Bad Apples

A confidential U.S. Army report contains graphic details of widespread abuse of detainees in Afghanistan in 2002 carried out by "young and poorly trained soldiers" The New York Times reported on Friday.

So we've got "young and poorly trained" soldiers committing the same sorts of atrocities in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan -- yet somehow it's the perpetrators, but not the trainers, who are to be held responsible.

That's George Bush's America. But, anybody wanna hazard a guess as to what the "young and poorly trained soldiers" would have been doing in the following cases had they been properly trained?

In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers described mistreatment ranging from a female interrogator stepping on a detainee's neck and kicking another in the genitals to a shackled prisoner being made to kiss the boots of interrogators as he rolled back and forth on the floor of a cell, according to the newspaper.

Another prisoner was made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum filled with a mixture of excrement and water to soften him up for interrogation, the report said.

I mean, that's some training gone seriously awry, isn't it?

Posted by Eddie Tews at May 25, 2005 04:11 PM