Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Another military-bashing America-hater, I guess:

[R]etired Col. Stuart A. Herrington ... is considered an expert in human intelligence operations, ran programs during Operation Desert Storm and in Panama and was part of the controversial Phoenix Program, which targeted the roots of the Viet Cong insurgency in Vietnam.

No, I admit he doesn't sound like a peacenik. But he hates America, you betcha. Today's Washington Post makes that clear:

A confidential report to Army generals in Iraq in December 2003 warned that members of an elite military and CIA task force were abusing detainees, a finding delivered more than a month before Army investigators received the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison that touched off investigations into prisoner mistreatment.

The report, which was not released publicly and was recently obtained by The Washington Post, concluded that some U.S. arrest and detention practices at the time could "technically" be illegal. It also said coalition fighters could be feeding the Iraqi insurgency by "making gratuitous enemies" as they conducted sweeps netting hundreds of detainees who probably did not belong in prison and holding them for months at a time.

The investigation [was conducted by] by retired Col. Stuart A. Herrington...

"Between the losers and dead end elements from the former regime and foreign fighters, there are enough people in Iraq who already don't like us," Herrington wrote. "Adding to these numbers by conducting sweep operations ... is counterproductive to the Coalition's efforts to win the cooperation of the Iraqi citizenry. Similarly, mistreatment of captives as has been reported to me and our team is unacceptable, and bound to be known by the population."


Yup -- Herrington thinks these practices might be illegal and might be hurting the war effort. Gotta be a traitor.

And he's not the only one. There also seem to be America-haters at the Army's Center for Army Lessons Learned, according to the Post:

A separate report by the Center for Army Lessons Learned, issued this past May and intended for internal use, gave the sense that some Army tactics served to "alienate common Iraqis who initially supported the coalition."

The 134-page CALL report singled out the practice of detaining female family members to force wanted Iraqi males to turn themselves in, similar to Herrington's findings.

"It is a practice in some U.S. units to detain family members of anti-coalition suspects in an effort to induce the suspects to turn themselves in, in exchange for the release of their family members," the report stated. The CALL report also was critical of the delays in notifying family members about the status of detainees held in U.S. custody, reminding family members of Hussein's tactics.


And how do we know that these people hate America? Because the International Red Cross did more or less what they did -- it made a (non-public) report to the U.S. government on torture and abuse at Guantanamo (as noted in yesterday's New York Times),which inspired this from Rush Limbaugh:

Int'l Red Cross Hates America.

And we all know Rush would have been a much braver soldier than Colonel Herrington or the people at CALL ... if he hadn't avoided military service in the Vietnam era because of that peky cyst.

(Limbaugh link via BuzzFlash.)

*****

(By the way, that practice of detaining family members in order to motivate suspects to turn themselves in? It's not only bad for winning hearts and minds, it's a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.)

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