COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

If this is true, then heads should roll.

If it's true.

I have a lot of doubts, though. First of all, the medical service corps wouldn't put up with that shit. Second, it would be easy enough to identify which prisoners had the "broken arms and legs and shit." Just look for the broken arms and legs and shit. Then ask them, separately, who did it. If several people with broken arms and legs and shit pulled the same people out of a lineup, and all described the same Louisville Slugger, you've got a case, and the coverup will quickly unravel.

Now, there's apparently an officer who made an appointment with a Senate staffers. Ok, what Senator? When? Did the reporter bother calling the senator to confirm the appointment?

And the officer was denied permission to leave the base? What base? Mercury? The alleged abuses happened between March 2003 and April 2004. Yep, the same time I was there, roughly. The 1-504th has been back in the U.S., on and off, since the alleged abuses occured. And a captain was denied permission to leave Fort Bragg? A CAPTAIN???

My bullshit detector is ringing off the hook on this one.

And he got an appointment with the Criminal Investigations Division and the Army Inspector General? Ok. Were charges filed? Where's the evidence that these abuses actually occurred as alleged? Because all we've got to go on is HRW repeating the allegations of three other people, who are not named. Only three people have come forward in a year and a half?

And a captain won't put his name to the allegations, even though he's REQUIRED to pursue the matter by law?

And what's this bull-hockey?

The soldiers attributed the abuse to lack of guidance on the Geneva Conventions rules on the treatment of prisoners and assumptions that they did not apply.

Horsehockey. The Geneva Conventions is a mandatory annual briefing in most commands. Every interrogator and MP in the Army gets taught about the Geneva conventions in AIT. Every one of them. There is nothing ambiguous about it, and nothing that requires "guidance" to understand. You can't go breaking arms and legs and shit with a Louisville Slugger or anything else.

The AFP apparently did nothing to corroborate, nothing to fact check, nothing to verify the HRWs allegations.

I don't doubt some abuse occured, and that it occurred throughout the country - particularly prior to the Abu Ghraib abuses becoming public and shedding light on the issue. But I'm throwing the bullshit flag on this story, as alleged here.

CID is not going to ignore broken bones. Nor is the Army IG.

Splash, out

Jason

UPDATE: The NY Times actually gets the captain's name and he's gone on the record, though he's not speaking much to media. So there may be more here. But there seems to be only one instance of broken bones.

UPDATE: Full Human Rights Watch report here. His account is actually really interesting, and makes for a good officer professional development conversation.

His Battalion commander didn't ignore him, though, but just referred him to JAG. You don't get that from the AFP account. It's not an unreasonable course of action, if the Battalion commander is not responsible for the detention facility.


Splash, out

Jason