LTC Bateman drank the kool-aid
in the early afternoon on Saturday, the 3rd of June 2006 by Capt Jake Fortune
Over on MSNBC.com. Read it a few days ago, but took me a while to find it again.
Private Ericsson was the blond-haired blue-eyed epitome of American youth. A little older than his peers at 22, he was often the first to speak up when I called for a response. In this case I had just put forward the question, What would you do? to a hypothetical situation in which several prisoners had been captured who may, or may not, know about an ambush the enemy had emplaced for our unit some distance away. The prisoners appeared to be civilians, taken in a village from which we had, in this notional scenario, recently taken fire.
I’d shoot one of them sir, to see if it got the next one to talk, said Ericsson with a perfectly straight face. The room remained silent.
WHAT?! It was not my calmest reply because I was, frankly, stunned. Standing at the front of the room I looked around at the assembled men seated before me. Nobody was leaping to contradict his comment. Their attention was split between us.
Ericsson repeated his response, looking me straight in the eye. I’d shoot one of them sir. And then, if that didn’t get the next guy to talk, I’d shoot another.
Jesus.
Ericsson¦ I started to reply, about to tell him how wrong that was, to lecture him and explain about not only the laws of land warfare but how this would additionally be entirely counterproductive in addition to being illegal and immoral, but I stopped myself. If Ericsson thinks this way¦
“No, wait¦OK, how many of you think that this is the correct response? Now I was addressing the whole group, most of my company in fact. After a few seconds almost half of the hands went up.
I had a lot of work to do.
Yeah, but not the kind of work you expected. After being fed so much PC bullshit in army school, you actually believe that shooting one guy WOULDN’T get one of the others to talk.
It is actually a shame that LTC Bateman does believe this. Here’s what would happen in the REAL WORLD, not the world that you are led to believe by military lawyers and the media handlers would like you to believe.
You have a dozen likely terrorists you just captured. Walk in to the room and look at them. You’ll notice two things. Several of them are hard core. They’ve been through this kinda stuff before. They’re the leaders. You know they are, because several of the others are looking at them for guidance.
Then there are the kids who just a few weeks ago were living with their parents, boasting to their fellow unemployed buddies about how they can take out some American troops. The lucky ones will get a whirlwhind training session of about a week before getting sent out to assist the leaders.
Walk into that room, and shoot one of the leaders right in the head. The one the rest looked to. Sure, he might have been the most “valuable” prisoner because he knew the most, but I guarantee one of the newbies will break. If not, take out #2.
I want you to think what you would honestly do in the newbie’s position. You’re just some 19 year old kid who wasn’t expecting anything like this when you joined up with Al Qaeda or “the resistance”. You just wanted to prove you’re a man. But that doesn’t include what’s happening now. I guarantee that if you know anything, you’ll talk at this point.
Our military goes through intense training to learn how to handle being captured, what they’re allowed to do and not to do. And I’m sure that if we were in a war with another similiar regular military, this tactic wouldn’t work nearly as well. But this isn’t the Russian army. This is a ragtag bunch.
Can anyone convince me otherwise? Does anyone think that if they do know anything, that they’ll continue to keep it quiet?
Is this an ugly solution? Oh yeah. And it is illegal according to the laws of normal war. But we’re not fighting a uniformed army. The terrorists we are fighting are civilians. They’re classified at best as irregulars, which aren’t treated the same as a standing uniformed army. The rules make allowances for when the enemy looks no different than true civilians.
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June 3rd, 2006 at 5:10 pm
I whole-heartedly agree, I serve in the military, but I have not had the chance/been forced to go to Iraq, but I see the effects of our ‘war’ everyday. There is such of a can of worms associated with these type of issues, unfortunately I agree with them all. 1. Shoot the first one – dang right! When AMERICAN lives are on the line, I (if not opposed by contradicting laws/regulations) would not hesitate to ‘remove’ an enemy combatant to save others. 2. I am in the military to serve my country, and whther we are true to it or not anymore. Military folks are charged with the responsability to uphold the tenets of the Constitution, equal rights, fair play. I, as a military member, CHOOSE to uphold the ideals we were founded on, but I do not accept that we must compromise our security nor our lives to do so.
Flames can be sent to null@home.com, constructive criticism welcome…
June 3rd, 2006 at 10:06 pm
I must respectfully disagree. I, too, served in the military, and while I can understand the impetus to follow the suggestion to shoot one to make the others talk, I must point out that this action clearly starts us on a road that will take us to a dark and scary place. If we concede that the laws of land warfare can be violated in this manner, what is to say that we cannot walk into a villiage and randomly pick out ten people for execution to make the rest cooperate with our hunt for insurgents? Or, for that matter, descending on a villiage and wiping out every living thing because they might be harboring the enemy? Hell, while we’re at it, why don’t we just round up all of the Sunnis and send them to camps where we can work them to death?
Taking the moral high ground may be harder in the short run, but I, for one, would not like to live in a country that would condone shooting an unarmed prisoner.
June 4th, 2006 at 9:56 am
I’ve been thinking about this a little more, and very carefully read what Bateman said. He really set up a situation that was incredibly unlikely to occur. Why?
The whole scenario is kinda crap. He makes it sound like the prisoners are a bunch of randomly selected people off the street, just like how profiling at the airport is bad. I have a hard time believing that the troops would just go eenie meenie miney moe picking out prisoners.
No, they’d use actual intelligence to figure out who is very likely to be affiliated with the terrorists at the very least. And then observe them together for a short period of time. Listening to what they whisper to each other. Unless dealing with incredibly highly trained people, it should be fairly easy to spot if the people captured may know anything.
So the problem with this entire scenario again falls on LTC Bateman. He set up a scenario that everyone else made assumptions about. Private Ericson, the rest of the class, myself, and I’m sure many others assumed that the people captured had something to do with a possible attack. They couldn’t process the actual scenario where completely random people would have been selected, because that is just damn too stupid to contemplate. He even makes it worse by setting up how the an attack came from the villiage. You now make the assumption that upon entering the villiage, there was absolutely no sign of actual enemy activity. Forcing the further assumption that obviously the villiagers are responsible for the attack. In which case, they’re valid prisoners. Out of uniform, therefore making them not held to Geneva Conventions. And they can be legally summarily executed.
But these assumptions are just down to the bad example set.
February 25th, 2007 at 5:17 am
I’m afraid that you’ve got a very distorted vision of what works, and what doesn’t.
Shoot one guy, the others will certainly talk. They’ll talk their heads off. In fact, they will say absolutely anything, but most likely exactly what they think you want to hear.
And because of that, you can now not trust a single word they’ve said, because they said it only to save their skin.
We ourselves are taught, if in that situation, to say anything, but preferably to lie. (Senator McCain once, in a moment of inspiration, gave his “crew” up under torture. The North Vietnamese never realized that the names he gave them to stop the torture was, as I recall, the starting front line of the previous years’ Green Bay Packers.)
That’s the military (dis)utility argument against torture. (And threatening to kill is torture) It doesn’t work.
Ethics matter as well.