Geneva and other conventions

The first of the accuseds in the Abu Ghraib prison scan­dal was sen­tenced at a spe­cial court mar­tial to 1 year’s impris­on­ment, reduc­tion in rank, and dis­charge. I won’t say how ridicu­lously light the sen­tence is, regard­less of whether the bas­tard has agreed to ‘co-operate with inves­ti­ga­tors’, except to say, 365 days in a mil­i­tary deten­tion bar­racks is pretty tame com­pared with 365 days’ tour of duty in Iraq, what with the long-running Iraqi Fes­ti­val of the Road­side Bomb and fringe ambushes.

Accord­ing to the report, the accused knew what had hap­pened at Abu Ghraib con­tra­vened the arti­cles of the Geneva Con­ven­tion, which made him even more cul­pa­ble under the rules of the courts mar­tial, I’d assume.

Here in Sin­ga­pore, in the Sin­ga­pore Armed Forces, we were recently edu­cated dur­ing in-camp train­ing, in between com­bat train­ing revi­sions, on the arti­cles of the laws of war in a series of long, sleep-inducing lec­tures, which were livened up by the screen­ing of British made mil­i­tary edu­ca­tion videos which resem­bled Monty Python more than any­thing. It was funny how the ‘enemy com­bat­ants’ in the videos were dressed like WW2 Ger­man sol­diers. I don’t remem­ber much else about the lec­tures, except for gig­gling at the lec­turer, a young lieu­tenant, who read from the lec­ture notes ver­ba­tim, man­gling words as ‘sub­terfuge’ into ‘subtle-fudge’, and per­fidy into ‘pufeedee’.

Point is, you don’t need to pass a test based on the lec­tures given to know that what the bug­gers did at Abu Ghraib was absolutely wrong. It is no excuse whether the sol­dier involved was from a reserve unit, or whether he had been taught the rules of engage­ment and of deal­ing with civil­ians in the theatre.

Alright, I can’t resist putting the sen­tence into per­spec­tive: A reservist from my unit was sen­tenced to 10 days deten­tion bar­racks because he went for a can­teen break dur­ing a turn-out. They rejected his mit­i­ga­tion that the can­teen aun­tie took too long to make his cof­fee.