Lesson in Honor from the Military

Somewhere along the line the people who run this country failed to learn some valuable lessons about honor and integrity. What is stupefying about that is for all of the "reverence" they have for the military, they've never seemed to absorb any of the morals to the stories they love to tell. The fact that so many retired officers have spoken out in the last 2 years should be telling them something, but it isn't. What are they missing?

The retired officers believe that the negative consequences of the president's anti-terror policies could have been avoided if the administration had followed traditional military practices. Retired Marine Maj. Gen. Fred E. Haynes, 83, is a veteran of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars. In 1945, he was a captain in the regiment that seized Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima and raised the U.S. flag there. In March of that year, his unit found two U.S. soldiers dead, apparently victims of torture. On March 17, about 10 days before the battle ended, a Japanese soldier, wearing nothing but his boots and a cotton jock strap, stepped out of a cave with his hands up. He had read one of the leaflets Americans were distributing in artillery shells that promised that anyone who gave up would get his wounds treated and his stomach filled.

The Moral?

"The moral of the story," said the general, "is we Americans have been so thoroughly imbued with the idea that you have to treat prisoners humanely — and this [story] is an example of why. It is an illustration of how by treating an individual decently you are much more likely to get any information you might want — and it's more likely to be correct."

How are things done today?

Retired Brig. Gen. James P. Cullen was chief judge of the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals. "I grew up in an Army where the rules were very clear and where serviceman and women had no question about what their obligations and responsibilities were under both the Geneva Convention and our domestic law," he said. "When you have a winking-and-nodding policy [as was the case at Abu Ghraib], that just brings about the consequences that we came to view at [the prison]."

What further fuels the officers' outrage is that the policies they believe have undermined the military were mostly formulated by men, like Bush, who have not seen combat.

"[Vice President Dick] Cheney made mention in the days after 9/11 that he wanted to operate sort of on the dark side," Cullen said. "Here was a guy who never served, and now something terrible had happened, and he wanted to show that he was a tough guy…. So he's going to operate outside the rules of law. Bad message."

Maybe if the administration spent more time listening to them and less parading them around like show ponies they could learn something.