According to the Washington Post,
An Army intelligence sergeant who accused fellow soldiers in Samarra, Iraq, of abusing detainees in 2003 was in turn accused by his commander of being delusional and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation in Germany, despite a military psychiatrist’s initial judgment that the man was stable, according to internal Army records released yesterday.
….
A witness in his unit told investigators that the captain later pressured a military doctor — who had found the soldier stable — into doing another emergency evaluation, saying: “I don’t care what you saw or heard, he is imbalanced, and I want him out of here.”
The next day, after the doctor did another evaluation, the soldier was evacuated from Iraq in restraints on a stretcher to a military hospital in Germany, despite having been given no official diagnosis, according to the documents. A military doctor in Germany ruled he was in stable mental health, according to the documents, but sent him back to the United States for what the soldier recalls the doctor describing as his “safety.”
In fairness, other members of the team denied the charges, but….
A whistleblower gets marginalized by a bureaucracy? Say it isn’t so!
Yes, I am also shocked, shocked, shocked!
But seriously, I know a little bit about military training and discipline and I do expect something better. Military men and women, enlisted or officers, are drilled in the law, in refusing to obey illegal orders, and in reporting illegal orders or activities to the appropriate superiors. I hope that an appropriate investigation is undertaken in this case to get to the truth. (I can feel Mr. T. J. Madison’s cynicism already, and there is substantial justification for it, but I think that even cynicism should be moderated by some expectation of good behavior. It does happen, it should happen, and it should be encouraged. A stance of pure cynicism does nothing to encourage the behavior that we should expect as a matter of course.)
Tom’s point, correct as far as it goes, reminds me of the superficial rationalism criticized by Hayek. On the one hand, the military has all these courses soldiers have to take that explicitly tell them certain actions “aren’t right” and they “shouldn’t do it” (e.g., torture). OTOH, there are clear filtering mechanisms such that testosterone-filled teenage men who think fighting is a good way to earn a living have a greater tendency to end up in the front lines than bookish, reflective sorts. I doubt there were many learned debates in boot camp as to whether or not Saddam played a role in 9/11. Further, there is a culture of intense patriotism and fanatic nationalism (“my govt., right or wrong…”) that leads to the brutality we saw in American-run Iraqi prisons. We’re all familiar with the Milgram psych experiments. It is all too typical for people to engage in abhorrent violent, brutal behavior if they think themselves justified by ideology, group-think, or merely the old defense of following orders. So I think a healthy dose of skepticism (or, as Tom calls it, cynicism) is warranted. What else would one expect from a govt. monopoly?
RL
I find myself in an odd position, as I think T.J. and Ross probably do, as well.
I am skeptical (or cynical), but I also believe that inculcating support for the rule of law can have a positive effect. The Abu Ghraib scandal was, after all, revealed because a young man did the right thing when he was loaned a CD of photos and found a little file in the corner full of photos of abusive actions: he put it under the door of the appropriate commanding officer. That young man — not highly educated, not a Ph.D., and not a cynic — did the right thing. And he was supported by the chain of command. Without men and women like that, we are surely lost. And “excessive” cynicism (i.e., too much) discourages, rather than encourages, such behavior. Let’s be skeptical, but let’s also show our expectation for respect for right behavior.
>>That young man — not highly educated, not a Ph.D., and not a cynic — did the right thing. And he was supported by the chain of command.
It should also be noted that that young man and his family are now in protective custody. It seems that many in his home town consider him to be a traitor and a rat, and consider the torturers to be heroes. The military managed to contain the scandal easily. A few low-ranking scapegoats were sacrificed, domestic political consequences were minimal, and the torture can continue.
One of the purposes of the chain of command is to protect the institution from the threat of whistleblowers while at the same time providing plausible deniability for the leaders. If the man who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal had been really clever, he would have bypassed the chain of command and anonymously leaked the photos to the press and internet directly. That way the military wouldn’t have been able to filter out the most egregious evidence of rape and murder, and the whistleblower might have been able to keep his house and his job.
>>Without men and women like that, we are surely lost.
Indeed. Such individuals are rare and precious — maybe 10% of the general population and certainly less than 2% of the military. It’s a shame to see these people crushed by institutional logic. To be effective in the long term, whistleblowers need to find a way to rat out the bad elements while remaining unknown, otherwise they will be quickly neutralized (and usually made an example of.)
At this point I should also refer everybody to the War Nerd’s discussion of this matter, entitled “Torture and Truth”:
http://www.exile.ru/2004-June-24/war_nerd.html