Liberal web site spins troop survey against them
This article showed up on a liberal web site, and select portions were pulled from it obviously to infer that soldiers are evil and want to torture and otherwise abuse Iraqi citizens. However, if you look at the flip side of it, it really isn’t how original article was written.
For example, the first pull quote:
A survey of US combat troops deployed in Iraq has found that one in 10 said they mistreated civilians and more than a third condoned torture to save the life of a comrade, a report said Friday.
Oh, that sounds bad. Troops are mistreating civilians and are willing to torture.
OK, but look at the numbers again. To me, it shows that the VAST majority - 90% - have never mistreated civilians. And the torture bit? Only 33% said they’d be willing to torture someone - and that was in connection with saving one of their buddies lives. By the way, that was people who think they might torture someone, not people admitting that they had.
Here’s the next pull quote on that same liberal blog:
The study by an army mental health advisory team found continuing problems with morale and that acute mental health issues were more prevalent among troops with lengthening tours or on their second and third deployment to Iraq.“They looked under every rock, and what they found was not always easy to look at,” said Ward Casscells, the Pentagon’s health affairs chief.
OK, that makes sense. More deployments would tend to harden a person. That’s to be expected. However, here’s the paragraph from the original story they left out of the post:
Major General Gale Pollock, the army’s acting surgeon general, sought to make a distinction between soldiers’ thoughts about torture and their actions. “These men and women have been seeing their friends injured and I think that having that thought is normal,” she said at a Pentagon press conference. “But what it speaks to is the leadership that the military is providing, because they’re not acting on those thoughts. They’re not torturing the people,” she said.
Funny how that last line wasn’t included
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