Wednesday, May 05, 2004
Email from a reader:
Dude, it's Reuters. And an anonymous source, yet. They've falsified stories and bylines before. So I'd wait until there's more substantive corroboration.
Nope. I went with it early. Reuters does weird things sometimes. But they don't invent stuff out of whole cloth. (Let's not get totally out of hand with the liberal media conspiracies!) The story smelled right to me.
And sure enough, the New York Times substantially confirms it, with their own in house reporting:
In the last 16 months, the Army has conducted more than 30 criminal investigations into misconduct by American captors in Iraq and Afghanistan, including 10 cases of suspicious death, 10 cases of abuse, and two deaths already determined to have been criminal homicides, the Army's vice chief of staff said Tuesday.
To date, the most severe penalties in any of the cases were less-than-honorable discharges for five Army soldiers, military officials said. No one has been sentenced to prison, they said.
From a PR point of view, it is good for the Army to come clean with everything at once. We're in the doghouse with a public relations disaster anyway. Releasing every skeleton in the closet at once won't put us appreciably more in the doghouse, and when this blows over, we don't have to worry about that stuff coming out again, perhaps at an even more sensitive time.
Here's what I don't get:
How in God's name can you convict a soldier of murder, and the most he gets is a reduction and a dishonarable discharge?
Granted, the court found the soldier was provoked. But the world isn't going to read the fine print.
To deal with a homicide with administrative punishment makes a mockery of Status of Forces Agreements everywhere in the world, and opens us up to charges of hypocrisy on human rights matters.
It also sends a powerful message to the world:
As far as America is concerned, brown, muslim lives don't count.
Splash, out
Jason
Dude, it's Reuters. And an anonymous source, yet. They've falsified stories and bylines before. So I'd wait until there's more substantive corroboration.
Nope. I went with it early. Reuters does weird things sometimes. But they don't invent stuff out of whole cloth. (Let's not get totally out of hand with the liberal media conspiracies!) The story smelled right to me.
And sure enough, the New York Times substantially confirms it, with their own in house reporting:
In the last 16 months, the Army has conducted more than 30 criminal investigations into misconduct by American captors in Iraq and Afghanistan, including 10 cases of suspicious death, 10 cases of abuse, and two deaths already determined to have been criminal homicides, the Army's vice chief of staff said Tuesday.
To date, the most severe penalties in any of the cases were less-than-honorable discharges for five Army soldiers, military officials said. No one has been sentenced to prison, they said.
From a PR point of view, it is good for the Army to come clean with everything at once. We're in the doghouse with a public relations disaster anyway. Releasing every skeleton in the closet at once won't put us appreciably more in the doghouse, and when this blows over, we don't have to worry about that stuff coming out again, perhaps at an even more sensitive time.
Here's what I don't get:
How in God's name can you convict a soldier of murder, and the most he gets is a reduction and a dishonarable discharge?
Granted, the court found the soldier was provoked. But the world isn't going to read the fine print.
To deal with a homicide with administrative punishment makes a mockery of Status of Forces Agreements everywhere in the world, and opens us up to charges of hypocrisy on human rights matters.
It also sends a powerful message to the world:
As far as America is concerned, brown, muslim lives don't count.
Splash, out
Jason
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