This WaPo report from yesterday outlining the heavy-handed tactics of the 4th ID is pretty disturbing:
its first days in Iraq in April 2003, the Army’s 4th Infantry Division made an impression on soldiers from other units — the wrong one.
“We slowly drove past 4th Infantry guys looking mean and ugly,” recalled Sgt. Kayla Williams, then a military intelligence specialist in the 101st Airborne. “They stood on top of their trucks, their weapons pointed directly at civilians. . . . What could these locals possibly have done? Why was this intimidation necessary? No one explained anything, but it looked weird and felt wrong.”
Today, the 4th Infantry and its commander, Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, are best remembered for capturing former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, one of the high points of the U.S. occupation. But in the late summer of 2003, as senior U.S. commanders tried to counter the growing insurgency with indiscriminate cordon-and-sweep operations, the 4th Infantry was known for aggressive tactics that may have appeared to pacify the northern Sunni Triangle in the short term but that, according to numerous Army internal reports and interviews with military commanders, alienated large parts of the population.
The unit, a heavy armored division despite its name, was known for “grabbing whole villages, because combat soldiers [were] unable to figure out who was of value and who was not,” according to a subsequent investigation of the 4th Infantry Division’s detainee operations by the Army inspector general’s office. Its indiscriminate detention of Iraqis filled Abu Ghraib prison, swamped the U.S. interrogation system and overwhelmed the U.S. soldiers guarding the prison.
Of course, as we all know, there is nothing to any of this, as this is merely the liberal media once again attacking Bush through the military. Or, on plane earth, it might be a pretty scary tale that could help to explain how a ‘get tough’ mentality, combined with Rumsfeld’s (“I stand for 8 hours so waterboarding can not possible be torture”) urging, complete and total abdication of oversight by the Republican Congress, as well as a few other variable, helped to turn Iraq into the mess it is today. But, again, don’ worry- things are actually going pretty well in Iraq, it is just that the press only reports the bad things. Like the 100 dead every day.
There are a lot of things that upset me about this article, but I think the one that makes me the angriest is how certain individuals in the leadership have managed to turn the perception of these well meaning American kids- guys and girls from small towns that you and I know, from that of soldiers there to help the Iraqi citizens to a group of thugs. These kids joined the military for all the right reasons- to serve their country, because they believed in the War in Iraq, to help pay for college and cement a successful future, and they, in the process of following orders and doing what they were told to do and probably believe are the ‘right’ things to do, were misused this way in Iraq.
And before Michelle Malkin or one of the other crazies reads this website and sends 9 million irate Rush Limbaugh listeners here to tell me I hate america, I am not calling our troops thugs. I am stating that the leadership has failed them, and that pisses me off.
And before someone defends the practices, read the entire article:
Lt. Col. David Poirier, who commanded a military police battalion attached to the 4th Infantry Division and was based in Tikrit from June 2003 to March 2004, said the division’s approach was indiscriminate. “With the brigade and battalion commanders, it became a philosophy: ‘Round up all the military-age males, because we don’t know who’s good or bad.’ ” Col. Alan King, a civil affairs officer working at the Coalition Provisional Authority, had a similar impression of the 4th Infantry’s approach. “Every male from 16 to 60” that the 4th Infantry could catch was detained, he said. “And when they got out, they were supporters of the insurgency.”
The unit’s tactics were no accident, given its commanding general, according to his critics. “Odierno, he hammered everyone,” said Joseph K. Kellogg Jr., a retired Army general who was at Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-led occupation agency.
***In July, a member of a psychological operations team attached to the 4th’s artillery brigade, which was known as Task Force Iron Gunner, filed a formal complaint about how its soldiers treated Iraqis.
“Few of the raids and detentions executed by Task Force Iron Gunner have resulted in the capture of any anti-coalition members or the seizure of illegal weapons,” wrote the soldier, whose name was blacked out from documents released by the Army.
Those were the folks (the worst of the worst) that we had in Abu Ghraib. I fully understand that some of them were a menace, but like Gitmo and some detention centers in Afghanistan, I can’t help but feel that more often than not, it is turning out that many of the people we did detain and subsequently abuse were innocents.
I don’t know what to believe anymore, but this is ust another depressing chapter.
