Prisoner Abuse Shows Lack of Character, Not Poor Training
My son is a nineteen year old Army Reserve MP. Or rather he is graduating
If anyone is more perplexed and outraged than the average American citizen by abusive behavior by MPs, than it is most certainly my son and the members of his newly minted MP unit. These men and women are motivated by patriotism and a mix of other emotions, including both apprehension and excitement. But the bottom line is that they are young soldiers training to serve their country. While they’re embarrassed and incensed by these latest revelations, they’re proud of what they are and what they wish to become. I’m proud of them too.
Our son will be home with us for a time this summer, but later this year in all likelihood his unit will be deployed somewhere in the world. The “police actions” in which the finds itself in or , to name only two, require people who are “part police officer-part soldier.” That’s exactly what a MP is, a military police officer operating, one would reasonably assume, with the highest consciousness of duty, honor, and country.
My concern for my son and his fellow MPs leads me to hope the Abu Ghraib abuses are an aberration. I pray that the culprits are a few wildly errant soldiers, people who clearly do not represent the thousands of uniformed Americans serving around the world with deserved distinction. And I do not want to believe that inhumane policies were sanctioned by line officers. But we must know the truth. Where were the troops’ commanding officers? And in the language of Watergate, “What did they know? And when did they know it?”
The prison abuses we’ve learned about thus far, and those Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has ominously warned us are yet to be revealed, are a direct hit on one of America’s most cherished ideals—respect for human life and individual dignity. How, we ask, is it possible for American soldiers to stoop to such animalistic degradation? Is this some morally bankrupt application of the old dictum, “All’s fair in love and war”? Is this the result of what the Pentagon investigation written by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba contended—that the MP unit assigned to Abu Ghraib was under-prepared? Did these abuses occur because, according to the MP unit’s commanding officer, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the 320th Battalion was “stretched thin and (headquarters) continued to assign us more missions far outside our capabilities”?
Something about our Army’s leaders’ initial responses troubles me. Admittedly, more training and more personnel are perhaps needed forms of support. Indeed, I am an educator, so I can be depended upon to promote the merits of more training. But these examples of human depravity are not about more training. They’re about character.
Teddy Roosevelt once said that to educate a man without morals is to educate a menace to society. Well-educated criminals exist. So now do well-educated terrorists. More training or preparedness will not solve all our problems.
If ’s moral credibility was at stake before it most assuredly is teetering now, even if it is true that a few soldiers do not an Army—or a country—make. How handles perpetrators of sexually charged humiliation and torture will say a great deal about who we are at the heart of our culture. Justice delayed will in the eyes of a watching world be justice denied. Finger-pointing blame games between the armed forces and intelligence agencies will only further inflame potentially violent actions against Americans overseas. This is a time for statesmanship among political and military leaders not just among boots on the ground.
Character is everyone’s business. It’s about one soldier saying, “This is not right.” It’s about the American people bucking our recent peacetime trends and using categorical moral statements like “evil” or “wrong,” and then holding accountable those who are responsible for a form of war crimes.
As a parent I’m not naïve. I know what MPs must sometimes do in defense of freedom. But I also know that the best service my son can give his country is to wear his uniform honorably. We should expect no less of his colleagues and his leaders, for to paraphrase
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Published as “Prisoner Abuse Shows Lack of Character, Not Poor Training,” The
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