Another Abu Ghraib Myth Expires

[Greyhawk]

Testimony in the Article 32 hearing for Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan concluded at Fort Meade this past week.

If you have no idea who he is, that's because the case has drawn virtually no attention from any media outlet beyond the "local paper". That's true for most legal proceedings, but Lt Col Jordan's case involves crimes that drew more worldwide attention than perhaps any case in history. He's the first officer to be charged with crimes at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

You won't hear much about it because the hearing - and (depending on the hearing's outcome) the subsequent trial - removes one of the media's favorite claims about Abu Ghraib. "Only the junior troops are being prosecuted."

Even though several officers' careers were destroyed with reprimands, that claim has been true until now. But it's also a specious accusation, because until guilt of the actual perpetrators of a crime is determined, you can't punish their supervisors for their failures that might have led to the crime. To have punished from the "top down" would have been to effectively declare the junior troops guilty before they ever had a trial. (Yes - it was quite obvious they were guilty - but I'm talking court of law guilty here, Constitutional rights, etc.)

But this obviously logical order of business - without which due process for the junior troops would be impossible - initially leaves the prosecution open to claims of "only going after the little guys". In some cases that claim is more accurate than others, but in the Abu Ghraib case, it is not - as is being demonstrated in a room strangely empty of the many reporters who worked so hard to establish it.

Recent related post here.

How We Got So Stupid In 2015

[Chap]

How? We killed off military history.

If a free society is ignorant of war, how can it possibly remain free of the boot of the tyrant?
If any society is ignorant of war, how can it possibly remain itself and at peace, save the peace of the dead?

Doc's Home...

[Soldier's Mom]

from his 3rd deployment to Iraq... Drop by and send some welcome home wishes... at DocInTheBox

MILBLOG OPSEC Watch

[Dadmanly]

I was reading a post at Defensetech, which linked back to MILBLOGS.

When I first read Greyhawk’s commentary, I hadn't noticed the mention of my (yes, tongue in cheek) desire to "spend my drills scanning MILBLOGS."

And then I thought two things.

What if MILBLOGS take on an OPSEC watch, and on our own, start looking for (or at least making note of) OPSEC violations, "over the top," or other I/O vulnerabilities?

And what if we approached DoD as a group, and offered to advise, develop guidelines, and work with those they've officially tasked to monitor BLOGS?

The hook for them, is they get to meet some of the most pro-military guys, Greyhawk and B5 and Smash, they elevate their own "get it" quotient by a factor of 10, and they provide a mechanism to coordinate offensive and defensive I/O.

We get to proactively influence DoD response to MILBLOG challenge.

That’s an idea I think we need to discuss.

Background all over the place:
Michael Yon on Censorship
Greyhawk on Yon
How to Lose a War
The Media War

Signs and Warnings

[Dadmanly]

Somebody’s watching the violence carefully, and asking when the next Improvised Explosive Device (IED) will detonate.

Only, we’re talking France. Okay sure, the next IED will be the first, but at the moment it appears that some among the violent Islamic youth don’t just want to cause mayhem. They want to kill French police.

How easy will it be for a determined French Jihadist to get a hold of the munitions or explosives material for an effective IED?

(More commentary over at Dadmanly.)

RE: Threats to MILBLOGS

[Dadmanly]

Jules Crittenden picks up on the story of potential MILBLOG censorship in today’s Boston Herald.

It’s hard for anyone with any time in service to argue with his introduction:

When something good is happening in the military, you can rely on someone high up and behind the lines to try to kill it. Slowly. Bureaucratically. Bleed the life out of it.

That is what is happening to milblogging, the Internet phenomenon that lets soldiers in Iraq tell us what they see, do and think.

Crittenden uses as example a 2005 post from Michael of www.adayiniraq.com, which conveys the kind of immediacy captured by many of today’s MILBLOGGERS. Crittenden also mentions The Blog of War as Matthew Currier Burden’s (Blackfive) to capture those battlefield accounts.

Crittenden’s piece pretty much passes on the warnings that have been floating among MILBLOGGERS, without much additional information. He shares our concerns, but also notes hopefully:

There is still a wealth of information on the Web, where information is like water, and we can only hope it will find a way.

I think we can do more than hope. Many of us can act.

Readers can do their part, as Crittenden suggests:

Go to sites such as www.blackfive.net and www.milblogging.com, and discover the world of milblogging, while it still exists.

I would only add, visit also all the great folks at MILBLOGS, Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette. And of course, Dadmanly, but you already knew that.

(H/T Instapundit, cross-posted at Dadmanly.)

Weekend Reading

[Greyhawk]

How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam

From 1981. Pretty much "the playbook" for today.

Excerpt:

It was no wonder that correspondents writing to win the approbation of other correspondents in that insidiously collegial atmosphere produced reporting that was remarkably homogeneous. After each other, correspondents wrote to win the approbation of their editors, who controlled their professional lives and who were closely linked with the intellectual community at home. The consensus of that third circle, the domestic intelligentsia, derived largely from correspondents' reports and in turn served to determine the nature of those reports. If dispatches did not accord with that consensus, approbation was withheld. Only in the last instance did correspondents address themselves to the general public, the mass of lay readers and viewers.
<...>
The "Viet Nam Syndrome" is compounded of a variety of symptoms, none unique in itself, but unprecedented in combination and devastating in their totality. Wars have been badly reported in the past. Facts have been mis-stated, and their interpretation has been biased. Emotions have been deliberately inflamed, and reporters have ridden to fame on waves of misrepresentation. But never before Viet Nam had the collective policy of the media—no less stringent term will serve—sought by graphic and unremitting distortion the victory of the enemies of the correspondents' own side. Television coverage was, of course, new in its intensity and repetitiveness; it was crucial in shifting the emphasis from fact to emotion. And television will play the same role in future conflicts—on the Western side, of course. It will not and cannot expose the crimes of an enemy who is too shrewd to allow the cameras free play.

As long as the "Viet Nam Syndrome" afflicts the media, it seems to me that it will be virtually impossible for the West to conduct an effective foreign policy. It is apparently irrelevant that the expectations of paradise after Hanoi's victory evoked by "the critics of the American war" became the purgatory the Indochinese people have suffered. Just as many denizens of the antebellum American South did not know that "Damyankee" was really two words, an entire generation in Europe and the United States behaves as if "the dirty, immoral war in Viet Nam" were an irrefutable and inseparable dogma. Merely equate El Salvador (or any other American intervention) to Viet Nam—and not only the American public but all "liberal" Europeans will condemn it without reservation. That is all they need to know. In its final effect—what has over the last decade been called "the paralysis of political will"—it will make it especially difficult for the United States to honor any political commitment anywhere in the world where small and threatened nations may expect American support for their independent existence. Before they fall to an aggressor, they will have been victimized by "the Viet Nam Syndrome."

The author was a reporter who was in Vietnam in the '60s, but he wrote this in 1981.

(Via Power Line)

Update: More at Old War Dogs - from Russ Vaughn