Lt. General Ricardo "Dirty" Sanchez cleared of all charges
(Or, why da hell is Szatmari posting on a Saturday?)
It looks like General Sanchez has been cleared. Who is General Sanchez? Only the guy who was in charge of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. Sanchez and the three men under him have been cleared of all wrongdoing. The biggest thing he's got to worry about is whether this incident will delay him from getting his fourth star.
Did General Sanchez tell his soldiers to abuse the Iraqi prisoners? He allowed them to do some questionable things, as detailed by this memo, but did he tell Lynndie England to stack them up in pyramids and take pictures?
Whether he did or not, it was his job to make sure that stuff like that didn't happen. Sanchez is, at the very least, incompetent. People can be punished for incompetence. For example, if I am driving down the road, talking on my cell phone, and I hit somebody, I would face charges. Reckless driving is not as serious as vehicular assault, but it is still a crime.
For some reason though, once you get high enough in society you are not punished for incompetence. It's terribly ironic that the people who are put in charge of others' well-being and safety are not held responsible for incompetence.
Recall the Iran-Contra scandal (the short of it: Reagan's administration helped out both sides of the Iran-Iraq war. As a result, the war went on for eight or nine years and millions of people died.)
When America found out, Reagan was impeached and thrown out of office. No I'm just kidding, he totally got away with it. Reagan claimed that it was his administration's fault and that he didn't know about it. Let's say that that's true, just for the sake of argument: then Ronald Reagan was guilty of gross incompetence of the highest degree and should've been thrown out of office anyway. I would say that the Iran-Contra scandal was worse than Watergate--at least nobody died over Watergate.
So what of Sanchez? I think this is absolute bullshit. I will not be surprised when the Iraqis make the Rodney King riots look like fire island after labor day.
posted by Marie Antoinette at 6:34 PM
4 Comments:
Sanchez and et. al. needs to be punished. But, I think they are the smaller fish. Much larger fishes are there in the state dept, pentagon, etc, and they will never be caught.
True, that. I was expecting *them* to get away with it--the Bush administration's really good about taking care of its own--but I was at least hoping Sanchez and his crew would get caught.
So what they're trying to tell us is, five or so underlings are responsible for Abu Ghraib? Ridiculous!
It shouldn't matter, but not all of the detainees at Abu Ghraib were terrorists or even terror suspects.
Torture is never justified, nor is it effective. The detainees who were tortured gave false information to their torturers. Moreover, about 90% of the detainees at Abu Ghraib committed no crime and were subsequently released with no charges. This display of sadism, incompetence and planned chaos is just another example of the neo-con imperial agenda in action.
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