But I also remember there was a scandal concerning SERE and things being taken too far. Cadets winding up in the hospital, dropping out of the Academy after the program, that sort of thing. As I recall, it was exposed by one of the local papers, there was an investigation, things changed. It would have been around 1974, give or take a year.

But I’ll be damned if I can find anything online about it.

Strangely enough, that’s about the time Bush’s AG dropped out left the Academy.

In order to make the training more effective, he was deliberately led to believe that his torturers had gone “rogue” and were really interested in causing him real harm, not just simulating threatening him with it. The shooting was an attempt to convince him his captors were covering up the excesses of his brutalization by faking an accident that would eliminate the only witness. The idea is to familiarize the trainee with the feeling of helplessness and panic which demoralizes the POW.

His opinion is different. Speaking of his captors, he believes that kind of work tends to attract psychopathic personalities, and tends to reinforce psychopathy in those prone to it. He also is convinced that healthy personalities will quickly find another line of work to get into.

I make no moralistic judgement here. War forces all involved to do horrible things, including the killing of what are probably perfectly decent individuals who you have never met and who have no quarrel with you, simply because they wear a different uniform, or because they are merely in suspected physical proximity to those who do.

There is no real difference between running a teenager through with a bayonet face-to-face and loading an artillery piece which kills him from twenty miles away. For that matter, there is no difference between the gunner and the civilian machinist who helped build his cannon.

I am not a pacifist, but I try to never forget that. Rightly or wrongly, I have convinced myself it helps preserve my humanity. I believe people like Dick Cheney never even made the effort. I can tell by the sneers on their faces.

They were lied to, that’s why they told the country Iraq had WMDs. Well, what are they supposed to do, they were lied to!

Al Qaeda was never in Iraq as long as Saddam was in power. He wouldn’t tolerate them. Someone at a meeting mentioned them and all at once Conservatives claimed a significant presence. Weren’t there.

It was over in weeks my tail. It’s still going on. If you want to look at a very narrow, meaningless view you will believe “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED”. However, simply because the government was overthrown the war did not end. Not by anyone’s definition, except maybe a Conservative’s view defending the indefensible.

We were welcomed based upon our false promises. But when a guest stays and makes life worse, the guest becomes not welcome. We were not welcome. It was like life under Saddam only worse. As the commanding general of the First Marine Division said, ” If they go along with us we are their best friend. If they don’t, we are their worst enemy!” Same thing Saddam said, and it was said from one of his palaces.

Nope, the continuing difficulties can be laid at the feet of Bush-Cheney. It’s their responsibility and no amount of weasel-wording can change the reality. The Republicans trying to place blame is like oil companies pleading poverty.

Abu Ghraib has nothing to do with any of this. That was a rogue operation carried out by ignorant and undisciplined thugs, I blame no one but the punks involved. I’m talking about the legal procedures and justifications that guided “renditions” and “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Those were traceable all the way up to the White House, and they often violated existing and long-standing CIA and DOD protocols.

I don’t need to be lectured on how there is evil in the world, but I also know it is very good tactically to not be brutal simply for the sake of being brutal. From a purely practical point of view, it rarely works anyway, and it is rarely carried out with the clinical detachment that guarantees it is done for valid intelligence and military reasons, as opposed to plain ordinary sadism, or simply not knowing what else to do, or worse, passing on the moral responsibility altogether; “Deliver the prisoner to Col. Trang for interrogation, soldier. He understands these people better than we do.”

I’m perfectly ready to torture an enemy if I know it will save the lives of my comrades, but I also believe that it rarely is that simple a choice, or that easy a decision, and that it is usually a case of looking for an excuse to inflict pain by hiding under altruistic and patriotic motives. I’ve yet to see evidence of even one American life saved by the torture of a prisoner.

Still, I can understand the actions in the field of scared, tired men under desperate stress. This is very different from the actions of sleek, freshly-showered fat slugs in air-conditioned Washington offices devising elaborate and intricate legal cover to justify their long distance brutality.

However, I can agree with you that whatever crimes we may have committed in our wars, none rose to the level of the Nazi Holocaust. I suppose that is something we can be proud of: we never got quite that low. Still, our excuses sound very similar to theirs.

War is intrinsically painful, every non-instantaneous death is pure agony, and every wound is as painful as the suffering of the tortured. I don’t fantasize a world where everybody plays nice, but neither do I hope for a world where I have all the excuse I need to derive pleasure from inflicting pain. That is the very definition of barbarism.

The Abu Ghraib incident is the issue that drives your comments. It was not the actions of black ops that continue to occur undiscovered to this very day.

When individuals outside the intelligence venue start mistreating prisoners, they are war criminals and anyone up the line of authority that allowed it to happen is guilty of gross stupidity and possible prosecution.

How high the responsibility goes, in the absence of direct orders from the top, is always a question. I doubt that Cheney thought the Abu Ghraib was just an unfortunate exposure of people following his orders. I suspect his reaction was outrage that it was allowed to happen, because it was stupid and served no useful purpose. He might not have felt the disgust that many felt but he was just as angry at the perpetrators.

None of our sins rise to the level of genocide like the “final solution” where an apparatus was put in place by the highest level of government and staffed by thousands of subordinates from command to the lowest levels.

Bottom line, don’t be naive and before you take it all the way to the top, make sure your your own house is in order.

I know you are a realist ER, but I wonder about people who fantasize a world where everybody plays nice.

Maybe its time for the Cheneys and their apologists to adopt their own business rhetoric and “cut their losses”, and “stop throwing good money after bad”. People make mistakes. I supported the war too, at the beginning, it never occurred to me my government would lie to me that cynically and systematically. But it becomes intolerable when the lies continue long after the truth is out.

Oh, and BTW, I almost forgot about the torture, the waterboarding and the renditions and the legal gymnastics this man’s gang of scrubbed and perfumed lawyers and public relations hacks engaged in to cover their slimy asses. The man, and everything he represents, is an obscenity. He is indeed a war criminal, and I am not just being rhetorical. He should be prosecuted.