseki's idea? I wasn't aware of that either. I heard about it, and was pretty disgusted by it, but didn't know who it came from.
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