Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Over at JWN: Fishback's letter, and the NTFU porn story
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[Matt just told me he'd missed this little post when I first posted because I didn't put a bold headline on it. So he went ahead and posted the whole text of the Fishback letter, which you'll see above. I'm cool with that. It's a fine letter! Note to self, though: Blogger is different from the software I use over at JWN, so here I have to remember to insert a special headline. Also, how come I ain't seeing "underline" here? Oh well. Blogger does also have its strong points... ~HC]Hi. Today over at Just World News I give nearly the whole text of the fine letter that Ian Fishback, a captain in the 82nd Airborne and West Point grad, wrote to Sen. McCain about the way that-- as Fishback has seen in Iraq and Afghanistan-- the "confusion" over the Geneva Conventions at the highest levels of the US command has led to the commission of major abuses in the field. In his letter, Fishback described the search he had made up the chain of command for some clarity on what, in fact, was allowed and what not allowed in the treatment of detainees. And also, the frustration he experienced in that search. He argued:
we can learn from our mistakes and ensure that this does not happen again. Take a major step in that direction; eliminate the confusion. My approach for clarification provides clear evidence that confusion over standards was a major contributor to the prisoner abuse. We owe our soldiers better than this. Give them a clear standard that is in accordance with the bedrock principles of our nation.Fishback was almost certainly the informant described only as "C" in the recent Human Rights Watch report on torture and abuse. On JWN, I also have a post noting that the story on the solicitation of body-part photos from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan by the "Nowthatsfuckup" porn website is finally starting to make its way into the MSM. A number of bloggers, I among them, had started writing about this in English more than a month ago. What took the highly paid MSM types so long?
