WikiLeaks later released a United States assessment
RisingWorld
2017-02-11
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WikiLeaks later released a United States assessment
that detainee mistreatment at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo was “the single most important motivating factor” convincing foreign jihadists to wage war, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal said, “In my experience, we found that nearly every first-time jihadist claimed Abu Ghraib had first jolted him to action.” Our moral reputation had started killing American soldiers.
Just as with that wounded insurgent there was a codified set of procedures set in place to help guide Marines
and Navy medical personnel to make moral choices, choices they could tell their children and grandchildren about without shame, for Eric, there was a codified set of procedures beckoning him to take actions that he now feels condemn him.
Only over time did I learn that he’d been an Army Arabic linguist before Sept. 11,
and then had signed up as a contractor and gone to Abu Ghraib prison in January 2004, all things he would later write about in his memoir “Consequence.”
Back then Abu Ghraib was a mess, he told me.
This was standard policy, part of tradition stretching back to the Revolutionary War, when George Washington ordered every soldier in the Continental Army to sign a copy of rules intended to limit harm to civilians and ensure
that their conduct respected what he called “the rights of humanity,” so that their restraint “justly secured to us the attachment of all good men.”
From our founding we have made these kinds of moral demands of our soldiers.
He told me later of the strangeness of sitting in the back of a helicopter, watching over his enemy lying peacefully unconscious, doped up on painkillers, while he kept checking the sniper’s vitals, his blood pressure, his heartbeat, a heartbeat
that was steady and strong thanks to the gift of blood from the Americans this insurgent would have liked to kill.
These weren’t acts of exceptional moral courage in the way Lieutenant Chontosh’s acts were acts of exceptional moral courage.
Eventually, he told a fellow contractor the ridiculous fishing story,
and how he wasn’t falling for it, and the contractor told him: “Of course they fish with car batteries.
that detainee mistreatment at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo was “the single most important motivating factor” convincing foreign jihadists to wage war, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal said, “In my experience, we found that nearly every first-time jihadist claimed Abu Ghraib had first jolted him to action.” Our moral reputation had started killing American soldiers.
Just as with that wounded insurgent there was a codified set of procedures set in place to help guide Marines
and Navy medical personnel to make moral choices, choices they could tell their children and grandchildren about without shame, for Eric, there was a codified set of procedures beckoning him to take actions that he now feels condemn him.
Only over time did I learn that he’d been an Army Arabic linguist before Sept. 11,
and then had signed up as a contractor and gone to Abu Ghraib prison in January 2004, all things he would later write about in his memoir “Consequence.”
Back then Abu Ghraib was a mess, he told me.
This was standard policy, part of tradition stretching back to the Revolutionary War, when George Washington ordered every soldier in the Continental Army to sign a copy of rules intended to limit harm to civilians and ensure
that their conduct respected what he called “the rights of humanity,” so that their restraint “justly secured to us the attachment of all good men.”
From our founding we have made these kinds of moral demands of our soldiers.
He told me later of the strangeness of sitting in the back of a helicopter, watching over his enemy lying peacefully unconscious, doped up on painkillers, while he kept checking the sniper’s vitals, his blood pressure, his heartbeat, a heartbeat
that was steady and strong thanks to the gift of blood from the Americans this insurgent would have liked to kill.
These weren’t acts of exceptional moral courage in the way Lieutenant Chontosh’s acts were acts of exceptional moral courage.
Eventually, he told a fellow contractor the ridiculous fishing story,
and how he wasn’t falling for it, and the contractor told him: “Of course they fish with car batteries.
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