Over at David Hackworth's SFTT.org they have published a copy of the reply to the Taguba report by the Capt. who was the operations officer of the 800th MP Brigade. I have been upset for a long time that they are going to pin this on 7 enlisted personnel and that, if they need to get a higher officer it was going to be General Janice Karpinski.
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=Unlisted.db&command=viewone&id
The letter is long and I was going to excerpt parts but the excerpts just kept coming. I recommend the letter. Essentially, she sent this as a rebuttal to congress so we should have known about it some time ago. Among her main points:
- The entire reserve MP force in the Army used up their training budget in 2001 and 2002 guarding airports so, when Taguba complains about poor training he's talking about units who could not train because of lack of funds.
- The 800th MP Brigade was trained and equipped to handle Prisoners of War in the communications area behind the battlefield. The Army expanded their responsibility to include rebuilding the Iraqi prison system, handling all of the criminals and terrorists detained in the country, providing personnell to the CPA, providing infantry mission defense at the prisons, and myriad other tasks for which they were not trained, equipped or manned.
- When their officers requested training equipment and manpower they were told that there was no chance because there was a political reluctance to increase manpower in Iraq.
- When Gen. Miller implemented the torture regime at Abu Graihb the staff and command of the 800th was not even told about it because, being MP's, everybody knew they would report to the IG that Geneva violatiions had been ordered, a central doctrine in MP units.
- The orders implementing the abuse were issued in now classified fragmentary orders by Gen Sanchez.
I guess its just more outrage but I want to know why I have to find this out myself?