I've mentioned here before Rush Limbaugh's defense of torture. The Center for American Progress has a piece by a serving Army infantry officer, describing how Rush's fool comments are, among other things, insulting to the US officer corps: On Officers and Control by Robert Bateman 05/20/04.
What Limbaugh apparently does not even realize is that in the process of saying that he is de facto slamming the officer corps of the U.S. Army and calling us incompetent.
How? Well for starters, it was one of our generals that did the investigation that said all of this was despicable and should be investigated under the Uniformed Code of Military Justice. Limbaugh apparently believes he knows more than Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, because he says what he saw was no worse than what happens at fraternities at elite East Coast colleges such as Princeton or Yale. I wouldn't know about that, but I do know that it was Army officers who proffered the charges for court martial against the prison guards, and Limbaugh is making a mockery of our processes and decisions. In effect it seems to me that he's trying to make a criminal behavior into a political one, and I detest that when it's applied to the military from the right or the left. It's akin to the dumb defense that some of the soldier's civilian lawyers are attempting, the "Nuremberg Defense."
Some of those lawyers may be high-powered big shots in the civilian world, but they sure as hell don't know their military history or much about our Uniformed Code of Military Justice. If they did they would realize how disgusting an attempt to try that line of defense is to those of us that wear the uniform.
When we codified and updated our military laws after World War II we made damned sure that we put in specific laws that protected prisoners, and we added an "anti-Nuremburg defense" clause in as well. It is every soldier's duty to refuse an unlawful order. Sometimes it's scary, but you have to do it. I've done it three times in my career, and an informal survey of my peers suggests most of them have had similar experiences. None of these were huge, in my experience, but were very small illegal orders. But I was scared at the time, telling my superior that I would not do something because I thought it was wrong. The point of this is that we're trained to do things like that, all of us. I am not anomalous. It's what keeps our Army straight.
Remember that the next time you hear one of the Oxycontin crowd saying torture of prisoners is just a big yuck.
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