Scandal at Abu Ghraib

Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison scandal that hi-jacked the television news headlines and evoked astonishment on the faces of those who saw the sickening images that accompanied the broadcasts, will forever remain a thorn in America's side. Our U.S. Military's treatment of Iraqi detainees is not only deplorable, but inexcusable. After all of the hemming and hawing that American society has done in relation to our own POW's and MIA's, and it's push for fair treatment of prisoners at the Geneva Convention, here are Americans instituting the same brutality. But what were the circumstances surrounding the scandal? We hear the same names over and over, among them Army Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, and Pfc. Lynndie England, and their reprimands and trials, and disciplinary sentences. But what about the big guns, the high ranking officials that those charged were to answer to? Many of them promoted; well, all except for one Col. Janis Karpinski, who ended up being demoted, and as I see it, an escape goat. Once again the chain of command has been used to protect the powerful, and to punish the little guy. The American soldiers acted on commands that were not only denied by those in power, but dismissed as bogus lies. If we are to believe that our soldiers are just ordinary men and women fighting a war that has put incredible stress on their moral character, to the point of committing these atrocities, then can we also assume that the human persona is not strong enough to live up to it's own beliefs? Or were these simply good people whose morality was put to the test? In Sartwell's article, The Genocidal Killer in the Mirror, the author states "Hitler didn't kill 6 million Jews, or King Leopald 10 million Africans. They used a bureaucracy and a media machine and, finally, people just like you and me" (Sartwell 233). Our government may have done the same with our American Soldiers.