a military response to the torture scandal
Question:
One would think that people who have spent their entire career in the military, and who I would hope has had some combat experience would know that abusing prisoners are not unique. I recall after the second world war, that some of the veterans of the European campaign that use to tell us about how POW’s seem to often "try to escape" as they were being transported back from the front lines, only to be shot dead. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – We Can’t Remain Silent By BOB HERBERT A t dinner on a rainy night in Manhattan this week, I listened to a retired admiral and a retired general speak about the pain they’ve personally felt over the torture and abuse scandal that has spread like a virus through some sectors of the military. During the dinner and in follow-up interviews, Rear Adm. John Hutson, who is now president of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H., and Brig. Gen. James Cullen, a lawyer in private practice in New York, said they believed that both the war effort and the military itself have been seriously undermined by official policies that encouraged the abuse of prisoners. Both men said they were unable to remain silent as institutions that they served loyally for decades, and which they continue to love without reservation, are being damaged by patterns of conduct that fly in the face of core values that most members of the military try mightily to uphold. "At some point," said General Cullen, "I had to say: ‘Wait a minute. We cannot go along with this.’ " The two retired officers have lent their support to an extraordinary lawsuit that seeks to hold Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ultimately accountable for policies that have given rise to torture and other forms of prisoner abuse. And last September they were among a group of eight retired admirals and generals who wrote a letter to President Bush urging him to create an independent 9/11-type commission to fully investigate the problem of prisoner abuse from the top to the bottom of the command structure. Admiral Hutson, who served as the Navy’s judge advocate general from 1997 to 2000, said he felt sick the first time he saw the photos of soldiers abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. "I felt like somebody in my family had died," he said. Even before that, he had been concerned by the Bush administration’s decision to deny the protections of the Geneva Conventions to some detainees, and by the way prisoners at Guant
Filed under: Human Rights
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