womenvets

For years, I’ve been telling anyone who listens that low-rate military personnel punished for the atrocities at the Abu Ghraib were ordered to do what they were accused of, or they would not have done what they did. Personnel of the 372^nd Military Police Co. of the U.S. Army were targeted and like the well-known Navy saying: shit rolls downhill.With accounts of abuse, torture, sodomy and homicide, beginning in 2004, the U.S. Department of Defense removed 17 soldiers from duty, and seven more were charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault and battery. Between May 2004 and September 2005, those seven soldiers were convicted in courts martial, sentenced to federal prison time and dishonorably discharged from service.
Two soldiers, Specialist Charles Graner, and his former fiancée, Specialist Lynndie England, were sentenced to 10 years and three years in prison, respectively. The commanding officer at the prison, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, was demoted to the rank of colonel in May 2005. Karpinski denied knowledge of the abuses claiming interrogations were authorized by superiors and she was not even allowed entry into the interrogation rooms.
Well, it was finally proven in December, the physical and mental abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was the direct result of Bush administration detention policies and is not to be dismissed as the work of bad guards or interrogators.
England, the female Army guard, who was plastered all over mainstream media pointing at detainees with a cigarette hanging from her mouth, should be released from jail, as should the rest of the convicted soldiers. They were doing what they were ordered to do.
Finally, with new President Barack Obama, the matter will not be swept under the rug. An unclassified version of the November 2008 report was released this week by the Senate Armed Services Committee. The “Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody” states top Bush administration officials ignored warnings from military advisers before approving torture methods, skipped a thorough legal review process, and failed to fully investigate the origins of the dangerous techniques they prescribed.
The report also states that the consequences of their actions trickled down to lower-ranking officers, leading directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Furthermore, according to a detailed timeline declassified by Attorney General Eric Holder.
As early as 2002, the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation methods was “reviewed and approved,” said one senior U.S. intelligence official, that “persistent, extreme”  interrogations were used because Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld demanded intelligence agencies “find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.”
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and former Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham) asked Obama to keep the door open to prosecutions. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), are reportedly organizing a “truth commission.”
Finally, some vindication for those set-up soldiers to take the fall for their superiors. That hardly ever happens, and hopefully, justice will be done.

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