More articles!
Feb. 3rd, 2006 12:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
First things first, I'll clear out my bookmarked links. I don't have credit-ing ability for most of these, so comment if you recognize one you think I snatched from you. Or don't. Whatever.
A recap (hysterical!) of the State of the Union. Thanks,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
literalgirl!
Mario 64 in 16 minutes (and a few seconds). Frankly, some of those jumps this guy made scare me. *shudders* Thanks,maladaptive! (I think)
On the clumsiest loss of historic vases ever. Like something out of a cartoon. *giggles* Thanks, whoever you are!
The Very Old Warning To Pat Robertson, who has abandoned science. Thanks, whoever you are!
Now, on to some more full-fledged articles.
On the increase of criminals in the military
Out of jail, into the Army
Facing an enlistment crisis, the Army is granting "waivers" to an increasingly high percentage of recruits with criminal records -- and trying to hide it.
By Mark Benjamin
Feb. 02, 2006 | We're transforming our military. The things I look for are the following: morale, retention, and recruitment. And retention is high, recruitment is meeting goals, and people are feeling strong about the mission.
-- George W. Bush, in a Jan. 26 press conference
It was about 10 p.m. on Sept. 1, 2002, when a drug deal was arranged in the parking lot of a mini-mall in Newark, Del. The car with the drugs, driven by a man who would become a recruit for the Delaware Air National Guard, pulled up next to a parked car that was waiting for the exchange. Everything was going smoothly until the cops arrived.
"I parked and walked over to his car and got in and we were talking," the future Air Guardsman later wrote. "He asked if I had any marijuana and I said yes, that I bought some in Wilmington, Del., earlier that day. He said he wanted some." The drug dealer went on to recount in a Jan. 11, 2005, statement written to win admission into the military, "I walked back to my car [and] as soon as I got in my car an officer put his flashlight in the window and arrested me."
Under Air National Guard rules, the dealer had committed a "major offense" that would bar him from military service. Air National Guard recruits, like other members of the military, cannot have drug convictions on their record. But on Feb. 2, 2005, the applicant who had been arrested in the mini-mall was admitted into the Delaware Air National Guard. How? Through the use of a little-known, but increasingly important, escape clause known as a waiver. Waivers, which are generally approved at the Pentagon, allow recruiters to sign up men and women who otherwise would be ineligible for service because of legal convictions, medical problems or other reasons preventing them from meeting minimum standards.
The story of that unnamed Air National Guard recruit (whose name is blacked out in his statement) is based on documents obtained by Salon under the Freedom of Information Act. It illustrates one of the tactics that the military is using in its uphill battle to meet recruiting targets during the Iraq war. The personnel problems are acute. The Air National Guard, for example, missed its recruiting target by 14 percent last year. And the regular Army missed its goal by 8 percent, its largest recruiting shortfall since 1979.
This is where waivers come in. According to statistics provided to Salon by the office of the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, the Army said that 17 percent (21,880 new soldiers) of its 2005 recruits were admitted under waivers. Put another way, more soldiers than are in an entire infantry division entered the Army in 2005 without meeting normal standards. This use of waivers represents a 42 percent increase since the pre-Iraq year of 2000. (All annual figures used in this article are based on the government's fiscal year, which runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30. So fiscal year 2006 began Oct. 1, 2005.)
In fact, even the already high rate of 17 percent underestimates the use of waivers, as the Pentagon combined the Army's figures with the lower ones for reserve forces to dilute the apparent percentage. Equally significant is the Army's currently liberal use of "moral waivers," which are issued to recruits who have committed what are loosely defined as criminal offenses. Officially, the Pentagon states that most waivers issued on moral grounds are for minor infractions like traffic tickets. Yet documents obtained by Salon show that many of the offenses are more serious and include drunken driving and domestic abuse.
Last year, 37 percent of the Army's waivers (about 8,000 soldiers) were based on moral grounds. Like waivers as a whole, these waivers are proliferating -- they're 32 percent higher than in the prewar year of 2000. As a result, the odds are going up that the soldiers fighting and taking the casualties in Iraq entered the Army with a criminal record.
"The more of those people you take, the more problems you are going to have and the less effective they are going to be," said Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan and a senior fellow at the progressive Center for American Progress. "This is another way you are lowering your standards to meet your goals." Retired Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, who was the Army's chief intelligence officer from 1981 to 1985, also called the increase in waivers "disturbing."
He expressed concern that the lower standards would place a burden on military commanders who have to deal with "more lawbreakers and soldiers with anti-social behavior in their units."
Even without the waivers, the Army has lowered its standards for enlistees. The Army has eased restrictions on recruiting high school dropouts. It also raised the maximum recruitment age from 35 to 39. Moreover, last fall the Army announced that it would be doubling the number of soldiers that it admits who score near the bottom on a military aptitude test.
In response to inquiries about the number of waivers being used, the Pentagon's assistant secretary for public affairs issued a three-page statement to Salon on Monday, headlined, "Military Recruiting -- High Standards With Limited Waivers." Regarding the use of moral waivers, it argues that "in most cases, the [criminal] charges were from a time when the applicant was young and immature." The Pentagon document contends that many waivers were "simply for an unusual number of traffic violations." It also cites as typical in waiver cases such minor offenses as "curfew violations, littering, disorderly conduct, etc."
Other Pentagon officials, who requested anonymity, cautioned against regarding this statement from the public affairs desk as the definitive word on the waiver question. These personnel experts stressed that the Army has a major problem with its use of exemptions from normal enlistment standards. These sources went on to say that the Army's statistical data appears to have been scrubbed to make its use of waivers look more infrequent than it actually is.
One Pentagon official, whom Salon asked to inspect the Army's official waiver figure, said the Army's claim that it has issued waivers to 17 percent of recruits "is not a correct number." In fact, the percentage should be higher. The Army has made the number appear lower by combining data from Army Reserve forces, including the Army National Guard -- even though the Guard has its own separate recruiting program and (based on information provided to Salon under the FOIA) used waivers in only 6 percent of all cases in 2005.
When pressed, the office of public affairs admitted that it had lumped together data from several military services to derive the official Army waiver number. Lt. Col. Ellen G. Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman in the office of public affairs, confirmed that the data provided to Salon had combined the waivers records of the regular Army, the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard into a single entry. She confirmed by e-mail: "Yes, these numbers include the active duty and reserve components."
Krenke referred questions about the Army's actual waiver rate to its Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky. Julia Bobick, an Army spokeswoman there, said her unit had received the document that the Pentagon had provided Salon and was "re-looking" at its own data in light of the follow-up questions. Until that reexamination is complete, Bobick said, the Army would have no additional comment. "The numbers that we have are not releasable," she said. "We are re-looking at these numbers in light of that query."
In short, the military's explanation seems a variant of Catch-22. Officials now admit that the Army waiver data originally given to Salon was contaminated with extraneous numbers, but the Army cannot comment on what its actual waiver percentage might be, since the Pentagon figures are so muddled. When told of these numbers games, Korb said, "I'm sure that somebody on Capitol Hill is going to demand the answers."
It is no secret to Congress that the Army, which is fighting the brunt of the war in Iraq, is facing a severe personnel crisis. A Pentagon-commissioned report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments leaked last week warned that prolonged deployments and recruiting problems were "breaking" the Army. A chapter of that report, titled "A Recruiting and Retention Crisis?" goes so far as to say that the grind of war on the Army -- rather than any political imperatives from Washington -- will accentuate the pace of military withdrawal from Iraq.
Odom offered a similar interpretation: "We will get out this year, not because we want to; we don't have any more troops to send. What we are seeing is the declining capability of the Army caused by the administration's manning and deployment policies."
A contrary, though far from surprising, view was offered by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Asked about the report warning of a broken Army at a press conference last week, Rumsfeld said, "I just can't imagine someone looking at the United States armed forces today and suggesting that they are close to breaking."
This fits with the Pentagon's official response that most Army waivers on moral grounds are for minor infractions like traffic tickets and littering. While there is no way to independently verify those claims regarding the Army, records from another branch of service suggest how recruiting waivers can easily be misused.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, Salon obtained copies of a one-inch stack of waivers granted by the Air National Guard from January to July 2005. Many of the offenses excused are significantly more serious than driving with a defective tail light or failing to return overdue library books.
Lt. Gen. Daniel James III, the Air National Guard director, told the House Committee on Armed Services last July 19, "The Air National Guard's success is rooted in the quality of our recruits and our ability to retain them. Our people are unequivocally our most valued resource."
Yet according to the waivers, just four days earlier the Air Guard's national headquarters had approved the enlistment of a California recruit who had been charged in October 2003 with "assault by means likely to produce great bodily injury." True, the recruit was a 17-year-old juvenile when he committed the crime for which he was later convicted, but that date was less than two years before he was admitted to the Air Guard.
# Other examples from the Air Guard files suggest a wider problem: After his parents filed a domestic-abuse complaint against him in 2000, a recruit in Rhode Island was sentenced to one year of probation, ordered to have "no contact" with his parents, and required to undergo counseling and to pay court costs. Air National Guard rules say domestic violence convictions make recruits ineligible -- no exceptions granted. But the records show that the recruiter in this case brought the issue to an Air Guard staff judge advocate, who reviewed the file and determined that the offense did not "meet the domestic violence crime criteria." As a result of this waiver, the recruit was admitted to his state's Air Guard on May 3, 2005.
# A recruit with DWI violations in June 2001 and April 2002 received a waiver to enter the Iowa Air National Guard on July 15, 2005. The waiver request from the Iowa Guard to the Pentagon declares that the recruit "realizes that he made the wrong decision to drink and drive."
# Another recruit for the Rhode Island Air National Guard finished five years of probation in 2002 for breaking and entering, apparently into his girlfriend's house. A waiver got him into the Guard in June 2005.
# A recruit convicted in January 2004 for possession of marijuana, drug paraphernalia and stolen license-plate tags got into the Hawaii Air National Guard with a waiver little more than a year later, on March 3, 2005.
Taken together, the troubling statistics from the Army and anecdotal information derived from the files of the Air National Guard raise a warning flag about the extent to which the military is lowering its standards to fight the war in Iraq. The president may be correct in his recent press conference boast that "we're transforming the military." But the abuse of recruiting waivers prompts the question: In what direction is this military transformation headed?
On people who way overspend on their babies
Ringing up baby
Rich, older moms in N.Y. and Chicago are snapping up $1,240 diaper bags and $500 bassinets. But the rest of the country is about to throw an enormous tantrum.
By Dale Hrabi
Feb. 02, 2006 | "Babies know so little about what's going on, sweetie," says posh infant-togs designer Lucy Sykes of the new compulsion among urbanites to pamper their indifferent newborns in luxury. "It's really for the parents." A former fashion editor and socialite sister to "Bergdorf Blondes" author Plum, she has a point: To date, no infant has actually requested a $45 bottle of Burberry Baby Touch Eau de Toilette Spray. Or signaled his approval of the $1,240 Louis Vuitton Diaper bag. Or wept because Citibabes, the new private club for New York City parents with a $2,000 annual fee, declined to let him crawl into its prestigious walls. Still, as Sykes, who describes her fall/winter line as perfect for "a nice baby tea at the Carlyle Hotel," confesses, "A lot of my Manhattan friends are spending so much on their babies they can't afford to go out for dinner anymore!"
While wealthy parents like these are forced to forgo necessities like peekie toe crab appetizers, the kids upscale product industry has been raking in an estimated $45 billion annually. Why the boom? As more U.S. moms wait until their relatively affluent 30s to give birth and race to give their offspring every possible competitive advantage, 30,000-square-foot "baby superstores" (such as the delicately named Buy Buy Baby), Euro-tot boutiques, and "educational" software companies are proliferating to suck up that affluence as efficiently as the $200 Whisper Wear Hands-Free Double Breast Pump extracts milk.
The lengths to which the baby industrial complex will go to exploit these avid parental consumers is surreal. Foreign language institutes in the well-heeled suburbs of Westchester County, near Manhattan, eagerly teach infants as young as 6 months old 11 different languages. Parents can skip the Mandarin class, of course, if they've managed to outbid the competition for a rare Chinese-speaking nanny -- crucial in case their babies show an early interest in controlling the new global economy. (Sadly, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, Bay Area parents increasingly have to make do with an Ethiopian or Eritrean caregiver, or even a passé Laotian.)
Anxious to inculcate your baby with a taste for minimalist European appliances? Fifty bucks can get you a 10-inch-tall replica of a Miele stove or washing machine. Why not a baby cot designed by Phillipe Starck? A $650 modernist doll house with its own garden and pool house? You may even be tempted to spring for a crib that vibrates soothingly -- a must for rattled infants who've been forced to take their first obesity-preventing swimming lesson, as the Daily Telegraph (London) reports, when only1 day old. If baby rejects such robotic lulling, a $100 "Why Cry" gadget, the world's first patented baby cry analyzer, will announce in just 20 seconds whether her wails indicate that she's "annoyed, bored, hungry, sleepy ... showing signs of stress/colic" -- or simply appalled by her parents' gullibility.
Perhaps most ludicrous of all: The people behind the Posh Tots catalog -- one of dozens targeted at spendthrift parents -- have seen fit to combine the uniquely incompatible words "child" and "chandelier," hawking 91 variations of this nursery must-have, from the folksy "Cow Over the Moon Chandelier" ($630) to the Classic Crystal Chandelier ($1,230), a miniature masterpiece of pretension.
Even the normally imaginative designer Marc Jacobs, who recently unleashed $400 cashmere baby hoodies on the planet, has said: "I can't imagine any of my friends not wanting to spoil their kids rotten." Try harder, Marc.
Yet signs of a growing baby-luxury backlash are appearing. A New York Times piece about $900 sidewalk-hogging Bugaboo strollers here. Exasperated posts on mothering blogs there. Pointedly irreverent books, such as "The Three-Martini Playdate: A Practical Guide to Happy Parenting," are openly mocking moms and dads who over-coddle. When Jeff Howe and Alysia Abbott, an expectant Brooklyn couple, were searching for baby names last summer, Howe dismissed several of Abbott's suggestions -- Spencer, Sebastian, the admittedly indefensible Willem -- with a weary: "Too Bugaboo." Which is to say, "too ubiquitously yuppie." One senses they're not alone.
One senses, too, that they'd be equally troubled by Cookie, the new shopping/lifestyle magazine for upscale parents, a distractingly beautiful title that favors $115 toddler haircuts and unapologetically JonBenet-ish photos of preschoolers fiercely clutching "mom's" $2,300 purse. With its debut issue, editor in chief Pilar Guzmán, a frank, incisive woman who says things like "booze becomes a big friend in the early years of parenting," made a valiant effort to walk the line between "aspirational" and "galling," with several nods toward affordability. But as she puts it, "My readers want to curate a certain lifestyle for themselves that isn't necessarily the norm." So true: The magazine suggests you buy your kids single stock shares, conveniently framed, to hang in their rooms.
The New York Observer called Cookie "horrifying." Fortune implicated it in what's being called "the prince and princess syndrome." A reviewer on bloggingbaby.com, the popular blog for moms, seemed to agree: "Cookie had me gagging on my tongue and shrieking ... my husband calmed me down by reminding me that, "We're middle class. We're just middle class, it's okay. This isn't targeted at you." Another scornful mom posted: "[The magazine] seems to reflect a one-upmanship that's been going on in the parenting world." The sole pro-Cookie comment -- "Do you know how nice it feels to dress your child in $200 boots, a $300 outfit, and a $400 coat? You feel honestly proud" -- was slammed by a queasy poster: "You should feel honestly ashamed."
Sighs Guzmán: "People get very self-righteous when it comes to parenting." For her, the real value of the baby-product explosion isn't the proliferation of "status" items, but an influx of good design, the sort she says sophisticated parents demand. And it's true: Never before have aesthetics so informed a parent's arsenal; even mundane potties and pacifiers have been subjected to Italian design exercises. "I don't know anyone in New York or Chicago who's having a baby before 32," Guzmán says. This older mother, she says, is "often someone who's traveled, who's evolved. She doesn't want her house covered in Barney and plastic." Not that Guzmán believes in total design ruthlessness, especially where her own child's yearnings are involved. "We have the SuperSaucer," she admits with a mixture of pain and tenderness, "which is the ugliest thing in the world."
Unfortunately, says Elise Mac Adam, a screenwriter and mother in her 30s who pens the blog Indiemom, which critiques ludicrous parenting, so many of these hiply designed objects become obsolete the second your baby outgrows them. So you honored your exacting design standards and bought the $500 neo-Eamesian Ooba Nest bassinet in walnut? "What do you do with it afterwards?" she asks. (Unlike, she points out, the legendary David Netto Design changing table, conceived to evolve into grown-up furniture.)
Mac Adam reserves special disdain for parents she sees in New York's Upper East Side pushing the pauncey Silver Cross pram (which, as a piece of traditional design, rivals a Bugatti). This pram, she says, only works for a month or two, since most kids want to ride sitting up fairly quickly. "It seems like those parents don't even need to think about practicality," she says. "They don't live in the same world as I do. They live in a fantasy."
There's no time for outrage at another popular blog, Baby Chic 101, updated by Patty Shaw, 25, a childless teacher who's nonetheless nuts about baby stuff. Not when product-deprived moms are awaiting posts like "Britney's Car Seat-Correction!" and "Opinion: Why there should be more Buy Bye Babys." In the latter, Shaw confronts some hard realities: "Sadly," she states, "there are only eight [Buy Buy Baby stores] total on our lovely planet. Eight!?" But, after urging her readers to pilgrimage to these outlets and agitate for a national expansion program, she rousingly concludes: "Together we can change the baby world. One top-notch store at a time."
"This is a phenomenon called displacement consumption," says James Twitchell, Ph.D., author of "Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism." "It always comes out of anxiety and what's more anxiety-provoking than, My god, I have a baby?" He points out that consumerist parents too conflicted to conspicuously indulge themselves (selfish!) sidestep guilt by buying their newborn a status stroller (doting!). "You're spending on your baby, though," says Twitchell, "so the assumption is: No one's going to criticize me."
Another driving force behind such extravagance, Twitchell argues, is the universal need for community. "Americans used to be defined by how we went to church, or by our schools. But now it's really about consumption communities. The question becomes: 'Can you assemble, by buying things, a coherent presentation of the self as part of a community?'" (Bugaboo parents, unite!)
"Have you seen this new magazine, Noodle?" he asks.
Cookie, perhaps?
"Yes, Cookie. I have never seen a clearer acknowledgement that children have been reduced to accessories."
Dr. Margaret Wehrenberg, a clinical psychologist who practices in an affluent Chicago suburb and lectures on "The Overindulged Child," has seen the unsightly consequences of that attitude. "The risk is making your baby an object, someone who eventually learns that her primary value to you is the way she looks. And out of that can grow a child who's consumed with appearance. Anorexia. Compulsive exercise."
Not to mention one who's lazy and unmotivated. "As we all know," says Wehrenberg, "desiring something and knowing you have the potential to get it causes you to work hard and feel very satisfied when you get it. But kids from wealthy families are getting everything they want. They literally have nothing to work for."
Competitive parents who lavish their babies with Ooba bassinets and Russian language classes at 6 months, she says, often develop a mind-set that they can buy their children everything they need. "But what growing children's minds really need," she says, "is time for free play. Time to just stare into space and allow the brain to rest, to form new connections, new ideas, and learn how to soothe itself."
It's all very dire. One can only hope that, just as prosperous Americans tired of the novelty of overindulging their dogs, and moved onto babies, their focus might soon shift to something less likely to lapse into indolence. Plants, maybe. Plants would be a lot more impressive with individual Marc Jacobs cashmere leaf-covers.
Indiemom's Mac Adam, who knows a compulsive stroller-collector ("she has six for two kids"), gave up trying to wow other parents with infant paraphernalia long ago. The emotional cost was too high. "My first visit to Buy Buy Baby made me feel like a loser," she says. "The sheer volume of stuff, and the sheer number of choices that had to be made." Not to mention all the hyper-focused, salivating moms. She says she lost it "somewhere near the cribs and co-sleepers." She didn't quite make it out intact. "I started weeping on the stairs."
People who kill foreign soldiers are apparently not themselves bound to the same laws as the rest of us.
More than a "few rotten apples"
A U.S. soldier who tortured an Iraqi general to death got his wrist slapped. Yet his appalling sentence made a certain sense.
By Brig. Gen. David Irvine and David Danzig
Jan. 27, 2006 | Earlier this week at Fort Carson in Colorado, the military jury that heard charges of murder against Chief Warrant Officer Lewis E. Welshofer delivered a bold and stunning version of justice -- a sentence amounting to a slap on the wrist. Welshofer was on trial for the death of Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush: After Mowhoush's capture in western Iraq in November 2003, Welshofer, an experienced Army interrogator, bound him and stuffed him in a sleeping bag, and then sat on Mowhoush's chest in an effort to pry from him information about the Iraqi insurgency. The Iraqi general suffocated.
A jury trial always has three defendants: the accused, the prosecutor and the law. In this one, part of which we observed from the courtroom last week, the three captains, two majors and one lieutenant colonel on the jury spared the defendant, indicted the prosecutor, and found the law irrelevant.
A primary aspect of Welshofer's defense was the claim that Welshofer had been operating under confusing guidelines, and that his superiors had been aware of the "claustrophobic" interrogation technique he used. With a verdict of negligent homicide and dereliction of duty against Welshofer, the jury spared him from a more serious murder conviction and life in prison. Even the lesser verdict could have carried a three-year prison sentence. But the jury imposed a sentence that called only for a letter of reprimand, two months' confinement to post, and forfeiture of $6,000 in pay. In essence, the jury took revenge upon the prosecution for wasting a week of the jurors' time by bringing a charge that the jury, evidently, felt was not warranted under the circumstances of combat.
Stung by the photographs of torture from Abu Ghraib, the Army touts the vigor with which it is investigating and punishing soldiers who are found to have abused prisoners. Pentagon spokespeople regularly refer to "more than 500 investigations and more than 300 instances of disciplinary action" as a result. With this latest sentence in a homicide case, it's time to either drop the pretense and spend the trial money on more body armor, or get real about accountability for enforcing the laws of war.
Juries are a check and balance in our system of justice. Military law does not allow the Welshofer jury to publicly explain its conclusions, but its sentencing decision was so disproportional to the facts in evidence and the spectrum of punishments for other instances of criminal conduct that it begs for careful analysis. It would be a mistake to conclude that the jury's light slap on Welshofer's wrist was a matter of a Fort Carson military jury looking out for a Fort Carson military officer. Prisoner torture is an issue about which the jury officers were undoubtedly well-read at this point, and of strong opinions. Those opinions remain unknown, but the Army ought to be digging for the answers.
On the most elemental level, justice requires proportionality and comparability of punishment for criminal conduct of similar gravity. Could the jury have been unaware that three Abu Ghraib defendants -- who, unlike Welshofer, didn't kill anyone -- are serving prison terms of three, eight and 10 years? Is there a different standard of punishment for junior enlisted reservists versus senior regular Army warrant officers? While she acted inexcusably, Pvt. Lynndie England had received little to no training for her guard duties at Abu Ghraib; Welshofer, 43, was thoroughly trained as an Army interrogator and in what the Geneva Conventions require and allow. England will spend three years in the Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth; Welshofer, vastly senior in status, responsibility and experience, wasn't even confined to his quarters. Until the Army can explain how Welshofer's sentence meets a minimal standard of equal justice under the law, the disciplinary score card it trots out is meaningless.
The jury's decision also underscores the pattern in the Army and at the Pentagon of enforcing accountability for prisoner torture at the bottom of the ranks, without any serious effort to enforce it at the top. If Welshofer was singled out by prosecutors for "trying to save soldiers' lives" under ambiguous or contradictory command guidance -- which his defense attorneys hammered at over and over during the court martial -- why hasn't the Army focused its prosecutorial lasers on those generals who fumbled the command guidance, or upon those colonels who were responsible for seeing that only approved interrogation techniques were put to use?
One striking fact to come out of the Welshofer trial was that he was operating on his own, with little direct supervision by his company commander, or the commanders up the chain of command. Were the jurors aware that of all the generals whose fingerprints were on Abu Ghraib, only one was ever disciplined by receiving a reduction in rank to colonel? Was it lost upon the jurors that the regimental commander, for whom Welshofer was his prized interrogation "subject-matter expert," was now serving in a plum Pentagon post while Welshofer was facing life in prison? This juxtaposition surely must have seemed discordant to the jury, especially knowing that the Army Field Manual -- also known as the Army's "operations bible" -- states: “The commander is responsible for all his unit does or fails to do.”
It may also have seemed discordant that an Army warrant officer alone was in the dock for alleged brutality and torture when "other U.S. civilians" involved in Mowhoush's capture -- presumably meaning CIA personnel and the Iraqi paramilitaries in their employ -- severely beat an enemy army flag officer, who was clearly entitled to Geneva Conventions protections, within an inch of his life.
The Welshofer case puts a fine point on a question that has plagued us since Abu Ghraib: Is the Army institutionally capable of dealing with the debacle of torture? The Army and the nation cannot afford to have soldiers draw the obvious lesson from the case's nonsensical outcome: that in combat, the ends justify the means, and the Geneva Conventions and the McCain anti-torture amendment are subject to change depending on the circumstances or executive whim. Since the Army seems to have no inclination to enforce the principles of command discipline and accountability among the senior ranks, the corrosive effects of U.S. torture in Iraq and elsewhere will continue to haunt any efforts to regain lost stature and credibility in the world.
"I deeply apologize if my actions tarnished the soldiers serving in Iraq," Welshofer said to the jury at his trial's close. His actions -- and even more the military's woefully inadequate response to them -- have tarnished far more than that.
A recap (hysterical!) of the State of the Union. Thanks,
literalgirl!Mario 64 in 16 minutes (and a few seconds). Frankly, some of those jumps this guy made scare me. *shudders* Thanks,
maladaptive! (I think)On the clumsiest loss of historic vases ever. Like something out of a cartoon. *giggles* Thanks, whoever you are!
The Very Old Warning To Pat Robertson, who has abandoned science. Thanks, whoever you are!
Now, on to some more full-fledged articles.
On the increase of criminals in the military
Out of jail, into the Army
Facing an enlistment crisis, the Army is granting "waivers" to an increasingly high percentage of recruits with criminal records -- and trying to hide it.
By Mark Benjamin
Feb. 02, 2006 | We're transforming our military. The things I look for are the following: morale, retention, and recruitment. And retention is high, recruitment is meeting goals, and people are feeling strong about the mission.
-- George W. Bush, in a Jan. 26 press conference
It was about 10 p.m. on Sept. 1, 2002, when a drug deal was arranged in the parking lot of a mini-mall in Newark, Del. The car with the drugs, driven by a man who would become a recruit for the Delaware Air National Guard, pulled up next to a parked car that was waiting for the exchange. Everything was going smoothly until the cops arrived.
"I parked and walked over to his car and got in and we were talking," the future Air Guardsman later wrote. "He asked if I had any marijuana and I said yes, that I bought some in Wilmington, Del., earlier that day. He said he wanted some." The drug dealer went on to recount in a Jan. 11, 2005, statement written to win admission into the military, "I walked back to my car [and] as soon as I got in my car an officer put his flashlight in the window and arrested me."
Under Air National Guard rules, the dealer had committed a "major offense" that would bar him from military service. Air National Guard recruits, like other members of the military, cannot have drug convictions on their record. But on Feb. 2, 2005, the applicant who had been arrested in the mini-mall was admitted into the Delaware Air National Guard. How? Through the use of a little-known, but increasingly important, escape clause known as a waiver. Waivers, which are generally approved at the Pentagon, allow recruiters to sign up men and women who otherwise would be ineligible for service because of legal convictions, medical problems or other reasons preventing them from meeting minimum standards.
The story of that unnamed Air National Guard recruit (whose name is blacked out in his statement) is based on documents obtained by Salon under the Freedom of Information Act. It illustrates one of the tactics that the military is using in its uphill battle to meet recruiting targets during the Iraq war. The personnel problems are acute. The Air National Guard, for example, missed its recruiting target by 14 percent last year. And the regular Army missed its goal by 8 percent, its largest recruiting shortfall since 1979.
This is where waivers come in. According to statistics provided to Salon by the office of the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, the Army said that 17 percent (21,880 new soldiers) of its 2005 recruits were admitted under waivers. Put another way, more soldiers than are in an entire infantry division entered the Army in 2005 without meeting normal standards. This use of waivers represents a 42 percent increase since the pre-Iraq year of 2000. (All annual figures used in this article are based on the government's fiscal year, which runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30. So fiscal year 2006 began Oct. 1, 2005.)
In fact, even the already high rate of 17 percent underestimates the use of waivers, as the Pentagon combined the Army's figures with the lower ones for reserve forces to dilute the apparent percentage. Equally significant is the Army's currently liberal use of "moral waivers," which are issued to recruits who have committed what are loosely defined as criminal offenses. Officially, the Pentagon states that most waivers issued on moral grounds are for minor infractions like traffic tickets. Yet documents obtained by Salon show that many of the offenses are more serious and include drunken driving and domestic abuse.
Last year, 37 percent of the Army's waivers (about 8,000 soldiers) were based on moral grounds. Like waivers as a whole, these waivers are proliferating -- they're 32 percent higher than in the prewar year of 2000. As a result, the odds are going up that the soldiers fighting and taking the casualties in Iraq entered the Army with a criminal record.
"The more of those people you take, the more problems you are going to have and the less effective they are going to be," said Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan and a senior fellow at the progressive Center for American Progress. "This is another way you are lowering your standards to meet your goals." Retired Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, who was the Army's chief intelligence officer from 1981 to 1985, also called the increase in waivers "disturbing."
He expressed concern that the lower standards would place a burden on military commanders who have to deal with "more lawbreakers and soldiers with anti-social behavior in their units."
Even without the waivers, the Army has lowered its standards for enlistees. The Army has eased restrictions on recruiting high school dropouts. It also raised the maximum recruitment age from 35 to 39. Moreover, last fall the Army announced that it would be doubling the number of soldiers that it admits who score near the bottom on a military aptitude test.
In response to inquiries about the number of waivers being used, the Pentagon's assistant secretary for public affairs issued a three-page statement to Salon on Monday, headlined, "Military Recruiting -- High Standards With Limited Waivers." Regarding the use of moral waivers, it argues that "in most cases, the [criminal] charges were from a time when the applicant was young and immature." The Pentagon document contends that many waivers were "simply for an unusual number of traffic violations." It also cites as typical in waiver cases such minor offenses as "curfew violations, littering, disorderly conduct, etc."
Other Pentagon officials, who requested anonymity, cautioned against regarding this statement from the public affairs desk as the definitive word on the waiver question. These personnel experts stressed that the Army has a major problem with its use of exemptions from normal enlistment standards. These sources went on to say that the Army's statistical data appears to have been scrubbed to make its use of waivers look more infrequent than it actually is.
One Pentagon official, whom Salon asked to inspect the Army's official waiver figure, said the Army's claim that it has issued waivers to 17 percent of recruits "is not a correct number." In fact, the percentage should be higher. The Army has made the number appear lower by combining data from Army Reserve forces, including the Army National Guard -- even though the Guard has its own separate recruiting program and (based on information provided to Salon under the FOIA) used waivers in only 6 percent of all cases in 2005.
When pressed, the office of public affairs admitted that it had lumped together data from several military services to derive the official Army waiver number. Lt. Col. Ellen G. Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman in the office of public affairs, confirmed that the data provided to Salon had combined the waivers records of the regular Army, the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard into a single entry. She confirmed by e-mail: "Yes, these numbers include the active duty and reserve components."
Krenke referred questions about the Army's actual waiver rate to its Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky. Julia Bobick, an Army spokeswoman there, said her unit had received the document that the Pentagon had provided Salon and was "re-looking" at its own data in light of the follow-up questions. Until that reexamination is complete, Bobick said, the Army would have no additional comment. "The numbers that we have are not releasable," she said. "We are re-looking at these numbers in light of that query."
In short, the military's explanation seems a variant of Catch-22. Officials now admit that the Army waiver data originally given to Salon was contaminated with extraneous numbers, but the Army cannot comment on what its actual waiver percentage might be, since the Pentagon figures are so muddled. When told of these numbers games, Korb said, "I'm sure that somebody on Capitol Hill is going to demand the answers."
It is no secret to Congress that the Army, which is fighting the brunt of the war in Iraq, is facing a severe personnel crisis. A Pentagon-commissioned report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments leaked last week warned that prolonged deployments and recruiting problems were "breaking" the Army. A chapter of that report, titled "A Recruiting and Retention Crisis?" goes so far as to say that the grind of war on the Army -- rather than any political imperatives from Washington -- will accentuate the pace of military withdrawal from Iraq.
Odom offered a similar interpretation: "We will get out this year, not because we want to; we don't have any more troops to send. What we are seeing is the declining capability of the Army caused by the administration's manning and deployment policies."
A contrary, though far from surprising, view was offered by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Asked about the report warning of a broken Army at a press conference last week, Rumsfeld said, "I just can't imagine someone looking at the United States armed forces today and suggesting that they are close to breaking."
This fits with the Pentagon's official response that most Army waivers on moral grounds are for minor infractions like traffic tickets and littering. While there is no way to independently verify those claims regarding the Army, records from another branch of service suggest how recruiting waivers can easily be misused.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, Salon obtained copies of a one-inch stack of waivers granted by the Air National Guard from January to July 2005. Many of the offenses excused are significantly more serious than driving with a defective tail light or failing to return overdue library books.
Lt. Gen. Daniel James III, the Air National Guard director, told the House Committee on Armed Services last July 19, "The Air National Guard's success is rooted in the quality of our recruits and our ability to retain them. Our people are unequivocally our most valued resource."
Yet according to the waivers, just four days earlier the Air Guard's national headquarters had approved the enlistment of a California recruit who had been charged in October 2003 with "assault by means likely to produce great bodily injury." True, the recruit was a 17-year-old juvenile when he committed the crime for which he was later convicted, but that date was less than two years before he was admitted to the Air Guard.
# Other examples from the Air Guard files suggest a wider problem: After his parents filed a domestic-abuse complaint against him in 2000, a recruit in Rhode Island was sentenced to one year of probation, ordered to have "no contact" with his parents, and required to undergo counseling and to pay court costs. Air National Guard rules say domestic violence convictions make recruits ineligible -- no exceptions granted. But the records show that the recruiter in this case brought the issue to an Air Guard staff judge advocate, who reviewed the file and determined that the offense did not "meet the domestic violence crime criteria." As a result of this waiver, the recruit was admitted to his state's Air Guard on May 3, 2005.
# A recruit with DWI violations in June 2001 and April 2002 received a waiver to enter the Iowa Air National Guard on July 15, 2005. The waiver request from the Iowa Guard to the Pentagon declares that the recruit "realizes that he made the wrong decision to drink and drive."
# Another recruit for the Rhode Island Air National Guard finished five years of probation in 2002 for breaking and entering, apparently into his girlfriend's house. A waiver got him into the Guard in June 2005.
# A recruit convicted in January 2004 for possession of marijuana, drug paraphernalia and stolen license-plate tags got into the Hawaii Air National Guard with a waiver little more than a year later, on March 3, 2005.
Taken together, the troubling statistics from the Army and anecdotal information derived from the files of the Air National Guard raise a warning flag about the extent to which the military is lowering its standards to fight the war in Iraq. The president may be correct in his recent press conference boast that "we're transforming the military." But the abuse of recruiting waivers prompts the question: In what direction is this military transformation headed?
On people who way overspend on their babies
Ringing up baby
Rich, older moms in N.Y. and Chicago are snapping up $1,240 diaper bags and $500 bassinets. But the rest of the country is about to throw an enormous tantrum.
By Dale Hrabi
Feb. 02, 2006 | "Babies know so little about what's going on, sweetie," says posh infant-togs designer Lucy Sykes of the new compulsion among urbanites to pamper their indifferent newborns in luxury. "It's really for the parents." A former fashion editor and socialite sister to "Bergdorf Blondes" author Plum, she has a point: To date, no infant has actually requested a $45 bottle of Burberry Baby Touch Eau de Toilette Spray. Or signaled his approval of the $1,240 Louis Vuitton Diaper bag. Or wept because Citibabes, the new private club for New York City parents with a $2,000 annual fee, declined to let him crawl into its prestigious walls. Still, as Sykes, who describes her fall/winter line as perfect for "a nice baby tea at the Carlyle Hotel," confesses, "A lot of my Manhattan friends are spending so much on their babies they can't afford to go out for dinner anymore!"
While wealthy parents like these are forced to forgo necessities like peekie toe crab appetizers, the kids upscale product industry has been raking in an estimated $45 billion annually. Why the boom? As more U.S. moms wait until their relatively affluent 30s to give birth and race to give their offspring every possible competitive advantage, 30,000-square-foot "baby superstores" (such as the delicately named Buy Buy Baby), Euro-tot boutiques, and "educational" software companies are proliferating to suck up that affluence as efficiently as the $200 Whisper Wear Hands-Free Double Breast Pump extracts milk.
The lengths to which the baby industrial complex will go to exploit these avid parental consumers is surreal. Foreign language institutes in the well-heeled suburbs of Westchester County, near Manhattan, eagerly teach infants as young as 6 months old 11 different languages. Parents can skip the Mandarin class, of course, if they've managed to outbid the competition for a rare Chinese-speaking nanny -- crucial in case their babies show an early interest in controlling the new global economy. (Sadly, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, Bay Area parents increasingly have to make do with an Ethiopian or Eritrean caregiver, or even a passé Laotian.)
Anxious to inculcate your baby with a taste for minimalist European appliances? Fifty bucks can get you a 10-inch-tall replica of a Miele stove or washing machine. Why not a baby cot designed by Phillipe Starck? A $650 modernist doll house with its own garden and pool house? You may even be tempted to spring for a crib that vibrates soothingly -- a must for rattled infants who've been forced to take their first obesity-preventing swimming lesson, as the Daily Telegraph (London) reports, when only1 day old. If baby rejects such robotic lulling, a $100 "Why Cry" gadget, the world's first patented baby cry analyzer, will announce in just 20 seconds whether her wails indicate that she's "annoyed, bored, hungry, sleepy ... showing signs of stress/colic" -- or simply appalled by her parents' gullibility.
Perhaps most ludicrous of all: The people behind the Posh Tots catalog -- one of dozens targeted at spendthrift parents -- have seen fit to combine the uniquely incompatible words "child" and "chandelier," hawking 91 variations of this nursery must-have, from the folksy "Cow Over the Moon Chandelier" ($630) to the Classic Crystal Chandelier ($1,230), a miniature masterpiece of pretension.
Even the normally imaginative designer Marc Jacobs, who recently unleashed $400 cashmere baby hoodies on the planet, has said: "I can't imagine any of my friends not wanting to spoil their kids rotten." Try harder, Marc.
Yet signs of a growing baby-luxury backlash are appearing. A New York Times piece about $900 sidewalk-hogging Bugaboo strollers here. Exasperated posts on mothering blogs there. Pointedly irreverent books, such as "The Three-Martini Playdate: A Practical Guide to Happy Parenting," are openly mocking moms and dads who over-coddle. When Jeff Howe and Alysia Abbott, an expectant Brooklyn couple, were searching for baby names last summer, Howe dismissed several of Abbott's suggestions -- Spencer, Sebastian, the admittedly indefensible Willem -- with a weary: "Too Bugaboo." Which is to say, "too ubiquitously yuppie." One senses they're not alone.
One senses, too, that they'd be equally troubled by Cookie, the new shopping/lifestyle magazine for upscale parents, a distractingly beautiful title that favors $115 toddler haircuts and unapologetically JonBenet-ish photos of preschoolers fiercely clutching "mom's" $2,300 purse. With its debut issue, editor in chief Pilar Guzmán, a frank, incisive woman who says things like "booze becomes a big friend in the early years of parenting," made a valiant effort to walk the line between "aspirational" and "galling," with several nods toward affordability. But as she puts it, "My readers want to curate a certain lifestyle for themselves that isn't necessarily the norm." So true: The magazine suggests you buy your kids single stock shares, conveniently framed, to hang in their rooms.
The New York Observer called Cookie "horrifying." Fortune implicated it in what's being called "the prince and princess syndrome." A reviewer on bloggingbaby.com, the popular blog for moms, seemed to agree: "Cookie had me gagging on my tongue and shrieking ... my husband calmed me down by reminding me that, "We're middle class. We're just middle class, it's okay. This isn't targeted at you." Another scornful mom posted: "[The magazine] seems to reflect a one-upmanship that's been going on in the parenting world." The sole pro-Cookie comment -- "Do you know how nice it feels to dress your child in $200 boots, a $300 outfit, and a $400 coat? You feel honestly proud" -- was slammed by a queasy poster: "You should feel honestly ashamed."
Sighs Guzmán: "People get very self-righteous when it comes to parenting." For her, the real value of the baby-product explosion isn't the proliferation of "status" items, but an influx of good design, the sort she says sophisticated parents demand. And it's true: Never before have aesthetics so informed a parent's arsenal; even mundane potties and pacifiers have been subjected to Italian design exercises. "I don't know anyone in New York or Chicago who's having a baby before 32," Guzmán says. This older mother, she says, is "often someone who's traveled, who's evolved. She doesn't want her house covered in Barney and plastic." Not that Guzmán believes in total design ruthlessness, especially where her own child's yearnings are involved. "We have the SuperSaucer," she admits with a mixture of pain and tenderness, "which is the ugliest thing in the world."
Unfortunately, says Elise Mac Adam, a screenwriter and mother in her 30s who pens the blog Indiemom, which critiques ludicrous parenting, so many of these hiply designed objects become obsolete the second your baby outgrows them. So you honored your exacting design standards and bought the $500 neo-Eamesian Ooba Nest bassinet in walnut? "What do you do with it afterwards?" she asks. (Unlike, she points out, the legendary David Netto Design changing table, conceived to evolve into grown-up furniture.)
Mac Adam reserves special disdain for parents she sees in New York's Upper East Side pushing the pauncey Silver Cross pram (which, as a piece of traditional design, rivals a Bugatti). This pram, she says, only works for a month or two, since most kids want to ride sitting up fairly quickly. "It seems like those parents don't even need to think about practicality," she says. "They don't live in the same world as I do. They live in a fantasy."
There's no time for outrage at another popular blog, Baby Chic 101, updated by Patty Shaw, 25, a childless teacher who's nonetheless nuts about baby stuff. Not when product-deprived moms are awaiting posts like "Britney's Car Seat-Correction!" and "Opinion: Why there should be more Buy Bye Babys." In the latter, Shaw confronts some hard realities: "Sadly," she states, "there are only eight [Buy Buy Baby stores] total on our lovely planet. Eight!?" But, after urging her readers to pilgrimage to these outlets and agitate for a national expansion program, she rousingly concludes: "Together we can change the baby world. One top-notch store at a time."
"This is a phenomenon called displacement consumption," says James Twitchell, Ph.D., author of "Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism." "It always comes out of anxiety and what's more anxiety-provoking than, My god, I have a baby?" He points out that consumerist parents too conflicted to conspicuously indulge themselves (selfish!) sidestep guilt by buying their newborn a status stroller (doting!). "You're spending on your baby, though," says Twitchell, "so the assumption is: No one's going to criticize me."
Another driving force behind such extravagance, Twitchell argues, is the universal need for community. "Americans used to be defined by how we went to church, or by our schools. But now it's really about consumption communities. The question becomes: 'Can you assemble, by buying things, a coherent presentation of the self as part of a community?'" (Bugaboo parents, unite!)
"Have you seen this new magazine, Noodle?" he asks.
Cookie, perhaps?
"Yes, Cookie. I have never seen a clearer acknowledgement that children have been reduced to accessories."
Dr. Margaret Wehrenberg, a clinical psychologist who practices in an affluent Chicago suburb and lectures on "The Overindulged Child," has seen the unsightly consequences of that attitude. "The risk is making your baby an object, someone who eventually learns that her primary value to you is the way she looks. And out of that can grow a child who's consumed with appearance. Anorexia. Compulsive exercise."
Not to mention one who's lazy and unmotivated. "As we all know," says Wehrenberg, "desiring something and knowing you have the potential to get it causes you to work hard and feel very satisfied when you get it. But kids from wealthy families are getting everything they want. They literally have nothing to work for."
Competitive parents who lavish their babies with Ooba bassinets and Russian language classes at 6 months, she says, often develop a mind-set that they can buy their children everything they need. "But what growing children's minds really need," she says, "is time for free play. Time to just stare into space and allow the brain to rest, to form new connections, new ideas, and learn how to soothe itself."
It's all very dire. One can only hope that, just as prosperous Americans tired of the novelty of overindulging their dogs, and moved onto babies, their focus might soon shift to something less likely to lapse into indolence. Plants, maybe. Plants would be a lot more impressive with individual Marc Jacobs cashmere leaf-covers.
Indiemom's Mac Adam, who knows a compulsive stroller-collector ("she has six for two kids"), gave up trying to wow other parents with infant paraphernalia long ago. The emotional cost was too high. "My first visit to Buy Buy Baby made me feel like a loser," she says. "The sheer volume of stuff, and the sheer number of choices that had to be made." Not to mention all the hyper-focused, salivating moms. She says she lost it "somewhere near the cribs and co-sleepers." She didn't quite make it out intact. "I started weeping on the stairs."
People who kill foreign soldiers are apparently not themselves bound to the same laws as the rest of us.
More than a "few rotten apples"
A U.S. soldier who tortured an Iraqi general to death got his wrist slapped. Yet his appalling sentence made a certain sense.
By Brig. Gen. David Irvine and David Danzig
Jan. 27, 2006 | Earlier this week at Fort Carson in Colorado, the military jury that heard charges of murder against Chief Warrant Officer Lewis E. Welshofer delivered a bold and stunning version of justice -- a sentence amounting to a slap on the wrist. Welshofer was on trial for the death of Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush: After Mowhoush's capture in western Iraq in November 2003, Welshofer, an experienced Army interrogator, bound him and stuffed him in a sleeping bag, and then sat on Mowhoush's chest in an effort to pry from him information about the Iraqi insurgency. The Iraqi general suffocated.
A jury trial always has three defendants: the accused, the prosecutor and the law. In this one, part of which we observed from the courtroom last week, the three captains, two majors and one lieutenant colonel on the jury spared the defendant, indicted the prosecutor, and found the law irrelevant.
A primary aspect of Welshofer's defense was the claim that Welshofer had been operating under confusing guidelines, and that his superiors had been aware of the "claustrophobic" interrogation technique he used. With a verdict of negligent homicide and dereliction of duty against Welshofer, the jury spared him from a more serious murder conviction and life in prison. Even the lesser verdict could have carried a three-year prison sentence. But the jury imposed a sentence that called only for a letter of reprimand, two months' confinement to post, and forfeiture of $6,000 in pay. In essence, the jury took revenge upon the prosecution for wasting a week of the jurors' time by bringing a charge that the jury, evidently, felt was not warranted under the circumstances of combat.
Stung by the photographs of torture from Abu Ghraib, the Army touts the vigor with which it is investigating and punishing soldiers who are found to have abused prisoners. Pentagon spokespeople regularly refer to "more than 500 investigations and more than 300 instances of disciplinary action" as a result. With this latest sentence in a homicide case, it's time to either drop the pretense and spend the trial money on more body armor, or get real about accountability for enforcing the laws of war.
Juries are a check and balance in our system of justice. Military law does not allow the Welshofer jury to publicly explain its conclusions, but its sentencing decision was so disproportional to the facts in evidence and the spectrum of punishments for other instances of criminal conduct that it begs for careful analysis. It would be a mistake to conclude that the jury's light slap on Welshofer's wrist was a matter of a Fort Carson military jury looking out for a Fort Carson military officer. Prisoner torture is an issue about which the jury officers were undoubtedly well-read at this point, and of strong opinions. Those opinions remain unknown, but the Army ought to be digging for the answers.
On the most elemental level, justice requires proportionality and comparability of punishment for criminal conduct of similar gravity. Could the jury have been unaware that three Abu Ghraib defendants -- who, unlike Welshofer, didn't kill anyone -- are serving prison terms of three, eight and 10 years? Is there a different standard of punishment for junior enlisted reservists versus senior regular Army warrant officers? While she acted inexcusably, Pvt. Lynndie England had received little to no training for her guard duties at Abu Ghraib; Welshofer, 43, was thoroughly trained as an Army interrogator and in what the Geneva Conventions require and allow. England will spend three years in the Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth; Welshofer, vastly senior in status, responsibility and experience, wasn't even confined to his quarters. Until the Army can explain how Welshofer's sentence meets a minimal standard of equal justice under the law, the disciplinary score card it trots out is meaningless.
The jury's decision also underscores the pattern in the Army and at the Pentagon of enforcing accountability for prisoner torture at the bottom of the ranks, without any serious effort to enforce it at the top. If Welshofer was singled out by prosecutors for "trying to save soldiers' lives" under ambiguous or contradictory command guidance -- which his defense attorneys hammered at over and over during the court martial -- why hasn't the Army focused its prosecutorial lasers on those generals who fumbled the command guidance, or upon those colonels who were responsible for seeing that only approved interrogation techniques were put to use?
One striking fact to come out of the Welshofer trial was that he was operating on his own, with little direct supervision by his company commander, or the commanders up the chain of command. Were the jurors aware that of all the generals whose fingerprints were on Abu Ghraib, only one was ever disciplined by receiving a reduction in rank to colonel? Was it lost upon the jurors that the regimental commander, for whom Welshofer was his prized interrogation "subject-matter expert," was now serving in a plum Pentagon post while Welshofer was facing life in prison? This juxtaposition surely must have seemed discordant to the jury, especially knowing that the Army Field Manual -- also known as the Army's "operations bible" -- states: “The commander is responsible for all his unit does or fails to do.”
It may also have seemed discordant that an Army warrant officer alone was in the dock for alleged brutality and torture when "other U.S. civilians" involved in Mowhoush's capture -- presumably meaning CIA personnel and the Iraqi paramilitaries in their employ -- severely beat an enemy army flag officer, who was clearly entitled to Geneva Conventions protections, within an inch of his life.
The Welshofer case puts a fine point on a question that has plagued us since Abu Ghraib: Is the Army institutionally capable of dealing with the debacle of torture? The Army and the nation cannot afford to have soldiers draw the obvious lesson from the case's nonsensical outcome: that in combat, the ends justify the means, and the Geneva Conventions and the McCain anti-torture amendment are subject to change depending on the circumstances or executive whim. Since the Army seems to have no inclination to enforce the principles of command discipline and accountability among the senior ranks, the corrosive effects of U.S. torture in Iraq and elsewhere will continue to haunt any efforts to regain lost stature and credibility in the world.
"I deeply apologize if my actions tarnished the soldiers serving in Iraq," Welshofer said to the jury at his trial's close. His actions -- and even more the military's woefully inadequate response to them -- have tarnished far more than that.
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Date: 2006-02-03 04:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-03 04:59 am (UTC)