I spent the entire weekend trying to recover from Thursday.
Thursday night I had to do some work at a western Michigan customer site in the overnight hours since it would involve causing temporary but widespread outages in their customer's services. So I went to bed at 8:00P on Thursday and got up just after midnight Friday morning and went to work. I finished all my disruptive work at about 6:00A, checked my email and had a bit of breakfast, and decided I had nothing better to do than to keep working since I wasn't really all that tired. Hm.
At about 2:00P I was about ready to call it a day, and headed into Chicago to pick up my brother, which put me coming into the I-80/90/94/294 bottleneck at a bad time of day, though frankly I think most times of day are bad times to encounter this stretch of highway. The worst of it saw me take about an hour to cover six miles. With a few delays in town and some minor but puzzling problems with the truck on the way home, we didn't get back to my fair Ohio community until 2:00A Saturday morning, at which point I realized--poof!--I had been awake for 26 hours and was starting to get a little loopy.
Six hours later I was awake again, and between the crying baby and the weekend festivities and the dog and whatnot, it was 9:00P Sunday night and I had had enough--no mas--so after putting the babies to bed I crashed hard and feel miraculously better this morning.
So much to write about after being away for two weeks. Where to begin?
I do intend to bore all of you with some recounting of my fabulous trip to New York, so--although I don't think I'll get to that today--none of you are off the hook for hearing about my trip. But more on that later.
Time to catch up on the actual news. A brief note on the whole Abu Ghraib business:
There is the occasional bad person everywhere. Some of them even conspire to be bad together. No one claims Americans are all angels, or that the American military is comprised solely of angels either, just because we live under democracy (actually a republic). Democracy doesn't make the people who live under it better, but it does generally provide for the rule of law, and the punishment of the guilty.
James Madison, in Federalist 51, wrote:
[W]hat is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Spc Jeremy Sivits is now in jail for his role in the Abu Graib debacle. And he won't likely be the last. In that same article, Lt General Sanchez told the Senate Armed Services Committee that abuse of prisoners in Iraq will be investigated thoroughly up the chain of command, specifically saying "and that includes me."
All this is as it should be. The particularly guilty should go to jail, and likely will. The senior NCOs and commissioned platoon commanders responsible for the facility where all this took place have demonstrated, at best, gross negligence in being ignorant of what happened under their command, even if they knew nothing of the abuses and didn't order them. Some administrative penalty should be levied against them for not maintaining better control of their units.
Sanchez, puzzlingly, had previously provided for certain interrogation techniques like stress positions and sleep deprivation, provided they were administered only with his written authorization. While these clearly violate some of the Geneva Conventions, they would not necessarily violate the fourth Convention, which deals with the occupying force maintaining order and contemplates non-uniformed detainees. This was probably an aggressive, perhaps marginal, reading of the Conventions, but which was probably not illegal as such. The acts at Abu Ghraib were clearly beyond the scope of techniques contemplated in Lt Gen Sanchez's order, and it's hard to believe that he would have actively encouraged such practices. More likely, if he is actually complicit in this fiasco, he may have created a system in which such offenses were not quickly or aggressively investigated. I do hope the matter is investigated fully up the chain of command, including Lt Gen Sanchez, and the guilty or negligent parties punished as appropriate.
For now, Sivits is in jail and has been booted from the Army. At this early stage, I'd have to say this is an example of the system working to clean up a mess after the fact. It's just too bad it didn't prevent it to begin with. It's harder to convince the average Iraqi (or the "average," meaning non-Al Queda, Iraqi insurgent) that we're there only to help them to develop a free system of government when we have our own soldiers pull this kind of stunt. "A lot of Marines may get killed because of these idiots [the Army prison guards]," said 1st Lt. Justin Engelhardt, 28 years old, of Denison, Iowa. (Marines in Iraq See Prison Photos Creating Enemies, Wall St Journal 5/10/2004)
Now the way the press has played this is a little interesting. In New York as this thing was breaking into the news, on Monday morning at our hotel there was a stack of New York Times and a stack of Wall Street Journals in the lounge. The Times, on 5/10/2004, had two full-page columns (of six) on its front page dedicated to Abu Ghraib, (after at least as much in the Sunday edition), and all of pages 8, 9, 12 and 14 (apart from ad space) dedicated to Iraq and Abu Ghraib in particular. The front page included a two-column-wide color photo.
The Journal had most of one column on the first page with no photo. Inside, pages 10 and 11 featured the fallout from Abu Ghraib (except for ad space).
One may ask, perhaps just rhetorically, why the Times would be more aggressive in showing something it supposes to be embarrassing to the current Administration in an election season. Anyone who suggests there is no bias (perhaps even just an unintended one) in the mainstream media in favor of discrediting George Bush could perhaps explain this to me.
Tomorrow! Sarin nerve gas, and why we all say "bringing democracy to the middle east," when it's actually the Republican form of government, just like what we have here.
Posted by JKS at May 24, 2004 01:14 PM