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Greenhat
LCDR
Joined: 09 May 2004
Posts: 405
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 Posted: Mon May 17, 2004 6:32 pm Post subject: |
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| ROTC DAD wrote: | Greenhat,
Rushed? I think you're reaching here. This is the usual answer given when a bureaucracy is shown not to have done right. |
Glad that someone of your experience has all the answers. If your son or daughter (whichever one is in ROTC) happens to ever be the subject of an investigation, you remember to push for it to be finished quickly. Maybe you like the idea of your child spending time in Leavenworth.
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sparky
Former Member
Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 546
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| Posted: Mon May 17, 2004 6:43 pm Post subject: |
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I don't accept the argument that doing nothing is acceptable because otherwise military justice is too swift or imperfect.
Many of these perpetrators were not actual military personnel and could have been temporarily reassigned pending further investigation. High US officials had over a year to do this.
This is just another PR mess that only matters to people at the top when it becomes publicized. Prior to that, all that stuff the Red Cross just wasn't their problem.
And lurking in the back of every authoritarian or totalitarian mind is the belief that they wouldn't have been arrested if they weren't guilty of something. That's one of the mental mechanisms that the Kerry-haters here are using to justify their position. |
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ROTC DAD
Lt.Jg.
Joined: 12 May 2004
Posts: 147
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| Posted: Mon May 17, 2004 6:51 pm Post subject: |
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Greenhat,
That's not only facile but ridiculous. First off, the people who they are presently bringing up on charges, they knew about for awhile; that wouldn't change no matter how long they take to investigate.
Secondly, the real investigation is what is going on now, concerning such things as just how high up the command structure this goes. And, as is normally the case, it's being done from outside the military because certain elements would just like to sweep it under the rug and make it disappear. |
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Greenhat
LCDR
Joined: 09 May 2004
Posts: 405
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| Posted: Mon May 17, 2004 11:31 pm Post subject: |
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| ROTC DAD wrote: | Greenhat,
That's not only facile but ridiculous. First off, the people who they are presently bringing up on charges, they knew about for awhile; that wouldn't change no matter how long they take to investigate.
Secondly, the real investigation is what is going on now, concerning such things as just how high up the command structure this goes. And, as is normally the case, it's being done from outside the military because certain elements would just like to sweep it under the rug and make it disappear. |
Your first point? It's correct. Problem is, that your first point also is also why those in the second group (those you claim are the real investigation) are not members of the first group (at least potentially) because the investigation wasn't able to run its course. It is obvious that you have never dealt with CID or an investigation.
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ROTC DAD
Lt.Jg.
Joined: 12 May 2004
Posts: 147
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| Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 1:56 pm Post subject: |
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Greenhat,
Again, you hide behind procedure stating such things as obviously I haven't done this or I haven't done that. That neither explains anything or even excuses the behavior. It's just a way to hide behind supposed procedures.
You know as well as I do that if it had been considered an issue before the story broke, something would have been done and quickly. But it wasn't considered an issue because there are people in the command structure who do not feel that what they did is wrong. |
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Greenhat
LCDR
Joined: 09 May 2004
Posts: 405
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| Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 2:20 pm Post subject: |
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Ever talked to an internal affairs cop?
If you want to get the people at the top, to clearly know and be able to prosecute everyone involved in an activity, an investigation must remain secret and evidence be collected that completely covers everyone potentially involved before any hint of the investigation is revealed.
How hard is this to understand?
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ROTC DAD
Lt.Jg.
Joined: 12 May 2004
Posts: 147
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| Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 3:57 pm Post subject: |
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In the meantime, the very people you are arguing hidered the investigation by releasing the pictures and the report are the ones breaking the investigation wide open. Go to the msnbc site and read the report about how Gonzales' memo suggests the US should drop the Geneva Conventions so that Bush and the Administration cannot be tried as war criminals.
The problem is not my understanding, it is your extreme reluctance to accept the truth. |
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hist/student
Lieutenant
Joined: 09 May 2004
Posts: 243
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| Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 4:48 pm Post subject: |
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unabashed comprehensive retraction
Last edited by hist/student on Fri Jul 23, 2004 11:13 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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mikest
PO2
Joined: 11 May 2004
Posts: 377
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| Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 5:07 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | As far as getting shot at..... buddy, ahhh sir untill you have been shot at or killed someone the answer is your opinion really does not count for much... none of it is fun , all of it is intense., sometimes it must be done. |
About 90% of the administration falls into this catagory. BUt they don't count, do they? |
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hist/student
Lieutenant
Joined: 09 May 2004
Posts: 243
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| Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 5:09 pm Post subject: |
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unabashed comprehensive retraction
Last edited by hist/student on Fri Jul 23, 2004 11:13 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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ROTC DAD
Lt.Jg.
Joined: 12 May 2004
Posts: 147
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| Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 5:45 pm Post subject: |
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hist/student,
Does that stand for hysterical student? I'm sorry, I don't usually call people names, but your rant had nothing at all to do with the points I was making.
Nothing I wrote was about Belgrade, which btw, I know something about from personal experience.
I was writing to the topic that the present Administration believes it is not only expedient but also necessary that they declare the US no longer a part of the Geneva Conventions so that they will not be held accountable in the world court. If you have something intelligent to say on this subject, I invite your input.
As for your remark about this being the US: pehaps you should reread The Constitution. Nowhere in that document does it say everyone is entitled to only your opinion.
If you are a history student as you say, then I would ask the school for your money back. They've obviously done a terrible job of educating you, either in grammer or in reasoning. |
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hist/student
Lieutenant
Joined: 09 May 2004
Posts: 243
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| Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 6:01 pm Post subject: |
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unabashed comprehensive retraction
Last edited by hist/student on Fri Jul 23, 2004 11:14 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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mikest
PO2
Joined: 11 May 2004
Posts: 377
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| Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 6:03 pm Post subject: |
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I have friends and relatives who have fought in every war since WWII. The fact is that every one of them has different views on both Iraq and this admin.
Here is the falacy of your argument. The people in charge of this admin didn't have much, sometimes didn't have any, experiance before starting this war. And maybe the worst is Rumsfeld because he did and still talks about casualties being "fungable." But people like Cheney who had other priorities and Bush who didn't want to blow his eardrum out with a shotgun had no real experiance before this. That is why they believed the "cakewalk" scenerio from another famous person who never fought, Wolfowitz. |
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Keith
Lt.Jg.
Joined: 18 May 2004
Posts: 130
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| Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 6:12 pm Post subject: |
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| sparky wrote: | And, actually, Kerry DID stop one crime. By the only critic who served on the boat WITH Kerry. From the Boston Globe about Steven Michael Gardner:
As Gardner recalls it, he was in the "tub" above the pilot house with the twin machine guns, and Kerry was in command, when the Navy swift boat came upon a sampan in the darkness. Gardner flashed a searchlight and ordered the craft to stop. Then, he said, he saw a figure rise up over the gunwale with a semiautomatic weapon. Spotting tracers in the sky and fearing an attack, Gardner said, he laced the sampan with bullets, and other crew members fired as well. Gardner recalls a man in the sampan falling overboard, presumably dead.
After the shooting had stopped and Kerry had ordered a cease-fire, Gardner said, the crew found a woman in the sampan who was alive. There was also the boy, dead in the bottom of the boat. Gardner said there is no way to know which crewmate fired the shots that killed the boy, but he said Kerry was in the pilot house and did not fire. Kerry was livid when he emerged, Gardner said.
"Kerry threatened me with a court-martial, screaming at the top of his lungs: `What the hell do you think you're doing? I ought to have you court-martialed,' " Gardner recalled. "Thankfully, the whole crew was there in the middle of it . . . they verified there were weapons being shot at us. That was the end of it."
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Sorry to come late to this discussion after it has already taken a different tack, but the only Boston Globe series I found gives a slightly differenent account... maybe they had two articles on the same topic. Interesting article anyway:
http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061603.shtml
But Kerry does recall a harrowing incident, which he has never previously publicly discussed, in which he said a crew member shot and killed a Vietnamese boy of perhaps 12 years of age.
A member of Kerry's crew announced he was shooting, and the air filled with the ack-ack-ack of gunfire. The rounds blasted into a sampan, hurling the child into the rice paddy. The mother screamed as the flimsy craft began to sink, and Kerry, shining a searchlight, yelled, "Cease fire! Cease fire!"
Kerry said his crew rescued the mother, took her aboard the Navy vessel for questioning, and left the child behind. Due to the dangerous location, and the possibility that the gunfire had drawn the notice of Viet Cong, Kerry never had a chance to see whether the woman was hiding weaponry in the sunken boat, and does not know to this day whether his crew faced a real threat.
"It is one of those terrible things, and I'll never forget, ever, the sight of that child," Kerry said. "But there was nothing that anybody could have done about it. It was the only instance of that happening.
"It angered me," Kerry said. "But, look, the Viet Cong used women and children." He said there might have been a satchel containing explosives. "Who knows if they had -- under the rice -- a satchel, and if we had come along beside them they had thrown the satchel in the boat. ... So it was a terrible thing, but I've never thought we were somehow at fault or guilty. There wasn't anybody in that area that didn't know you don't move at night, that you don't go out in a sampan on the rivers, and there's a curfew."
The details of the episode are murky, however, because none of Kerry's crewmates remembers it the way Kerry does. The closest recollection comes from William Zaladonis, a crewmate on No. 44 who vividly recalls killing a 15-year-old boy, but does not remember a mother being rescued. "I myself took out a 15-year-old" when the crew came across a sampan in a free-fire zone, Zaladonis said. "It was all legitimate. We told them to stop. When we fired across the bow, people started jumping from the boat. At that time my officer, whoever it was, told me to open up on them, and I did. And there was one body still in the boat, a 15-year-old kid. But over there, 15-year-old kids were soldiers." |
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hist/student
Lieutenant
Joined: 09 May 2004
Posts: 243
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| Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 6:14 pm Post subject: |
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unabashed comprehensive retraction
Last edited by hist/student on Fri Jul 23, 2004 11:14 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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