I was only following orders...

[gridlore]

The Army private facing a court-martial for being photographed with naked Iraqi prisoners says she was following orders to create psychological pressure on them.


Folks, on my first day in the United States Army, before my haircut, before my uniform issue, before anything, I and all my fellow proto-soldiers were herded into a theater and given a lecture. The subject of the lecture was "Legal Orders." We covered the concept of a legal order, and what constituted an illegal order. The Geneva Conventions were brought up, along with the UCMJ. They hammered this issue so hard that twenty years later I can still recall the details. The lesson that was highlighted, made crystal clear, to us sloppy civilians trying to be infantrymen, was this:

"I was only following orders" is NOT A DEFENSE!

This lesson was given again and again. During OSUT, some of the trainees were detailed to go score rifle qualifications for some staff officers from Building 4 (post HQ). Some of these officers ordered the brand-new troops to falsify scores. We're talking about career officers dealing with still-new basic trainees. What happened? Several officers were retired. Our guys did the right thing, and reported the illegal order to their chain of command.

Now, we come to the insanity at Abu Ghraib. PFC England claims she was ordered to pose for those pictures, claims it was a pysop. Wrong! It was torture and she had a moral and legal obligation to say no! What if she had been ordered to machinegun children? Would she have shrugged and said "orders are orders"? To a soldier, there is no difference.

We are hearing about breakdowns in command up to the brigade level. To put that in perspective, that means that for PFC English to do what she did required failures at five different levels of command. This passes beyond incompetent and goes directly to malicious. We hear of lack of supervision. Where the hell were the NCOs? We hear about a lack of training. What in the hell is an untrained unit doing in charge of an EPW camp? Now we hear it was our old friends in the CIA and DIA who ordered these pictures taken. Still no excuse. Abu Ghraib is a military facility. It was our responsibility. We dropped the ball.

Frankly, I've never been so ashamed to be a veteran of the United States Army as I was when I saw those pictures. Simply disgusted. I thought about sending my blue cord to Rummy, with a note stating "under your leadership, this has become meaningless."

Our only hope of salvaging anything from this mess is to vigorously prosecute everyone involved in the command and control of that prison, as well as the enlisted people involved in the actual abuses. Careers need to be broken. I don't care if you've got 19 years and 11 months in service. Colonel.. you're gone and so is your pension. Those who performed these abuses need to be jailed, busted to PVT, and given dishonorable discharges. If civilian intelligence agencies were involved, criminal action needs to be taken.

Comments

[peverel.livejournal.com]

Beautiful post -- I was referred to it by a friend after I went off on something similar.

But see...'I was just following orders' didn't die at Nuremberg. Oliver North turned 'I was just following orders' into the slogan of the true patriot in the late 80s, standing up there like a divinely righteous Boy Scout who would blindly and loyally follow his Commander in Chief with unending devotion, because he was Representing His Country. He parlayed that image into a great political career -- he was a man who would follow the orders of his leader, no matter what. And people respected that.

I never understood that...I never understood why that was a good thing. I suppose it's the anti-establishment streak in me; I've always had a problem with authority.

You say that the military, now, trains incoming soldiers never to follow an illegal order. I believe you, and I think that's a very good thing. But does the military train soldiers to distinguish an illegal order from a legal one? Does it teach them to think for themselves? At the level of Private, when the only response desired to an order is 'Sir, yes sir' -- to the point at which it's instinctive -- when should that Private be stopping to question whether or not an order crosses the line?

I am not being argumentative here. I've never been in the military; I genuinely don't know the answers to these questions, and I'd like to know. I don't know whether or not the soldiers in charge of Abu Ghraib were the kind of people who were really good at independent thought...or if they simply handed all their decision-making responsibility to the chain of command and turned off their brains, and 'just followed orders.' Either way, I don't have a whole lot of respect for them. I certainly don't have any respect for their superiors, who should have been able to prevent this recent atrocity from happening.

Pev

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

But does the military train soldiers to distinguish an illegal order from a legal one? Does it teach them to think for themselves?

Absolutely. We got regular lectures in OSUT, as well as reinforcement in regular units, on the laws of land warfare and potential abuses in peacetime. The simplest rule is the smell test. If an order smells fishy, report it. Refer to my fellow trainees who turned in Majors and Lt. Colonels for ordering them to falsify marksmanship scores. These were troops who hadn't even finished Basic Training yet, we were still terrified of junior NCOs, but they did what they were supposed to do.

As an infantryman, I was expected to execute my commands instantly. However, if my squad leader told me to fire my M-203 grenade launcher at a schoolyard where children were, I would tell him to insert a 400mm grenade where the sun don't shine. Same for an order to allow abuse of prisoners. Or even an order to loan a lieutenant my motorcycle. All illegal orders.

Even if the grunts, the Privates and Specialists current accused of the abuses didn't know better (which, as aurictech points out makes as much sense as a brigade of the 82nd not knowing how to fall out of airplanes) their commanders should have known better, and exercised command and control over the situation. When I was a fire team leader, what my troops did was my responsibility. The actions of the 800th MP Brigade is the responsibility of its officers and NCOs.

[peverel.livejournal.com]

Thank you for that response. Yes, I absolutely agree with you -- the actions of those we've seen on film and heard about in reports are surely the responsibility of their superior officers and NCOs -- the people who should have been supervising them and telling them what the right thing to do was.

It is also the responsibility of the privates themselves, the people who posed grinning and smirking over the tangle of naked bodies or who (allegedly) raped juvenile Iraqi women. For exactly the reasons you've given, these soldiers should not be absolved of responsibility just because their officers are responsible too.

I personally believe, though, that there is something about the system itself which shares responsibility. When I say that, I certainly don't mean that all members of the armed forces are to blame, or anything ludicrous like that -- but, as I have said elsewhere, we took barely-trained soldiers with the mentality that they were part of a conquering army and could do no wrong, and all Iraqis were The Enemy. We gave them little to no culture training (because no one expected them to have to stay there for a year and a half), and then we kept them there for a year and a half when they expected a tour of a few months. We took all that frustration and Us vs. Them conditioning, and we put it in charge of prisoners of war. Gosh, what did we think was going to happen?

It was a bad decision. I don't, for one moment, imagine that Abu Ghraib is the only place where it's happening -- I know it's not the only place where we've had POW deaths. It's just the only place where we have photos. It was a bad decision from somewhere up high, and it was a decision that should have been monitored a whole hell of a lot more closely, rather than relying on a bunch of wired kids safe behind the impenetrability of their American uniforms to not be sadistic.

Ahem. Sorry. Didn't mean to rant in your journal, there.

Pev

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

But does the military train soldiers to distinguish an illegal order from a legal one? Does it teach them to think for themselves? At the level of Private, when the only response desired to an order is 'Sir, yes sir' -- to the point at which it's instinctive -- when should that Private be stopping to question whether or not an order crosses the line?

And what happens to soldiers who do question orders? Are they treated like whistle-blowers in private industry? If so, then even if the order is illegal they have just severely limited their careers, if not ended them. And I suspect that if it isn't illegal then they have ended their careers.

[pathway.livejournal.com]

I was an NCO in my country's Air Force until recently (my term ended). As a boot-camp trainee, as a Private and as an NCO later on, you're expected to do a lot of things.

Following illegal orders is definitely NOT one of them. Reporting illegal orders to your chain of command (going higher and higher if you believe your concernes are not being addressed) IS one of them. Period. No buts, no maybes. If you cannot make a distinction between a legal and illegal order, or even a moral and immoral one, then you have no business being a soldier. Leave.

Finally, I might have some measure of leniency for soldiers who followed orders they didn't think or know were illegal or immoral. Some small measure. But I would have absolutely none for people who would follow such an order in full knowledge of what they were doing and did not speak up because they were afraid of the consequences.

Kudos to the original author's journal post, btw.