Yahoo! News - Guantanamo Interrogators Were Sent to Iraq-NY Times

Yahoo! News - Guantanamo Interrogators Were Sent to Iraq-NY Times

Do you think we will find a correlation here? I have found the story very hard to believe so far. Based on the tortures that were used, it seemed apparent to me that the soldiers involved had some coaching. The fact that the methods used were completely degrading to the prisoners (eating pork, renouncing Islam - an offense punishable by death, submission to female guards) had to have been a clue that they were not acting on their own volition.

Abuses such as these are not a surprise to me. There are so many things wrong with this operation, I'm not even sure where to begin, but having served in the military myself, the biggest problem that I can see is the sheer amount of National Guard and Reservists on the ground in Iraq. Having trained and served with many part-timers, I can tell you that right or wrong, the two main reasons that people join the Guard and Reserve is for the extra $$ and the education benefits. While they are mostly aware that they can be summoned to active duty at the governments will, trust me, most of them do not think it will happen.

Consider this scenario. You are late teens or early twenties and you need a part time job to supplement your income, so you take one on. Once a month, you work on the weekend at a local store, and during the summer when it gets busy, you work a couple of weeks. One day you are called in to work and told that you will have to put your full-time job on hold indefinitely, because the boss from the part time job needs you full time. By the way, they need you to go work in the store that is in the middle of the desert half way around the world, and you will need to be there for a minimum of 18 months. Oh, and did I mention, most of the full time employees will be needed to man the homefront store, so most of the people you will be working with will be part-timers, too?

The first red flag that should go up: How effective do you think a unit of part-time employees will be? The second: To what degree do you think they will be affected by the fact that the employees don't want to be there?

I'm not trying to make excuses here, I'm just trying to point out the facts. While I'm sure that they at first feel it's a matter of patriotic duty to serve, I have to believe that wears pretty thin, pretty quickly. Not only is this not a "Coalition of the Willing", I not so sure that the US fighting force is of the willing...