The issue here should be justice. Unless you make an effort to punish ALL who were involved you are not even attempting to get anything like justice. I agree she is culpable but unless the officers who made this all happen are also incarcerated then nothing positive comes from her sentence.
> Likewise, the Army can send you to places like Abu Ghraib and there is
> little you can do about it, short of going AWOL. But being in that place
> does not mean that you have to participate in the prisoner abuse. You can,
> as many if not most GIS do, just report for duty, play it dumb and do
> nothing unless specifically ordered (nobody in the Army is punished for
> being stupid or having no initiative).
You must have served in a different military than I did. People were routinely punished for being slow witted and having little initiative when I was serving. Not everyone is equally capable of removing themselves from situations like this.
> One of the first things you learn in the Army is to avoid
> doing things you do not want to do without being punished for that (playing
> stupid and incompetent is the name of the game). When people do volunteer,
> they usually do it for selfish reasons - to speed up their career, to please
> their superiors, to show off how "tough" they are and gain popularity, or
> for that matter, to "serve their country" (whatever that means).
That is not one of the first things you learn in the military. Playing stupid and incompetent is the fast track to a discharge. People also do volunteer work because they want to feel like they are making a difference and this desire is not fulfilled by their regular job.
> So the issue here is that MS England volunteered to take part in the abuse
> but she did not have to. She was not given a direct order. She
> volunteered. We can speculate abut the reasons why (most of which have
> something to do with crowd pleasing, as I already mentioned), but the fact
> remains that she did volunteer. The twinkie defense spin aims to deny that
> fact and substitute it with excuses why she (or for that matter any other
> criminal) should not be accountable for her actions.
>
> The reason I decided to contribute to this thread is not that I feel
> particularly vindictive toward Ms England - I met hundreds of service people
> like her and I think I can understand why she did it and even feel kind of
> sorry for people who fall so low in their self-esteem that they need this
> kind of "props" to gain peer respect. However, I am pretty fed up with spin
> and excuse culture and the avoidance of any responsibility for one's own
> action, and I saw that at work in this case - so I decided to speak up
> against it. Does it make me a right-winger as you insinuate? Well, if
> avoidance of responsibility is a necessary condition of being "left" then I
> do not mind being labeled right winger - I know better than that.
>
> Wojtek
The people put in charge of Abu Ghraib and the people chosen to work under them weren't chosen randomly. People like England (easily manipulated with a strong desire to please and pliable sense of morality) were placed under people like Granger (manipulative and sadistic) by someone who bears a great deal of responsibility. It's as if a childcare service director knowingly hired a pedophile to watch children without supervision. The pedophile is certainly responsible for their actions but the director is very nearly equally responsible. Charge them both or charge no one but don't just charge the person in the less powerful position and then have the gall to talk about responsibility.
John Thornton