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Originally posted by HarmlessRabbit
Well, that's exactly the point. If you read the current news on the story, the soldiers who were guarding the prisoners received *no* training. Not only were they not taught the rules of the Geneva convention, they weren't taught how to handle prisoners period. Also, they were extremely short-staffed at first.
Now, that said, there is no excuse for the treatment of the prisoners pictured above. You don't need training to understand that abuse and torture are wrong.
So far, I think the USA response has been ok. The president has strongly condemned the actions and appears to be putting fixes in place. Now I'd like to see some followup directly from the president on how the situation will be prevented in the future with structural and policy changes to the armed forces, and I want to see the people involved who are guilty severely punished.
Unfortunately, the damage is done to our national image. We went into Iraq because of Saddam's abuse of Iraqis, I'm sure to many Iraqis we look like hypocrites now.
I'm not directly blaming Rumsfeld, but I do think Rumsfeld's strategy of waging smaller, cheaper wars with less troops is partly to blame here.
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I don't know about the last paragraph. Isn't Rummy's whole game plan of smaller wars the utilization of Special Forces and Special Soldiers such as we have going in Afganistan? By nature of that it would appear that Iraq is in contrast to the gameplan. I'm not trying to argue the point so much as I just trying to address it.
It is a shame what this people did though. However there are no doubts in my mind that the book will get heaved at them in the worse possible way.