Thursday - November 20, 2003
LtCol West has seen too many movies
An army battalion commander is undergoing a court
martial for ordering his soldiers to beat a prisoner of war, threatening to kill
him, and twice firing a pistol to scare him. He claims he was just trying to
protect his men. He claims that he knew that this prisoner had information
about a plot to assassinate him and ambush his troops. Somehow he was able to
know this, but he didn't know anything more.
It doesn't appear to me that this
occurred during a firefight or in the heat of action, which still wouldn't much
excuse him, because they were garrisoned long enough for him to supposedly be
targeted by the enemy by name.
LtCol
West has successfully garnered sympathy from the public, including many who
should know better, by claiming to have the prescience to know that he was
saving the lives of his troops, a spurious claim that he repeats ad
nauseum.
He should be put in jail, and
here's why.
I think LtCol West has seen too many movies. I
also think it is presumptive to believe that the ambush wouldn't have been
averted anyway, or that the prisoner wouldn't have talked without being beaten
and threatened with a pistol. We can't know alternative futures, nor can he.
Yet he has been telling us that he can.
I suspect that any battalion commander
that orders a prisoner beaten up by his troops has some issues with the law. I
don't have a big problem with firing a pistol into a safety drum. I can't
imagine that intimidating anyone. (Dogs bark when they're chained up. When
they're not chained, they either run or bite and don't waste time barking.) It
wouldn't have intimidated me, I've heard gunshots before. I suspect that the
prisoner would have talked if just yelled at from the way I heard the story.
But then, I wasn't there.
Regardless, I
think that we have laws and that if you publicly flaunt the laws as the
commander, you can't expect anyone else to follow them. How can he expect his
troops to treat prisoners properly when he's not around if he's going to do this
in front of them all, and then make it a part of his official report? He should
be cashiered for simply being stupid. If the situation were really as dire as
he now presents it, he should have been more
discreet.
Part of having command or
being in charge is to know which rules are to be bent and when. I know that the
troops working for me occasionally broke the rules. It's impossible to live
without doing so. But if one of them came to me with a written confession
telling me that not only was a rule broken, but a criminal offense was committed
then I'd be obliged to act on it even if no harm was done. So putting this
sophomoric stunt in his official report was honest but idiotic.
If he really thought this was the only
way to preserve the lives of his men, to take upon himself the responsibility of
maltreating a prisoner, then he should accept the consequences of his decision.
He holds a commission to obey the laws of the officers over him and the
government who commissioned him. If he wants to disobey their laws and
publicize his misbehavior so openly, then he should salute smartly and accept
the consequences.
I understand that no
one was hurt or at least not given serious injuries. But this guy just got
lucky. He probably knows nothing about interrogation techniques. What if his
shooting into a barrel foolishness didn't work? What would his next step have
been? Shooting at his feet? Shooting him in the leg? Pistol whipping
him?
I think this officer was out of
control, and afterwards was smug about getting lucky that his silliness worked
and bragged about it in a report. He needs to be punished, and probably put in
jail.
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