Thursday - May 06, 2004
 Responsibility, Authority, and Power
In naval aviation they say there is no such thing
as an accident, they prefer to call them mishaps. This is mostly semantics, but
the idea is that things don't go wrong by pure happenstance. If a plane has a
mishap, it's either because maintenance was improper or was not sufficient for
the aircraft's condition (either a fault of the maintenance program or the
maintainers failed to follow the program), or the aircrew made a poor decision
or action, or the mechanical design of the aircraft was insufficient for the
conditions, among many other reasons. Most of the time there are multiple
failures required to happen before a mishap can occur. For instance, the plane
crash might occur because the aluminum wing was poorly cast, a maintenance tech
didn't find some corrosion on the wing root, and the pilot exceeded the maximum
recommended number of G forces. If any of the above failures didn't occur, the
wings wouldn't have fallen off the airplane in flight, but the most critical in
this case was the poor casting that caused the corrosion in the first
place.I think this is a really good
analogy for what happened in Abu Ghraib with the abused prisoners. Just like
the example I cited above, there were many things that contributed to the break
down in discipline. But also just like the example there is one fundamental
reason why the break down started. Her name is Brigadier General
Karpinski.
I'm a firm believer that you can often tell a
book by its cover and you can tell what kind of officer Karpinski is from her
public actions after this has come
out.A good general would never have
allowed such behavior to occur. That's not because the general should be
omnipresent or omniscient. That's impossible. But a good general knows how to
inspect her troops, her facilities, and her over all command to ensure that
discipline is maintained. A good general knows how to demand that subordinate
officers observe the law and proper behavior. A good general does her
job.But we can tell that General
Karpinski is not a good general and it is obvious that she failed as a general.
This is obvious from the results obtained of prisoners being abused so
openly.As if the results weren't clear
enough, General Karpinski has clarified her incompetence with subsequent public
statements and appearances on television news channels. With behavior that
would make any upstanding person blush, she has blamed everyone for actions
committed under her command. Not once have I heard this woman say that she
failed. Had she been half as good a general as any of the Marine generals or
navy admirals I've known (I'd say army too, but I don't have any experience with
the army) then this would never have
happened.It's not a mistake that these
troops abused these prisoners. It's a result of General Karpinski's
incompetence as a leader. If she exercised the leadership role that her oath
required of her then this could not have happened. This wasn't just a single
person with a momentary lapse of judgment, this required a breakdown of
discipline at all levels. If those troops knew that their behavior would not be
overlooked, they would never have done
this.The greatest evidence for her
incompetence is her refusal to take responsibility for her own command. I find
this repulsive. In all my career as an officer of Marines, I insisted on the
blame if anything went wrong in my sections, because if I didn't accept the
blame for things going wrong then I could hardly claim even a part of the credit
when things go right. And that's how it works. You never get all the credit,
but you always shoulder most of the blame. That anyone can become a general
officer and not understand this amazes me.
I'm getting sick of people pooh
poohing this issue. Now, just like with LtCol West, people who should know
better are saying that this is a necessary part of war. What rot. These were
people out of control. Those prisoners were not being handled by professionals
trying to extract information. These abusers were acting on their own like a
bunch of frat boys at South Padre Island or Fort Lauderdale on spring break.
Amateurs, juveniles, monsters.General
officers in a war zone have more power than anyone in our nation except for
commanding officers of ships at sea. General Karpinski had the absolute power
of life and death over her command. She created an atmosphere for these
monsters by failing to use the awesome power given to her. She should be thrown
in the brig along with the soldiers who committed these
crimes.(By the way, here's an enlightening
news article written in December where Karpinski claims to be very
active in knowing the conditions of every prison cell. "At least once every
three months, Karpinski tries to visit each prison, although she scaled back a
bit as attacks against the coalition increased." Frankly for someone in charge
of 15 prisons and getting them started from scratch, this is pathetic. If I
were responsible for 15 prisons being established in a less than a year, I'd be
visiting them a lot more often than
that.)The cavalier treatment of
prisoners must stop. The policy of coercive interrogations, the obvious
attempts to try and circumvent the Geneva Convention by labeling prisoners of
war as other than what they are, and the now commonplace acceptance of
maltreatment of prisoners must end. After all, if your son or daughter are
captured, you should demand that they are well treated too.
We've lost the moral high ground. It
wasn't an accident, it was from a failure to responsibly use power and authority
and many seem to think that's okay.
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