PC LED TO ABU GHRAIB

"Thanks to Rep. Heather Wilson, New Mexico Republican and a former military officer, we now know the sequence of events that led to the American military police abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison. A military investigation in late summer 2003 of the 800th Military Police Brigade under Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller found a breakdown in discipline at the prison. When told that her troops were not even saluting, the general refused to order them to begin doing so.

Central Command, concerned about the breakdown but apparently worried about disciplining one of the highest ranking female Army officers in Iraq, devised a compromise bureaucratic solution to hand control of the critical central interrogation prison at Abu Ghraib to the military intelligence unit questioning the prisoners. The critical order was issued October 12, 2003, and was confirmed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez in November. This put the interrogators in charge and was the precipitating event for what investigating Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba called sadistic criminal abuses, the first one of which apparently took place on October 17, 2003.

Army policy is to make MP's responsible for order within the prisons and for the physical safety of the community and the prisoners. In order to prevent abuse, interrogators are limited to a staff role so that the simple existence of the MP's becomes a restraint upon what they are able to do. Interrogators seek information that may save the lives of their comrades and have a tremendous incentive to use intimidation right up to the boundary of acceptable use. Once the interrogators were placed in charge, the limits were removed and they directed the MP's, unfamiliar with the limits and undisciplined by previous experience, to soften up the prisoners...

To a personnel officer, the worm in the apple was a simple bureaucratic decision, the equal opportunity assignment to unit command without consideration of sex.... No values are higher in the Arab world than male honor and female purity. Placing a woman in charge of Iraq prisons when the U.S. was trying to win the hearts and minds of the population was an affront to this culture.

Even when Gen. Karpinski was finally disciplined, the liberal cultural niceties remained so powerful that she was merely given a letter of reprimand that would keep her from being promoted, when she had already decided to retire.

So a little bureaucratic rule based upon progressive utopianism and political correctness collided with a foreign culture based upon male honor. The resulting pictures will fill al Qaeda's ranks with terrorists for generations to come".

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A CONFESSION?

"WE do rash things when a gun's easily at hand"? So this Australian Greenie says .... Have others got to pay for her lack of self-control?

"New South Wales Premier Bob Carr is being called on to show leadership on gun control and convene a summit to further tighten firearm laws.

A recent triple murder-suicide has prompted the Greens' Lee Rhiannon to say there are too many guns in circulation. She says while most licensed gun holders abide by the strict controls for gun storage, others do not.

"We all know we all lose our temper in the heat of the moment," she said. "We do rash things when a gun's easily at hand on top of the cupboard, in the boot of the car, people grab it and regret using it afterwards."

But the Sporting Shooters Association says it is the state of mental services which are the problem, not guns."

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