Why Is Is Wrong To Criticize Soldiers That Commit Atrocities?

[DistressedAmerican]

Following the much discussed spitting on soldiers after Vietnam, the notion that is was fair to criticize soldiers that participate in ill-fated, illegal and immoral wars went right out the window. Fair enough. But, are there not some who deserve the criticism?

While, I agree that it is wrong to paint all returning soldiers with the baby killer brush, some certainly deserve the title. "The Troops" are not a monolithic entity. They are made up of individuals.

Many individual soldiers have done reprehensible things over there. Those that have committed immoral acts should be strongly criticized and punished.

When did criticism of the war become the equivalent of criticizing "the troops" and when did it become a no no to call soldiers out that commit these acts?

I recently read a great post about someone that enlisted the morning of Sept. 11. Didn't know about the attack until he came out of the office. He was sent to Iraq where he documented a huge number of abuses including an incident where the troops fired on a large group of detainees that were protesting their detention, killing several unarmed prisoners.

Following the shootings, the soldiers involved took pics with the detainees they had killed and posted them up in their headquarters. One pulled out a spoon and had his pic taken scooping out one dead prisoner's brains with a spoon. There is no possible excuse for such behavior, time of war or not!

The soldier refused to continue carrying a gun and demanded conscientious objector status. He has been touring the country with a slide show of these horrid shots. I for one am very glad that he is making a stand about what he witnessed over there. I feel no need to restrict my criticism of soldiers involved in such actions.

So my question is, "Is it wrong to criticize all troops or can I still criticize the ones that have crossed the line and committed revolting acts of immoral violence on the Iraqi people?"

Nobody should criticize all of the troops. But everyone should be criticizing some of them!

[mopaul]

1. it just is

bush quote regarding the 'absurd' charges about gitmo brought up by amnesty international. that's absurd, it just is.

[DistressedAmerican]

2. Anmesty International - "I Just Can't Take Them Seriously."

Dick Cheney - I just can't take YOU seriously! Pig fucker!

FYI - Your post got me thinking about this this morning. Thanks!

[whistle]

6. I can't and don't take anything that Dick Cheney, George W. Bush ...

...or any of BushCo people say seriously, because of their non-stop lies and distortions. However, I do have to take their actions and the actions of others who follow their policies seriously, because those actions and policies as causing pain and suffering and torture and deaths and murders of hundreds and thousands of people, most of whom are innocent victims.

[DistressedAmerican]

7. Ditto! Most Certainly Ditto!

[liberal N proud]

3. Well, Because the repukes tell us,

The President says it is bad for the troops if we are against the war.

The atrocities as you call them are committed against bad people, they be-head people and would want them to do that here or over there?

And you must remember WE ARE AT WAR! ok

:sarcasm:

Typical repuke response

[reality based]

4. What would Hitler Do?

If you are from Illinois, at the very least, you had better make clear that you are excluding the Mayor of Chicago's son from your criticism.

[DistressedAmerican]

5. Give The Abusers Promotions! Oh Wait, That's George.

[NeoGreen]

8. I think that the focus should be on those who...

created the situations that allowed the abuse to occur. Yes I agree that the individual enlisted members and of the military who committed the crimes should be punished appropriately, but it most definately should not stop there, the investigation(s) should proceed up the chain to both the top brass and civilians who created the policies that fostered the abuse.

Please do not paint all the troops with such a broad brush, the troops are us and we should be aware that each one of us could very easily have found ourselves in thier shoes. I'm not sure how I would have acted if my 19yo self was stationed in Gitmo with civilian "security" contractors telling me what to do.

The troops are in a tough spot and are being asked to do the impossible, let's not let our anger with the abuse cloud our judgement of who is ultimately responsible of the crimes committed by a few enlisted members and field officers. They did not make the policy that put them in the situation they found themselves in. Yes the will likely be found guilty of crimes under the UCMJ, but the focus should be on the higher ups.

(all IMHO)

[DistressedAmerican]

9. Both Groups Should Be Punished. Clearly The Command Needs To

be held accountable. However, minimizing the actions of those actually pulling the trigger does not help either.

It is not an either/or situation. They should all be criticized and punished.

I hope that if I was a 19 year old kid, I'd hang onto my humanity. The guy I posted on did.

Clearly, it is possible to refuse these immoral orders. Is it not every soldier's duty to refuse such orders?

[malmapus]

20. Well spoken DG

Welcome to the DU buddy :toast:

[DistressedAmerican]

10. Kick!

[radwriter0555]

11. I refuse to excuse soldiers on the line "they were just following orders."

The nazis who turned on the gas in auschwitz were "just following orders.'

The US troops on the Ho Chi Mihn Trail were "just following orders.'

The men who allowed three thousand Native American Indians to die on the Trail of Tears were "just following orders.'

Troops who fought each other in the Civil War were "just following orders.'

The Winter Solders were "just following orders.'

No matter what ORDERS US troops are following, they're still killing people for a nefarious regime, and killing people for a PAYCHECK. They CAN OBJECT.
THEY CAN WALK AWAY.
THEY make the choice to stay and commit criminal acts.

[Bridget Burke]

14. But those who give the illegal orders should not go free.

They didn't at Nuremberg.

[DistressedAmerican]

16. Never Meant To Imply They Shouldn't. They Should ALL Be Tried and Punished

[Vinca]

12. I agree with your post. Even when put in a horrible situation,

such as Iraq, soldiers cannot run amok as in the Abu Ghraib photos and other incidents that have been reported. The majority of soldiers are fine people, but that shouldn't stop us from pointing out the ones who aren't. War isn't a license to commit atrocities.

[seabeyond]

13. because it didnt need to be. responsibility lays on the commanders

shoulders. not that the soldiers who do wrong dont have to pay the price, i just dont give it to them ultimately. they took these men and women, brainwashed them, put them in fearful place, pumped with anger and hate and let them loose with no leader to guide them. psychologically these soldiers were set up for this behavior and the commanders did not control what they had created. it did not need to be, the military allowed it. there is a blind trust with soldiers that their leaders will be the sane ones, to guide and control their enviroment. it is the leaders that failed and are ultimately responsible. to the top. bush

[DistressedAmerican]

15. What About All The Service People Under That Same Conditions

that do not commit attrocities? What does that say to them? Clearly it is possible to maintian your humanity under these conditions.

I do not think that blind loyalty to your commanders is an excuse for any actions. It just shows that they are weak in my book.

The chain of command MUST also be punished. I should have put that it my OP but, I guess I just assumed that!

Ultimately it takes fucked leadership AND the soldiers carrying out the orders to create these situations. One facilitates the other. It does not excuse it however.

IMO, They should ALL be held accountable.

[seabeyond]

18. it isnt a matter of excusing, it is a matter of understanding

how psychologically it is created. and it is wrong. the fundies for example. we were in a church school. i watched this group of people 6 years ago, so full of love. though we differed in religious beliefs, still we got along and worked together. bush elected. a couple years ago, i started seeing a shift in this group. i started seeing in the name of jesus hate created. i watched it materialize. thru leadership and speeches and preachers preaching on the pulpit, i watched them take these sheep (real comparable to soldiers) and mold them into hate, in the name of the lord and love. when i left the school, i told the top dude, these people that commit the act of hate, is secondary. i point the finger at all the spiritual leaders that have abused their powers over these people to take them away from the path of lite, jesus.......there is no greater sin

[DistressedAmerican]

21. I Do Understand. I Am Profoundly Amazed At How Effective This

type of indoctrination can be. Those responsible should be stopped and held accountable.

You are right that these acts are secondary to the war itself and the illegal orders coming down from on high. I spend countless hours working those issues.

However, there is an undiscussed dynamic in operation here. There is an undercurrent in America that says criticizing one soldier is the same as criticizing ALL soldiers. It is clearly a reaction to Vietnam.

My core contention if that those committing attrocities can and should be viewed as a different group than those that are serving honorably.

Criticism of those commiting war crimes and abuses (under orders or not) does not equal a failure to "Support The Troops".

Some soldiers are severely damaged goods (no matter how they got that way). Charles Grainer seems to have arrived damaged for example. Some of those are a danger to themselves and others. Just check the murder and suicide rates among returning vererans of the Iraq disaster.

This group of soldiers should be able to be discussed and dealt with without folks shouting "UNAMERICAN". Anything less is deluded and unhealthy for all of us.

That is all I am saying.

[seabeyond]

22. going after the source will kill the cancer

i am too tired fighting the little fires. let others. but go to the source. put out the big fire. a lot of the work will diminish and we will be able to get back to playing lfe, instead of working it

religion
corporation
republican
and yes white male, (sorry guys> as soon as the battle stops, lol lol you wont have to shoulder this any more. i make it really easy on my white males to hold the responsibility but know, i the woman, know that isnt who he is. helps a lot on the burden)

[yodermon]

17. Criticism is all well & good

and has its place, but when I read things like this:

Following the shootings, the soldiers involved took pics with the detainees they had killed and posted them up in their headquarters. One pulled out a spoon and had his pic taken scooping out one dead prisoner's brains with a spoon. There is no possible excuse for such behavior, time of war or not!

When this type of "behavior" occurs it is time to go beyond "excusing" or "not excusing" it. It is so extreme, so horrible, that we must try to find out what has been broken in the minds of these soldiers, and WHY it has been broken. Only individuals who have suffered profound, serious trauma in their own lives, either as children, or possibly during military training, are capable of such atrocities. It feels good to project blame for this upon the "failed leadership" of shrub* (and God knows he HAS failed, and miserably), but it still comes down to the individuals who commit these acts, and what motivated them. Some soldiers blew the whistle, did not participate, and were duly disgusted. What was different about them? What was that difference in their brains that disallowed them from committing these acts?

I know a lot of the torture was mandated from the top (rummmy et al). They are just as damaged. But it still takes messed-up individuals to carry out the orders.

I have not seen this type of thing addressed adequetly at DU or anywhere else for that matter. If you dig, I think you'll find that the these atrocities have always been, and always WILL BE, the very heart and purpose of Warfare. War and war-crimes are inseparable, and it is a measure of our group-fantasy to think otherwise ("support the troops, hate the war!" "love the sinner, hate the sin").

Again, I will post a link to the article "War as Righteous Rape and Purification", and again, it will be ignored.

http://www.geocities.com/kidhistory/childhod/chch6dm.htm

"War! It meant a purification, a liberation
...and an extraordinary sense of hope"
-Thomas Mann

Happy people don't start wars. They don't need "purifying" or "liberation," and their everyday lives are already full of hope and meaning, so they don't need a war to save them from anything.

What sort of strange emotional disorder is it that war cleanses, liberates and saves people from? And how can killing, raping and torturing people be acts that purify and restore hope in life? Obviously war is a serious psychopathological condition, a recurring human behavior pattern whose motives and causes have yet to be examined on any but the most superficial levels of analysis.

[Igel]

19. Shooting and killing the detainees was much more wrong,

albeit less inflammatory, than scooping out the brains of the dead.

Multilating bodies is bad. Killing people, much, much worse.

[yodermon]

23. You are correct

from a moral standpoint. However, the corpse mutilation, the rapes, the torture.. all this points to a level of sadism that bears serious psychological investigation. For example: it may be possible that the soldier was so traumatized by having to shoot a prisoner in cold blood, that s/he engaged in "brain scooping" to minimize/mitigate/de-personalize the act of murder s/he just committed. I am interested in the "why" of both acts.

I certainly don't mean to imply that corpse-mutilation is a worse crime than outright murder. But all war IS murder.. plus the extra sadistic bits known as war-crimes. I'm simply saying, let's investigate the (psychological) motivations behind the whole package.

[DistressedAmerican]

24. Not Ignored. Long As Hell Though. Working Though It Now!

I agree that war creates these people. It is a severly unnatural state.

So far I found the discussion of dissociative disorders very interesting. Disturbing, but very interesting. I had some experiences with form pshchologists that worked with post traumatic stress disorders. The stories horrified me.

-Snip-

DISSOCIATION OF THE TWO BRAINS
One of the most important findings of Athens from his lifetime of interviewing of violent criminals is that before they kill they consult "phantom communities" who approve of their violent acts as revenges for past humiliations.60 These phantom communities are, of course, identical to the "social alters" I have discussed previously, where dissociated violent selves and internalized harmful caretakers are kept and engaged in dialogues that influence our deepest emotions and approve of our most violent behavior. Athens determined that violence didn't just follow trauma; it required a further "belligerency stage of violentization" during which the brutalized subject resolves in consultation with his inner phantoms, his alters, that he or she has had enough, that violence is sometimes necessary if one isn't to remain a victim one's whole life and that he or she will now use physical violence for those who unduly provoke or humiliate him or her. These alters are often actual inner voices telling the criminal what to do, so that

their decisions to act violently followed from a dialogue with their phantom communities--the "voices" were their phantom companions coming in exceptionally loud and clear....Lews...corroborated Athens's finding that the self incorporates phantom companions when she examined Arthur Shawcross, the Rochester, New York, so-called serial killer who murdered prostitutes. "Arthur Shawcross also experienced dissociative states," Lewis reports. "At these times he would hear his mother in his head, berating him and the women he was seeing. No one was good enough for Arty. They should die."61

These dissociated social alters, it turns out, are concentrated in only one side of the brain, in one hemisphere, a different one in each of us. Frederic Schiffer explains how his studies of dual-brain psychology led him to ask his psychiatric patients to look through special glasses, one pair of which had only the left side of the left eye uncovered (reaching only the right hemisphere), the other only the right side of the right eye (reaching only the left hemisphere), so that the patient would transmit information only to one half of the brain at a time.62 He found that one hemisphere looked at the world with extreme anxiety and the other saw things more maturely:

One patient, a Vietnam veteran, whom I had diagnosed with a severe posttraumatic stress disorder, looked out of one side and developed an expression of intense apprehension as he looked at a large plant in my office. "It looks like the jungle," he said with some alarm. I asked him to look out the other side, and he said, "No, it's a nice-looking plant."

[DistressedAmerican]

25. DOES ANYONE HAVE A LINK FOR THE THREAD I MENTIONED?

I have been looking and I can't find it.

It paints a picture of the very pshchologically damaging indoctrination we are talkiing about. Starts with institutionalized anti-Muslim racism. The term "Haji" for example has replaced "Gook" in today's military lexicon.

Many soldiers themselves feel trapped there and vent their anger and frustration on innocent civilians.

PLEASE, IF YOU KNOW WHERE IT IS, POST A LINK.

The original thread should be revisited! It was a real eye opener for me!

[DistressedAmerican]

27. Still Looking! Anyone?

[manic expression]

26. NO. Absolutely not. There is everything right with it.

There is no question on this issue. If someone commits injustice (or atrocity, in this case), then there is NO excuse whatsoever, and there should be no rationalizing either. I couldn't care if they were wearing a Pakistani uniform, or a Russian uniform, a German uniform or an American uniform, it makes no difference at all. Wrong actions should be met with harsh criticism, at the VERY least.

[LynnTheDem]

28. It isn't wrong; you should hear the TROOPS criticize the troops that

commit atrocities.

My hubby wants ALL of them, every soldier who did, every soldier who watched, every soldier who knew & kept quiet, and every soldier AND CIVILIAN all the way up the chain to the very top who ordered and/or knew and/or kept quiet and/or participated to be...

Well there's one issue hubby and I disagree on; the death penalty. I'm against it.

But you should hear what a lot of the soldiers on the base here (Ft. Hood, Texas) have to say about soldiers & civilians involved in any way with that shit...they make my hubby look like a total pussy of a bleeding heart.

[DistressedAmerican]

29. I Have Always Assumed That. Glad To Hear!

I'm sure the vast majority are decent and honorable folks. I would be seriously pissed at my rep being destroyed by these fucked up few! Much the way I'd feel about rar right fundies oif I was a christian.

I'm with you on the death penalty. Not reversable and not fairly applied. The stats show it is a clearly and thououghly racist use in modern America.

[LynnTheDem]

30. I've learned new & ...interesting *cough*...ideas for men's private parts

from hubby's troops.

All of them sound extremely painful.

THEN the troops want the evildoer troops death penalty'd. Hubby just wants to go straight for the death penalty part.

Not all soldiers are stupid evil nasty MFers; but not all of them are decent people, either.

Take ANY town in the USA with a population of @ 100,000; a few people of that town ARE nasty evil MFers and have done nasty evil things, some WOULD do if they could get away with it, and MOST the people of that town are good people.

Same with the US military in Iraq.

SOME of the troops, before they were ever sent anywhere, were nasty eveil MFers who had committed rapes or spouse abuse or robberies etc here in the USA. EVERY DAY in the US, you can find soldiers arrested for rape, robbery, murder...you always could find such news. Because soldiers are JUST PEOPLE.

So ya got the already-nasty shits over there where there's little to no leadership controlling them and little chance of them paying for any crimes they commit. Then there's the soldiers who would be nasty shits IF they knew they could get away with it (experts on the subject believe at least 50% of ALL men would commit rape IF they knew they'd never be caught).

Add to that, ya got soldiers who are in total rage & despair and lash out at others. We've ALL done this ourselves, we just don't usually lash out and kill; but then, when we lash out, we're not usually holding a loaded weapon in a warzone where you sleep with one eye open in case this is the minute you die.

So you take all these people and you tell them THESE PRISONERS are WHY you are walking dead in Iraq; THEY are why you're stuck in that shithole away from your family and God knows what your wife is up to, her being alone so long with you away and facing death every second are the kids crying for me every night God I hate this place...

And you're told, by YOUR COMMANDER to get tear these prisoners apart, they're the ones responsible for your friends dying screaming as their blood pumps out all over you-or so you're told.

And hey, ya got Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and all the other gulags.

The evil MFer soldiers that are just nasty pieces of shit by inclination, they're just criminals. Lock em up.

The woould-be ones and the lashing out ones are why the military is SUPPOSED to have leadership. The leadership in Iraq is a failure; non-existant.